Often our elected representatives set out to do something and end up doing precisely the opposite.
They proclaim that they are acting to achieve a result that is in our best interests. They then pass a law which is it put into effect often at large cost. And they use feel-good phrases, like “world’s best practice” and “”think globally, act locally”, to make us think that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Some examples are the Government’s policies on outsourcing. The aim was for greater efficiency and cost savings and we now learn that the Federal Government will lose millions in excess rent costs of buildings it so foolishly sold at under value. Governments prohibit the use of a heroin with the aim of eliminating the drug from society, and their policy has the reverse effect – – it causes an increase in heroin use.
A government funds a car race in order to promote economic activity and greater wealth in the territory. And at the result is money going from ACT taxpayers to interstate concerns diverting precious funds from a hospital which is needlessly in “crisis” when there is no war, epidemic or other health scourge.
It happens so often that Churchill’s statement on democracy in under threat.
The example in this column is more petty, but none the less a classic of our elected representatives setting out to do a worthy thing only to achieve exactly the opposite.
During the fuss over the Kyoto protocols, I was engaged in a couple of property transactions for sundry family and friends. Two were in the ACT and one in NSW.
The ACT transactions were just two of the 15,000 or so dwellings that have passed hands in the ACT since 31 March, 1999. You may recall that that was the date on which the Energy Efficiency Rating (Sale of Premises) Act came into force. That Act requires that an energy-efficiency rating be obtained for every dwelling that is advertised or sold in the ACT. It was the gift of the Labor-Green-independent majority in the Assembly.
People selling a dwelling are required to get copies of the latest approved building plans and work through a checklist gathering information about the construction, insulation, fittings and so on. The seller then has to engage an independent accredited assessor to do the rating. Typically, a rating runs to four or five A4 pages and costs are to $300.
There are penalties for false statements and if a person fails to get a rating the buyer of the dwelling has a legal right to cut 0.5 per cent from the purchase price. In short, there is no practical escape. A seller cannot, for example, just a rate of the place at zero and take the market consequences, if any, of selling a place of a low energy efficiency.
So we have a nanny state forcing buyers and sellers of houses to engage in an expensive process to find information which most neither need nor want, or if they did could find it themselves.
The Office of Planning and Land Management says in its public explanation of the system, under the heading Benefits of a Rating: “An energy efficient dwelling can reduce the energy used in the average home by up to 40 per cent. The home can be up to five degrees warmer in the winter and up to 10 degrees cooler in summer, resulting in a reduction of energy bills.”
It may well be that an energy efficient dwelling can reduce energy consumption and reduce greenhouse gases. But to the compulsory obtaining of a rating does no such thing. In fact it achieves the opposite.
With copies required by conveyancing and faxing and the need to get plans, up to 30 A4 pages per sale would be generated. That is about 4500,000 A4 pages since the rating system began. Further, the accredited assessor has to travel to and from the dwelling, invariably by car. That is about 400,000 kilometres. At 0.3 of a kilogram of greenhouse gases per kilometre travelled it makes more than 120,000 kilograms of greenhouse gases needlessly poured into the atmosphere by this well-meaning but misguided law.
The total cost has been about a $4 million, which it surely would have been better put into something more environmentally constructive than the generation of 450,000 A4 pages of paper.
There is no evidence that anyone is ever persuaded or deterred from the sale on the strength of an energy-efficiency rating. People concerned about energy efficiency look at those elements of the house themselves before they buy it. More typically, however, they buy dwellings on the basis of other matters, such as locality, garden, number and location of rooms and the like.
The energy efficiency requirement was especially mad in the property transactions I was engaged in. One was to an existing tenant who had lived in the place for five years and the other involved the next door neighbour. In at both cases one could one could presume that the buyers knew the dwelling’s environmental strengths and weaknesses without having a rating.
The energy-efficiency-rating law is a feel-good fiasco that has achieved exactly the opposite of its stated aims. It would be better to require purchasers to insulate ceilings or walls. That would be no less draconian and not much more expensive, but at least it would achieve something for the environment.
Better still, the Assembly and the Government could follow NSW’s lead and get property titles available on the internet so one does not have to burn up greenhouse gases going in to the Registrar General’s Office to do searches – which, incidentally, cost twice as much as in NSW.
Once again, the ACT sprouts the mantra of the best practice while others actually do better. Labor should explain why it continues to support this additional needless impost on home purchase (in addition to the horrors of stamp duty) or have the spine to join the Liberals to remove it.
Incidentally, I think energy efficient buildings are excellent – and should be insisted upon time of building. ACT authorities are hopelessly hypocritical in often approving poorly designed, neo-Georgian boxes without ANY windows facing north or any eaves to protect from the summer sun and which shut out neighbours’ winter sun and at the same time demand energy-efficiency ratings on existing houses when it is too late to do much about it.