Page 104 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 14 February 2012
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There are, however, some things which the government can do which will address affordable housing. One of them—talking about the draft territory plan, variation 306—does not appear to be going anywhere at this stage, but it has a couple of good ideas as far as affordable housing goes. One of them is the idea of secondary dwellings. They used to be habitable suites under the old codes. Unlike habitable suites, you will be able to keep them indefinitely. They will be smaller, secondary dwellings. So where we have large blocks of land, we will be able to make better use of them instead of locking large areas away.
In considering affordability, we would like to see an emphasis not just on initial price, although that is important, but also on the costs of running houses, particularly energy efficiency and transport. Energy efficiency and general building standards were areas that Mr Doszpot thought the Greens were being a little unrealistic about. However, I would like to quote from a study by the RMIT’s lifetime affordable housing project. They found seven-star homes to be significantly more affordable than less efficient five-star homes once lifetime household running costs were included. The study modelled the extra costs of a range of options from 5.5 to 7.4-star standard, along with the energy bill savings; they found the best outcome to be a 7.2-star standard rather than the six-star standard which we now have in the ACT. The 7.2-star standard provided a simple payback of seven years with an internal rate of return of about 18 per cent. That is even without taking into account the extra advantages of living in an energy efficient house. Basically, it is more comfortable to live in.
Another thing that is really important in terms of housing affordability is location. If you are located somewhere where your transport options are very poor, you will end up spending a lot of money on transport. If there is no decent public transport, if there are not cycling facilities and if there are not footpaths, most families will be forced to have two cars, and that is a much more expensive option. Housing affordability has to take into account housing location.
As I mentioned before in relation to energy efficiency, one of the concrete things that the Greens are trying to do to address housing affordability is through my colleague Mr Rattenbury’s rental bill. That is looking at trying to increase the energy efficiency of rental houses to two stars. This can be done very cheaply. Mr Rattenbury will talk about it more tomorrow, but this can be done very cheaply in almost all houses by putting in some wall and ceiling insulation. This will lead to a huge increase in the comfort of the house and a huge decrease in the energy bills of the house. This is the sort of bill that anyone who is interested in housing affordability should be supporting. I trust, given the debate today, that the Liberals and the Labor Party will be supporting Mr Rattenbury’s bill tomorrow.
Another issue I would like to canvass briefly in the time I have is the need for more innovative design. A while ago in Canberra we built Wybalena Grove and Urambi developments. They were both very innovative in their time and they are still innovative. They are large areas with an integrated design inside them. They are areas which have reduced expenditure on roads and expenditure on carports and garages. They are more affordable. They are areas where there are community facilities.
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