Page 2569 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 1 August 2018
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There are many parts of Ms Tucker’s speech which have proved to be spot on nearly 21 years later. She talked about the impact of climate change, which of course we are now seeing. She talked about how clean energy could be an important industry for the ACT, and that is now starting to happen. She talked about how ratings would prove to be actually quite cheap to conduct and a big benefit to people looking for a place to live, and that has come to pass, at least partly.
Sadly, one part of Kerrie Tucker’s legislation did not get passed: full mandatory disclosure for rental properties. Even now, 20 years later, rentals still miss out unless there has been a rating done recently for the sale of the property. And unfortunately there is the little issue of enforcement of the disclosure provisions. Certainly from the rental point of view it is simply not enforced, as far as we can tell, although it is usually done for sale of premises.
Moving on to the new bills and the minimum standard for EERs, these only, at present, apply to newly constructed houses or houses with very significant renovations. It is partly implemented through the Building Code of Australia, which is a national document and applies to construction of all new dwellings. This produces some limitations on the actions we can take in the ACT. The Greens have been trying to improve the minimum standards for many years. Because the minimum standards only apply to new homes, Canberra’s older homes have not been covered. While many owner-occupiers have upgraded their own homes over the years, often with ACT and federal government financial support, there has been a big gap for rental homes.
My Greens colleague, Mr Rattenbury, tried to address this, amongst other problems for renters, in legislation in 2011. I will quote from his tabling speech:
It is not uncommon to see an energy efficiency rating of between zero and 1½ stars for older houses in the ACT …
… while many have had cosmetic upgrades that presumably make them easier to rent out, they still have very low EERs. Yet information supplied by the home energy audit team in 2005 indicates that lifting an EER from zero to three can halve a home’s energy bill.
Sadly, the Greens were defeated on this bill. It was voted down by both the ALP and the Liberals. They got together to vote down lifting the energy efficiency of rental homes. That is one of the many reasons I am very pleased to see and hear Ms Orr moving a motion in support of the EER scheme. This is really good.
I will now move on to the current review. It is based on two parliamentary items which are agreements the Greens secured from the Labor Party in terms of our support for the Chief Minister in supply. These items are (1) a review of the effectiveness of the energy efficiency rating scheme, and (2) a regulatory impact statement into setting minimum EER standards for rental properties. There are a number of reasons why this work is necessary. I am only going to cover two of them now. I have already talked about rental properties, so I will wrap up by
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