By Lynne Blundell

The Senate has rejected the Efficient Building Scheme proposed by Lend Lease and WSP Lincolne Scott. The Property Council’s Peter Verwer has lambasted the scheme and has pinned the PCA strategy for sustainable building upgrades on accelerated depreciation, despite doubts that it will be effective.

The Senate’s rejection yesterday of the Greens’ Energy Efficient Non-Residential Building Scheme Bill is short sighted and cavalier according to Australian Greens Deputy Leader Christine Milne. She has vowed to continue to fight for the scheme which the Greens say would halve emissions from buildings by 2020.

By rejecting the bill the government has missed an opportunity to lower energy bills, increase productivity and dramatically reduce emissions, Senator Milne said.

The bill, which is based on the Efficient Building Scheme developed by Lend Lease, WSP Lincolne Scott and Built Ecology (previously Advanced Environmental), was introduced to the Senate last year. A decision was delayed pending a formal enquiry into the scheme.

It proposed the establishment of a cap and trade scheme for all non-residential buildings including offices, retail centres, hotels, hospitals and schools. This contrasts with the government’s mandatory energy disclosure program, which only applies to commercial office buildings.

Ms Milne said the Senate committee had not taken the bill seriously and had demonstrated a lack of understanding of the scheme’s key components. It had also disregarded widespread support of the scheme from international experts and organisations such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s Energy Efficiency in Buildings Project; RAND Corporation, one of America’s oldest research institutes; and Dr David Vincent, Projects Director, Carbon Trust - an independent company set up by the UK Government to accelerate the  move to a low carbon economy.

“It is disappointing that the Economics Legislation Committee, dominated by the government, does not have a culture of trying to achieve a consensus and that the Chair failed to circulate comments on her draft that sought to achieve consensus,” Ms Milne said.

“As a result, in several areas the Committee’s report fails to represent the evidence received and fails to capture the essence of the arguments relating to the bill.

Christine Milne

“From the Greens point of view, a key outcome of the inquiry was that amongst all the submissions to the inquiry, there was no substantive rebuttal of the very simple method of assessing building energy intensity based on the reporting of electricity and gas bills,” Senator Milne said.

Under the proposed Scheme buildings owners would provide data on their buildings’ greenhouse gas emissions. This would include:

• energy consumption (electricity and gas bills, including any on-site energy generation)
• building type (office, hotel, retail, school, etc)
• location (climatic zone and/or economic centre).

From this data the building’s energy intensity (kWh/m2/annum) and carbon intensity (tCO2e/m2/annum using official greenhouse gas emission coefficients for fuel sources) would be calculated.

In rejecting the bill the Senate committee argued that the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will provide a clear signal to all sectors of the economy and must be the priority.

Maria Atkinson, global head of sustainability for Lend Lease, and Che Wall, managing director of WSP Lincolne Scott, said the Energy Efficient building Scheme was designed as a complementary measure to the CPRS, or as a stand-alone scheme if the CPRS was not introduced. It would provide an ”enabler” for the building sector to reduce its carbon footprint by offering building owners and developers an incentive to create energy efficient buildings.

Under the scheme, a cap is applied to carbon emissions from buildings and those that achieve lower emissions than the cap can sell the surplus to less efficient buildings.

Ms Atkinson and Mr Wall say that the CPRS will not stimulate emissions reductions in existing non-residential buildings.

“We know from international experience that the scale of energy efficiency improvements that are both possible and needed has not and cannot be achieved through voluntary incentive programs, building code reform or mandatory disclosure schemes,” Mr Wall said.

He pointed to Tokyo’s voluntary trading scheme, which, coupled with a mandatory disclosure scheme, delivered only a 2 per cent reduction in emissions over three years.

Property Council slams scheme as “big tax”

The Property Council of Australia opposes the scheme. Chief executive officer Peter Verwer instead supports accelerated depreciation, describing the Efficient Building Scheme as “a huge churning tax and transfer system”.

In a recent statement on the subject published in Property Australia magazine, Mr Verwer, said the proposed scheme was poorly conceived and enormously complex.

