Page 2317 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 22 June 2011
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acknowledge that the ACT, particularly with the most recent budget, has finally, I hope, adequately funded the auditing part and the compliance part of energy efficiency rating, and with the recent changes to CO(L)A. I did acknowledge, and I continue to acknowledge, that there is potential for considerable improvement in the energy efficiency rating regime over what has been the case in the ACT; I well agree with that.
What I found disappointing about Mr Corbell’s speech was that he did not actually address my motion. He just spoke generally about the ACT doing good things with energy efficiency. It is doing some good things. It could do a lot more than that. I also point out that a lot of the good things it is doing are because of the influence of the Greens. He talked about the fact that we were the only jurisdiction that has the residential sale of premises act. That was Kerrie Tucker’s legislation.
He talked about the fact that we were the first jurisdiction to sign up for six stars from the BCA last year. That was part of our agreement with the Labor Party. I think that the progress that we are making on energy efficiency rating is in no small part due to the Greens’ presence in the ACT, and I wish to continue pushing for progress on this. I was disappointed that he did not go through the things that I was speaking about and point out why, in his opinion, or the government’s opinion, they were not things worth looking at.
Mr Seselja made comments about the housing industry and the cost. I think Mr Seselja has slightly missed the point of what I was saying. I did not at any stage suggest that anyone would be required to build a higher standard of building, a different standard of building. That is not what this motion is about. This motion is about providing better information to potential consumers, to designers, to anyone who lives anywhere—so to all of us. In particular, I went through a rating for a whole house; there are no cost implications for that. We already know the size of households. They are on the building plans, and the building plans already give an energy use per square metre.
All I am suggesting is that these two numbers be multiplied together, because most people do not know that the energy rating is per square metre. They are simply in ignorance of this. It would cost us basically nothing to make it clear to people that there are two things that matter here—the size and the rating. People just do not realise it. It is the same as the washing machine example. We have an energy rating and we have the amount expected to be used per year. Or the fridge: we have different ratings for large fridges and small fridges. So the same deal happens with houses. Houses use a lot more energy than fridges, but for reasons unknown to me, we do not do our rating system as informatively for houses in many ways as we do for fridges.
I went very quickly through the last couple of points of my motion because I ran out of time, so I will say a bit more about point (h). The methodologies for data collection on built houses: this is something I have suggested that we advocate at COAG for funds for. Mr Corbell in his speech seemed to believe that the ACT does not have any role in COAG or with other states and that we should not advocate for any change; we should just look after our own borders. That is not how Australia’s cooperative federalism is done. We have COAG, and it is an appropriate role for jurisdictions to
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