Page 880 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 20 March 2019
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also potentially unsafe for vulnerable older people and young children. I remind members that heatwaves are Australia’s deadliest type of natural hazard, with seniors and infants most at risk of death and serious injury.
So why is this happening? Surely our energy efficiency standards should mean it does not happen. We do have energy efficiency standards, commonly known in the community as the EER rating system, but of course there is more to it than just the rating. The standards are set through the national construction code. Clearly they are not doing enough for heatwaves.
The first problem for Canberra is that the focus for cooler climate zones like the ACT has been on keeping houses warm in the winter. The standards have been reasonably successful at this. Most new dwellings can reasonably be heated in winter. A second issue, however, is that energy efficiency standards are based on past climate data. The data used is an average of past years’ temperatures, which means it is based on Canberra’s past cooler climate, not on the hotter climate that we are facing now and will into the future with climate change.
This has been a concern of mine, of the Greens and of many other people concerned with climate change for a long time. I unsuccessfully moved a motion about this and other EER-related matters eight years ago, when I was last in the Assembly. Unfortunately, there does not appear to have been any substantive progress on these issues in the intervening time. That is why I have moved this motion today.
There are also concerns about parts of building design that are outside the scope of the energy efficiency standards. That is what I refer in (2)(b)(ii) as “weak planning rules”. The standards focus on how good the shell of the dwelling is at keeping the inside temperature stable. That means things like insulation and whether the windows are double-glazed. However, the standards do not fully cover things like external summer shading devices, cross-ventilation and solar access. Indeed, these things partly fall into the planning system. It gets very complicated. I will not go through all of the details; I will give an example.
The planning rules specify that most apartments must get at least three hours of sunlight on the shortest day of the year. You might think that that means they have to face north. However, people in the industry and all of us who look at new apartments being built will tell you that instead most apartments face east or west. This is so that you can fit more on the block. East and, even more, west-facing apartments are at risk of getting very, very hot in summer.
In New South Wales they overcome this gap between building rules and planning rules with a comprehensive set of guidelines for apartment design: the apartment design guide, also known as SEPP 65. I have been told by a quite a few planners and architects that the ACT should adopt SEPP 65, as it is much better than our current rules. There can also be problems with compliance by builders. The less scrupulous design a building with energy efficiency features and get it approved but then, when it comes to construction, they are not all built or they are built in a substandard way compared to what they said they were going to do. This is a huge problem.
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