“It is utterly inequitable, as it makes owners responsible for energy loads and emissions caused by building occupants, over which they have no control, and fails to recognise why buildings perform in different ways,” Mr Verwer said.

The Property Council’s alternative is accelerated depreciation tied to environmental performance measures, which Mr Verwer believes will encourage property owners to refurbish early and green.

“It’s a simple plan –upgrade to improve your building’s energy performance by 60 to 80 per cent and write off the capital cost two to three times faster,” said Mr Verwer.

Maria Atkinson

Maria Atkinson told The Fifth Estate that it was opportunistic for the Property Council to describe the EBS as a big tax.

“It is scaremongering to use this language and it is not factual or informative. This is a massive opportunity for the sector to position itself and it is frustrating that an industry organisation is not providing leadership to help develop robust long term policy.

“I think the Property Council is very confused about how the scheme works. They are arguing for incentives and I would say to them why not work on a fair and affordable system to reduce emissions and then add incentives such as accelerated depreciation for those who really need them. They are not mutually exclusive, Ms Atkinson said.

She was positive that the EBS would eventually be adopted and that there would be an “aha” moment when the penny finally dropped for the government.

“What the government and the property industry needs is a register that shows a carbon footprint for every street address in Australia. This information is invaluable for government and for property developers and investors.,” Ms Atkinson said.

The Property Council, along with others who oppose the scheme, argue for retention of the National Australian Built Environment Rating System, or NABERS energy rating tool.

The Greens (and Che Wall and Maria Atkinson) argue that in its current form, the NABERS tool is an inaccurate rating tool as it distorts its reporting of CO2 intensity per sq mby correcting for externalities such as hours of use and numbers of computers in a workplace. The Efficient Building Scheme on the other hand looks at “raw” CO2 emissions and provides a carbon footprint average for industry and building types.

They also believe its reliance on the use of independent expert assessors makes NABERS very expensive to operate.

Senator Milne, in her response to the bill’s rejection, said the Property Council’s opposition to the Efficient Building Scheme was puzzling.

“With regards to accelerated depreciation, whether this would prove effective in the non-residential building sector was a contested point, but the Greens view is that either way it is compatible with and could be additional to the emissions trading scheme and/or white certificate trading or the proposed EBS.

“It is notable that the Property Council of Australia rejects a market mechanism to drive energy efficiency and prefers regulation and government largesse making it vulnerable to the whims of government in terms of both. Given that no government has this policy on the table why the PCA would take this approach is puzzling,” Senator Milne said.

“The Property Council had displayed both a poor understanding of the intent of the Bill and a determined effort to undermine a reasonable consideration of the pros and cons. This came as some surprise given that many members of the Property Council would presumably benefit from the EBS.”

lblundell@thefifthestate.com.au

See our article on why accelerated depreciation won’t work

and our article on the NABERS review under way

Do you have any feedback or comments?

Send them to editorial@thefifthestate.com.au

Kerry and Lindsay Clare

By Genevieve Lilley

This year, the Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal, has been awarded to the husband-and-wife team, Lindsay & Kerry Clare. It is the first time a couple has been awarded the honour, and only the second time in its 50 years that a woman has won it (the other was fellow-Queenslander Britt Andresen in 2002). The award was presented last night at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, which the Clares designed, (as directors of Architectus.)

See also sustainability award for Tony Arnel

As the jury report summarises, “Lindsay and Kerry Clare have made an enormous contribution to the advancement of architecture and particularly sustainable architecture, with a strong held belief that good design and sustainable design are intrinsically linked”. They make beautiful buildings, of all different scales, and they are always timeless. They have done so since establishing their practice in 1979, and their relative youth suggests their best work may yet be ahead of them. They have always worked with each other, and also in many different forms of collaboration with others.

Their work is not so much dramatic or striking but their projects display contextual sensitivity, clarity of design and environmentally sustainable principles. Their projects have won prestigious awards, including 28 State and National awards from the AIA for housing, public, educational, commercial and recycling projects.

