Did we really need the Productivity Commission to tell us that the energy efficiency ratings are a waste of time and money?
A week ago it suggested we might have wasted $12 million on EERs in the past five years.
It is another reminder of how badly Canberra has done on planning since self-government.
Other reminders are:
The despairingly slow progress at rebuilding after the 2003 bushfires. True, much delay has been because of insurance, but planning has been a major frustration. When these suburbs were built 30 years ago people had to finish building within a year, as a condition of their lease. Two years after the fires only a third of the 491 houses had been rebuilt.
The rotten state of Civic as highlighted by John Thistleton and Ben Doherty’s reports in The Canberra Times this week.
Planning Minister Simon Corbell’s side-flip on Civic. His enthusiasm for relaxed rules for West Civic resulted in people from other parts of Civic saying, “Why can’t we have relaxed rules, too?” Why not, indeed, the Minister said. He should have thought of it first up.
Gungahlin. Gungahlin is the epitome of the ACT falling from best planning practice in the 1970s and 1980s to being shown up by Jerrabomberra in NSW in the 1990s. Public spaces and streets were far too small. Houses went in (and developers left with the loot) years before the infrastructure was built. At least Corbell has attempted some catch up and fix up within Gungahlin, even if the means of getting there – the Gungahlin Drive Extension – has been a fiasco.
The shuffling about over higher densities, plot ratios and core areas.
Endless rounds of consultation and draft variations. These indicate that the Government and ACTPLA seem to be incapable of striking the right balance between development, environment and residential amenity.
The best judge of the state of Canberra’s planning position comes from Corbell’s own mouth. On April 7, in an astonishing admission in the press release announcing yet another round of community consultation on planning, he said: “We currently have a planning system that is resource intensive, uncertain and unable to respond quickly to changing community needs and expectations. The system gives rise to inconsistencies in decision-making. . . .”
Well, who has been Minister for three years and four months allowing this resource intensive, unresponsive system to continue?
To be fair to Corbell, he also has the health ministry. How many poison chalices must one politician drink from? You’d think Chief Minister Jon Stanhope would take one of the big three: Treasury, Health or Planning
Let’s return to the Energy Efficiency Rating because it epitomises much of the planning folly in Canberra. It allows the Government to be seen to be doing environmentally sound things while achieving nothing.
The law was originally passed in 1997 by a combination of Labor, Green and Independent MLAs, including Corbell. After a period of grace, the compulsory ratings began in 1999.Before any house could be advertised for sale it had to be given an energy efficiency rating. Cost — around $200.
The result has been zip. Real estate agents say location, size and price drive sales. And environmentally aware people know what to look without an EER. How difficult is it to point a compass north, poke your head in the ceiling cavity or tap the walls to find insulation?
Meanwhile, the EER that really matters – on houses BEFORE construction – is a flop. Environmentally dumb houses abound – houses with airconditioning, no eaves, poor orientation, weak use of glass and landscape, encroachment on neighbours sunlisght and so on.
The anger of developers and residents continues. They say (in an albeit contradictory way) that there is no certainty, consistency, flexibility or capacity to embrace the new. Environmentalists bemoan the energy- and water-guzzling houses.
Again we have been overtaken by NSW.
NSW is introducing in stages a system called BASIX. A developer, architect, designer or DIY resident can assess their building proposal online. You enter postcode, dimensions, roof, wall and floor material, window sizes and their orientation, insulation, eave size, set-backs and a myriad of other passive virtues to achieve an acceptable score before your development will be approved. As you do environmentally bad things (increase size, for example), you must compensate with good things (add a rain, tank for example).
It has some obvious educative value. If you add an air-conditioner you will have to add eaves and better ventilation to balance the score. And when you do that, of course, you will not need the air-conditioner. Try it at www.basix.nsw.gov. You can enter someone else’s Sydney address and NSW equivalent of block and section number.
You can also ask for manual assessment for innovative designs.
Basix will actually achieve something: in 10 years it will save 256 billion litres of water and 9.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. Whereas, in the ACT we have wasted $12 million on a worse-than-useless EER system that has in fact added to greenhouse gases as EER assessors people drive to the houses and put their reports on reams of paper – more than a third of a million mostly unread pages of them in the past five years.