Page 1310 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 23 March 2010
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was: if you are going to go past that and push for seven stars, what does that mean? What does it mean for building costs and what does it mean for delivery?
Industry is working towards six stars and you would think that it would be important to have a discussion with industry, in developing such a plan, to say: “If we were to move to seven stars over a period of time, what would that mean for houses? How would they look different? How would we develop that? How would we ensure that that occurred? And how much would it cost?”
We read in the Canberra Times, when the announcement was made, that the Housing Industry Association had not been consulted. The Housing Industry Association’s ACT chief, Sturt Collins, said he was disappointed the Greens had not consulted builders. He said that Australian governments had only recently agreed to move to a six-star energy system and he found it remarkable that there was a proposal to move to seven stars already and at the same time meet the government’s commitments on affordable housing.
It is about a progressive approach. It is about saying industry is doing the work now; it is getting ready to move to six stars; it has been doing work for a number of years to make houses more sustainable. Is there more that could be done? No doubt there is. There will always be innovations that we can come up with and they are worth pursuing.
But the question needs to be: how fast do you do it? Do you consult? Do you bother to consult the people in the community who would be building these houses? I think that would be one of the first groups you would talk to and say, “How do we do this and how much would it cost?”
We have got a lot of glib responses. In fact, when Ms Le Couteur and I were on radio talking about it, she sort of changed her view as to whether it was a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars. The only Treasury costings are $20,000 per home. That is the Treasury number that we have seen. I do not know whether they are right but they are the numbers. HIA could not give us a number because they could not actually tell us exactly what seven stars would look like. Indeed, Treasury has said $20,000 per home. Treasury may or may not be right.
But the Greens are saying, “Maybe a few hundred, maybe a few thousand dollars.” Treasury is saying $20,000. That is what it says in the documents. That is a big disparity and that is one that perhaps the Greens can discuss when Mr Rattenbury has his opportunity—the opportunity, I note, that he did not have last time and I am sure he is champing at the bit to come and respond.
The other issue that was a real concern—and there were a couple of things—was that we saw in the Greens paper:
The proposed plan for John Gorton Drive appears to be too car-friendly, and set to encourage the use of cars by Molonglo residents well into the future …
What we see—and it goes on in dots points—is:
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