As Queensland Government architect Philip Follent states, “The project output though relatively small in scale was diverse and, although attracting good private sector clients whose expectations were almost always delightfully surpassed, the forays into government work, despite, for example, the international acclaim for the Cotton Tree Pilot Housing Project did not yield an abundance of public projects.”

Thrupp and Summers house by Kerry and Lindsay Clare

So in the mid 1990s, Lindsay and Kerry left their office on the Sunshine Coast, and joined the NSW Government Architect’s Office as design directors. In five years they achieved many urban design successes and made an impact with buildings such as the No 1 Fire Station in Sydney City. Since that time they have been design directors with Architectus.

Major awards include the 2008 AIA Queensland Public Architecture Award for the University of Sunshine Coast Chancellery, the 2007 RAIA National Public Architecture Award for the GOMA and the RAIA Robin Boyd Award in 1992 and 1995. The recently presented 25 Year Award for Enduring Architecture (Queensland State Awards) for the White Residence, designed while in practice with Ian Mitchell, is a testament to the quality and longevity of their work.

Kerry is also a member of the City of Sydney Design Advisory Panel, providing advice on public and private developments to maintain high standards of urban design. She also serves on the Design Review Panel (SEPP 65) for Randwick and Waverley Councils where she assists in the review of development applications.

Architects are usually heralded for the breathtaking wins and building successes, but the Clares’ skill is often equally revealed in how they handle the less glamorous parts of their profession – the knockbacks, working with others, working while raising families, managing poor cashflow, the frustrations of the job.

Biographies of famous architects are littered with disaffected children, tormented ex-wives, miserable employees and unhappy clients. Lindsay and Kerry’s complementary natures resulted in a no-nonsense approach to coordinating family life, work and study. Kerry was the steadfast anchor to Lindsay’s looser sketches and ideas.

The Clares have raised five children, run a practice producing numerous award winning projects and still always hang on to the detail that separates a fine piece of architecture from merely expedient building. I have known them since the mid-1980s when they shared projects with my father Geoffrey Pie, and can report they are magnanimous, determined, calm and generous.

They eschew fashions and trends in their work. It is strange that the couple are now recognised partly because sustainability is fashionable, a topic of much discussion (and rightly so). Their buildings have always been designed with the moniker of sustainability woven into their very essence. Their work teaches us that ensuring good ventilation, and playing with natural light, and maybe collecting water is a given, or an opportunity in design, an integral part of every decision made.

The Clares’ approach also teaches us that sometimes the way to build the things you want is to work with others rather than wait till it comes to you. They teach us that parents can have children, work, study and teach; that the latter rewards the tutor as much as it helps the pupil. They teach us that often the way to make a difference to planning policy is to be involved in its very making. Their work gives enormous inspiration for those who like designing at a small scale, and who deliberately choose to work across a range of scales. The medal recognises that architects can give as much to as they get from practice and public life.

Lindsay and Kerry Clare are architects in the Renaissance sense, in that they are driven, obsessed with architecture, live it, breathe it, yet are also fully rounded people. They are interested, interesting, fun, passionate about travel, tell good stories, make great lunch guests, give time to others. They have influenced hundreds of others who worked with them, below them and around them.

The Gold Medal is the Australian Institute of Architects’ highest accolade. It recognises distinguished service by Australian architects who have designed or executed buildings of high merit, produced work of great distinction resulting in the advancement of architecture, or endowed the profession of architecture in a distinguished manner. It is particularly nice when its recipients have given so much already and yet will undoubtedly give more yet.

Genevieve Lilley

Genevieve Lilley is director of Genevieve Lilley Architects, which was founded in London in 1999 and reopened in Sydney in 2005 after Genevieve returned to Australia from the UK and US.

18 March 2010 -( UPDATED 19 MARCH 2010) - The major stakeholders involved in Sydney’s 1 Bligh Street development in the CBD  this week announced the building would house the CBD’s first blackwater recycling system and that more such systems were on the way.

