Page 4654 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 19 October 2010
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There are now a small but significant number of houses in Canberra that do not need external energy to maintain a comfortable internal temperature. They are great to live in as they are comfortable, have very low or zero energy bills and produce very low or zero greenhouse gas emissions. They are showing us what we can do and they should become the norm. Houses in Canberra have been getting bigger over the years. They use more energy, materials and greenhouse gases to build and to run. At the same time, household sizes are going down. This is a trend which we need to change to meet our targets.
ACTPLA is working on new developments in East Lake which I understand will use 40 per cent less energy and water than current developments. We need all new developments in the ACT to be at least at that standard. So it is disturbing that we are continuing with conventional development, business as usual, in Gungahlin and Molonglo. The Greens have been calling on the government to change the Molonglo development to show, as it does say in our agreement, excellence in sustainable design.
We need to push for more of our new houses to be in existing town centres and near transport corridors. This will reduce transport-related emissions and preserve green space as well as providing an environment that, it is clear, many Canberrans want.
Of course, most buildings in the ACT are existing buildings, and we need to work on improving them. We can insulate them and weather-strip them. In many cases, the payback period for these improvements is only a few years, and they are very cost effective. For instance, when I insulated my ex-govie house, I halved my heating bills while improving the comfort of the house.
Commercial buildings can also be improved. Again, as a personal example, I used to work for Australian Ethical Investments, and, for our headquarters, we took a typical second-hand, 20-year-old commercial building and renovated it. It now uses 75 per cent less energy to run. As most commercial buildings are refitted or refurbished every seven years when they get new tenants, we should be able to quickly improve our commercial buildings.
Our car-based transport system faces the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil. Both of these mean we must use less fossil fuel. We can change our transport system by good planning so that we have more people living close to the facilities they need and close to transport facilities. We can change it with better use of ICT so that people telecommute sometimes, which can mean but not always means a reducing of greenhouse gas emissions. We need better footpaths and cycle paths so that we can use human energy, not just fossil fuel, to move us around. And we need a world-class public transport system.
With things like this and things which my colleague Ms Bresnan will speak about, we should easily be able to reach the goal that Canberra’s families should only need a maximum of one car per family. And as each car costs at least $5,000 a year to run, this will save money for the people of Canberra, as well as saving our environment.
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