Page 135 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 26 February 2014
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of construction sector people around town and ask them how it is going. A lot of them say they have had a strange 12 or 18 months because there was nervousness about the outcome of the federal election. People simply did not know which way it was going to go, so there has been a built-in hesitancy. That is not going so much to Mr Barr’s comments, but is just a general observation, a non-political observation that people have been making around the fact that the federal election itself, the sheer uncertainty of it, has caused some downturn. But the other day I chatted to somebody in the building industry and said, “How is it going?” He said, “We are slowing down a bit, but we are coming to a point that is probably a long run average.” He said: “The last decade has been crazy. There has been so much work on. It has been abnormal. It has been above the long run trend, and it has been hard to find workers.”
So there are very different views out there about what the situation is in industry. We need to not be too general and say, “It is all the government’s fault because of this, this and this.”
Let me turn to some of the specifics in Mr Coe’s motion. When it comes to variation 306, I think it is well known that the ACT Greens advocated for the solar access provisions that were brought forward in variation 306, protecting solar access rights for new dwellings. The solar provisions have been supported by many in the industry who design and build solar passive homes. We know that we can build houses to capture valuable sunlight. These provisions simply ensure that we do not build homes that block the sunlight of the neighbours.
Other benefits of DV306 include increasing the size of secondary dwellings, for example, making it easier for people to build granny flats, which also aids the increase in the diversity of the housing stock in our city. There has been a lot of debate about the detail of draft variation 306, and I agree that there were some unintended consequences, which the government has sought to address through further technical amendment. I was concerned recently about changes to the definition of “northern boundary” which would have come into effect through the recent amendment, TA2013-12, and was pleased that the government took community concerns on board and delayed the introduction of that change. Some of the technical amendments that have gone through have addressed some of the glitches, such as aligning the solar envelope with existing building setbacks.
The provisions in 306 came into early effect in the suburb of Wright. It is often the one that people cite as the example of poor design outcomes, such as houses being built into the side of hills and houses in the shape of wedding cakes. Let us remember that the solar access provisions do not force these outcomes; they simply prescribe a solar envelope. No-one is forcing people to build the biggest houses they possibly can within the available space, but that certainly seems to be the prevailing trend.
It is again important to reflect on the fact that that is not what everybody is doing in the community. Members may have noticed a letter to the editor in the Canberra Times just a few days ago, on 17 February, from a resident of Wright, who wrote:
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