The news comes shortly after the major Ozwater’10 conference of leading water experts called for recycled drinking water to be urgently introduced to deal with dwindling water supplies.

At 1 Bligh Street (see our profile) project developers, DEXUS, DEXUS Wholesale Property Fund and Cbus, builder Grocon and recycling builder and operator Aquacell, said the system would save 100,000 litres of drinking water a day.

NSW Water Minister, Phil Costa said the licence, granted under the Water Industry Competition Act 2006 was part of a NSW Government strategy to secure Sydney’s drinking water by attracting private investment in recycled water projects.”

Under the project wastewater will be mined from the nearby sewer main and the base building and then “treated to the highest standards” approved by NSW Health at the recycled water plant in the basement, a joint media statement by the major stakeholders said.

Water will then be distributed around the building for non-drinking purposes, with 75,000 litres used for cooling towers and 25,000 litres used for flushing toilets.

Aquacell CEO Colin Fisher said the granting of the licence was an important part of a sustainable future for NSW.

“Recycled water schemes like this will ease pressure on water, energy and land as our population increases - this legislation ensures ongoing management is robust and a level playing field is achieved. Only organisations that meet the highest standards can be issued a licence which streamlines the approval process for future schemes.”

The company planned to add more sites in NSW to its licence, Mr Fisher said.

This would open the way for developers to access private sewer and recycled water schemes where they are urgently needed.”

NOTE - Our Bathurst Burr correspondent Michael Mobbs has advised he consulted on sustainable office project at Double Bay, which also has a blackwater recycle plant -Ed.

tperinotto@thefifthestate.com.au

Matthew Quinn

By Tina Perinotto

17 March 2010 - Australians could be on the cusp of “getting it” in terms of downsizing their houses to more sustainable and affordable levels, if you take note of Stockland chief executive Matthew Quinn.

Mr Quinn, who heads Australia’s biggest residential developer, said the evidence was coming through in the rate of sales for Stockland’s smaller and dramatically lower cost dwellings it had recently released at the Highlands community in Melbourne.  “They’re walking out the door,” he said.  More evidence was buried in the lower financing figures for housing Australia-wide, which he said were likely to reflect downsizing in house choice.

At Highlands, which is at Craigieburn, less than an hour north of Melbourne and near a train line, Stockland recently released 10 house and land package, each with land size of 212.5 square metres and house sizes of  144 sq m,for only $269,000.  All of them sold out on the first day and the company now plans to roll our similar offerings “across a range of our communities.”

Mr Quinn was speaking at an Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce business lunch at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney yesterday (16 March 2010) on the topic of affordability, which he said was a time bomb in the making.

He said that currently the picture for young people was bleak.  Households on an average income of $1387 a week and paying an average mortgage of $712 a week for housing, have $460 left after tax with to pay for food, health, clothing, education and anything else an average family needs, he said.

The average house price was $485,000 but the price that the average household could afford was only $330,000.

Huge pressure on prices came from a number of sources. Population growth, expected to reach 36 million by 2050, was one. But Mr Quinn pointed out that even without immigration the natural growth rate would see Australia at 30 million by that time.

Another spike in house prices came from the first home owners grant introduced, despite warnings, without finding a way to create more supply, he said.

Currently undersupply of housing in Australia was 200,000 dwellings, a figure growing by about 60,000 dwellings a year, so that by 2020, underbuilding was likely to be 1.4 million.

“Prices will go through the roof,” Mr Quinn said.

Highlands house and land package

Among possible answers were finding ways to build up densities in the metropolitan zones - shutting the gates was not an option.

Another was possible constitutional reform that could ride through the impasse of the various levels of government failing to co-ordinate their policies and activities.

Taxes were another. In Queensland, a quarter of the average new home price of $460,000 was due to taxes, said Mr Quinn quoting Property Council of Australia figures.

Yet despite these deep and it seems systemic failures, it could be that Stockland in a single stroke has delivered what all the property and building lobbies have failed to do - a housing option that has slashed prices and undercut the ideal affordable pricing point of $330,000 by a huge $61,000 margin.

