Page 2341 - Week 07 - Thursday, 4 August 2016
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When you own your own house it is easy to be in control of such things as making your house energy efficient. However, when it comes to private tenants and public housing tenants, this can be a very tricky issue. The ACT Greens have focused on increasing the energy efficiency of our public housing stock for many years now and I am pleased that there is progress being made in this area, particularly over the current and past Assemblies, through investment resulting from our parliamentary agreements with the Labor Party.
That is public housing. When it comes to private housing, we know, unfortunately, that many people are renting houses that are freezing cold in the winter and like little ovens in the summer, and having to pay a lot of energy bills to try to make those houses more comfortable. As part of our focus on making things better for people who are renting, the Greens this weekend just gone announced that we will set minimum standards for all rental properties to ensure that landlords are not allowed to leave students, young families, vulnerable older people or anyone in our community shivering through winter and roasting in summer.
At the very least, houses should be mandated to have roof insulation and draught sealing to improve their comfort and their efficiency for renters. Ensuring people can afford heating and cooling bills is an important way to make housing more affordable. This really is a win all round, because it not only reduces people’s energy bills, which are a significant source of expenditure, but also means that they are having a better quality of life, a more comfortable life. That adds to the benefits from having a lower financial bill to pay. These are the sorts of long-term things that can happen. It is very easy to go for the headline on some of these things, but this is long-term, serious work that has a long-term, serious impact on reducing the cost of living for households.
On energy, I would like to highlight the work that the ACT government has undertaken that has insulated ACT electricity consumers from increased costs in years to come, work that would never have been undertaken by a Liberal government, as they seem to have a fundamental opposition to renewable energy and climate mitigation.
When the large-scale feed-in tariff bill was debated in 2011, I did say in the chamber that the ACT would be insulated from energy price rises by committing to large-scale renewable contracts. At the time, I said:
The prices will go up, and if the ACT has contracts for 20 years at a fixed price there is no doubt that somewhere down the track there will be a crossover point where the territory will be doing very well under those contracts and the residents of the ACT will be thanking this Assembly for putting in place this legislation that saw us getting those economic benefits in 10 years time, 12 years time.
It seems that that is in fact becoming a reality already. What we have seen in recent weeks particularly is that with the significant increases in prices in the national electricity market, the ACT’s fixed price contracts are already starting to show those differences. It was written up in an article that appeared recently in a publication called Renew Economy, which is a specialist website about renewable energy matters. The article said:
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