How? By ridding the family home of the spaces that are hardly used anyway, Mr Quinn elaborated: the entertainment room, the formal dining room, the extra bedroom not needed by the family of three or four.

As Mr Quinn told the lunch crowd yesterday, Australia has the reputation of paying the highest price for housing of almost every country in the world, but the numbers are deceptive: Australia has the biggest average new dwelling size in the world, but second lowest cost per sq m, he revealed.

So a big part of the “unaffordability” was the sheer size of houses that the industry has been delivering to consumers.

Now at Highlands, the housing development industry seems to be finally delivering an alternative to the “choice” that previously consisted of various iterations on McMansions.

For Stockland this is the type of brave step that demonstrates genuine leadership and could kick start the sustainability revolution in housing - affordability included.

By Tina Perinotto

COMMENT 18 March 2010 - “What we have here is failure to deliver,” the surly prison guard in the mirror glasses might have said in Cool Hand Luke.

The NSW Government deserves to be locked up.

It has failed to deliver the credible long term planning which is the fundamental backbone of a sustainable city. This is something that is not an optional extra like organic shampoo or other green bling, it is absolutely what will sustain the life of the city and stop citizens suffering the consequences of gridlock, wildly expensive living costs of suburban sprawl, paying steep and rising costs to import food as nearby farmland disappears, and the sad prospect that our children will live a life worse than ours.

In the process the NSW Government has single handedly turned what was Australia’s most vibrant city at its peak of the Sydney Olympics into the least vibrant. Confidence is stripped bare and the citizens and business people go about with head hung low, trying to get by as best they can. They visit their great rival Melbourne and find an exciting highly entertaining city. Heads slouch lower.

Macquarie Street announces $500 million for light rail development.

Yawn…don’t believe them, is the response.

Yesterday it released the Metropolitan strategy review paper.

Yawn. So what?

It promises a new Metro rail system, starting with the single bravest thing it had attempted for years - “breaking the back” of the hugely difficult task of carving out a seed network into the bowels of the CBD. Slight shimmer of interest…then thud: another cancellation… Following the cancellation of several other transport plans, planning strategies and funding promises.

Transport plans are produced it seems, in secret, away from the prying jealous gaze of colleagues in the Planning Department or Treasury.

Someone once said that if you want to understand why planning is such a nightmare in NSW you need to read John Birmingham’s history of Sydney, Leviathan. This “failure to communicate” (the actual quote from Cool Hand Luke) between various government departments is wedged deep in the Rum Rebellion, at the very origin of the penal colony, he says, where no-one is to be trusted outside the inner clique and where true feelings are concealed; the powder kept dry.

Maybe it’s finally time for fireworks and for deep scepticism to finally crawl out from the normally polite shell of Sydney’s citizens.

This week the Property Council of Australia’s NSW executive director Ken Morrison quit from the Transport Blueprint expert panel.

“If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing time after time and and expecting a different result, then we are in danger of repeating the mistakes of the past,” he told the panel in his resignation letter.

In January the immediate past president of the Planning Institute NSW Julie Bindon jumped on a plane to attend an interview by The Fifth Estate with Melbourne City Council’s planning guru Rob Adams to see if she could bring back any insights into how to do planning better. (Our related story will be published soon.)

Adams says it’s possible to house 2.4 million more residents along the transport corridors of Melbourne - barely 6 per cent of the available metropolitan land sites - and leave the rest untouched. That’s 94 per cent of land owners who can breathe a sigh of relief and know they don’t have to go meetings with Save Our Suburbs, prepare resident action plans, tramp the streets collecting signatures and attend courts to stop development spoiling their homes.

Adams says that when you tell an audience this, you can almost see the relief.

How clever, how simple. More than anything it’s a proposal that understands and respects the psychological issues at the heart of development mistrust.

In the latest NSW Metropolitan Strategy review discussion paper released today planning for the transport corridors, promised in the past, have been forgotten, according to Urban Taskforce chief executive, Aaron Gadiel.

“These corridors included Victoria Road, Parramatta Road, the Pacific Highway, Liverpool Road, Anzac Parade, Pittwater Rd, Canterbury Rd, Princes Highway and Gardeners Rd,” he says.

“Urban development along the full length of corridors now barely rates a mention in the discussion paper.”

Gadiel continues: “The private sector was burned by the first Metropolitan Strategy, because so many of its promises were not fulfilled.”

Private sector confidence is critical because it has the power to tap capital and deliver the outcomes – given a framework it can rely on.

Of course Gadiel’s particular business constituents are urban land developers so he also bemoans the failure to provide land release.

But take a look at what one urban land developer has done – Stockland. This week Australia’s biggest housing developer showed it could be as clever and innovative as you might want.

At its Higlands estate at Craigieburn just north of Melbourne it released 10 house and land packages that dramatically undercut land size (212.5 square metres), house size (144 sq m) and price of $269,000, way below the average affordable price of $330,000.

They’ve done this by getting rid of all the spaces that the average family doesn’t actually need and still delivered what most young people want: a house of their own, near other young start ups, and the ability to have at least some contact with their own patch of earth.

The houses sold out in one day.

We bet other developers will follow.

Of course Craigieburn is on a train line.

What this proves is that the Australian consumer is not as wedded to McMansions as the housing and building lobbyists would have us believe.

It’s innovation, it demonstrates exciting flexibility – on both the demand and supply side - and it’s very encouraging that we can achieve real change among the voting public.

The NSW Government should put a poster of Highlands on every minister’s forehead.

Background on the role of corridors in the Metropolitan Strategy, supplied by the Urban Task Force.

The Metropolitan Strategy envisaged concentrated commercial, retail and residential development across the centres and corridors of Sydney.  For example:

• Part B(1) of the full Metropolitan Strategy is actually titled the Centres and Corridors Strategy for Sydney.(2)
• The Metropolitan Strategy’s Centres and Corridors Strategy for Sydney articulates a “vision for centres”, and alongside this vision, with equal prominence, is a “vision for corridors”.
• The Metropolitan Strategy’s “vision for corridors” states that economic corridors will play a key role in the metropolitan and national economy, renewal corridors will be the focus for diverse and liveable communities and enterprise corridors will provide locations for important local employment and services. … Existing and new infrastructure investment in these corridors will be used more efficiently by concentrating new development in these areas to support their role (emphasis added). (3)

Item B6 of the Metropolitan Strategy seeks to:

• Focus development in renewal corridors to maximise infrastructure use ..(.4)
• Renewal corridors are defined in this way:

Renewal Corridors generally follow transport and may join significant nodes or centres.  The area of interest may be extended up to one kilometre across.  They are usually a focus for commercial development and contain concentrations of employment, surrounded by or with the potential for complementary, higher density residential development (emphasis added. (5)

Enterprise zones benefit from passing traffic (over 50,000 vehicles per day).(6)  The Department of Planning says that  [t]he zone is generally intended to be applied to land where commercial or industrial development is to be encouraged along main roads such as those identified by the Metropolitan Strategy City of Cities: a plan for Sydney’s future (NSW Government 2005).(7)

1 NSW Government, City of Cities: A Plan for Sydney’s Future: Metropolitan Strategy Supporting Information (2005) 79 -117.
2 Ibid 79.
3 NSW Government, City of Cities: A Plan for Sydney’s Future: Metropolitan Strategy Supporting Information (2005) 81; Government,
City of Cities: A Plan for Sydney’s Future: Metropolitan Strategy (2005) 2.
4 Ibid 111.
5  Ibid 300.
6 Department of Planning- NSW, East Subregion: Draft Subregional Strategy (2007) 41; Department of Planning- NSW, Inner North Subregion: Draft Subregional Strategy (2007) 41; Department of Planning- NSW, North-East Subregion: Draft Subregional Strategy (2007) 35.
7  Ibid.

tperinotto@thefifthestate.com.au

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