Applicants will need to adapt an existing city fringe property into a medium density residential or mixed-use development, while preserving 50 per cent of the building and using Boral products.

Three cash prizes are on offer, totalling $34,000, to reward the professional, emerging professionals and student category winners.

Contact 1300 360 255 or visit www.boral.com.au/designawards

Speed Date a Sustainable Designer brings together Australia’s leading architects and building designers in the one spot so that you can meet and discuss your plans in a relaxed “no obligations” environment.

The first event is in Melbourne on 19 February. See sdsd.ata.org.au

The institute supports the Lighting a Billion Lives program which sets up a solar charging station in energy poor villages and offers solar lanterns for rent to the local community – reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 750 tonnes over the solar lantern’s useful life of 10 years.

In India 61 million rural households use kerosene and wicker lamps for lighting. Inadequate lighting has a direct impact on the livelihood, health, environment and safety of these rural residents, MWH said in a media statement.

Each village charging station is managed and operated by a local entrepreneur who leases the lanterns to village residents for an affordable fee, creating opportunities for renewable energy education and entrepreneurship in the villages.

The donation supports MWH’s partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative.

Area claimed by miners

By Michael Mobbs

1 February 2012 –This is a map which will change Australia’s future in the next 10 years. (1)
The map shows the area of land covered by the coal, petrol, oil and minerals mining leases given or being given over the Queensland catchments of the Murray Darling rivers. It foretells the finale of the rivers’ story.

Over 60 per cent of the catchments are to be mined.

The mining is taking both the water in the rivers and in the ground. This mining consumes about as much water as farming.

The area to be mined is so completely spread across the rivers and their catchments, so clear in its end result for the rivers and grounds water that it’s almost impossible to comprehend how governments could allow it.

The mining will take so much water from farming it will cause the quantity of food grown in the Murray-Darling Basin in the next 10 to 20 years to at least halve. About 40 per cent of Australia’s food is grown there.

The amount of ground and river water is expected to decline by at least 5- 15 per cent during these coming two decades; the data is clear and does not include the new mining leases.

“. . . there is very little spare capacity in the water budget [of Australia’s continent] for new activities or for using more water in existing activities; in other words, the Australian continental water budget is precariously balanced . . . Too many aquifers are already being over-extracted, with extraction at rates greater than natural rates of recharge . . . Groundwater use across Australia doubled between 1983 and 1996 . . . In most states groundwater extraction exceeds licensed allocations (Australian Water Resources Assessment 2000) . . . The commercial return on the water used in many agricultural industries is often small. For example, the beef cattle industry uses 800 litres of water to generate $1 of product value, and the seed cotton industry uses about 1600 litres of water to generate $1 of output. Rice in the husk uses almost 7500 litres to produce $1 of output . . . “

Ecohydrology: vegetation function, water and resource management, Eamus, Hatton, Cook & Colvin, CSIRO 2006 pp 3, 5]

In a 2012 report the near-terminal state of the rivers was made clear in the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation report:

“The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture (SOLAW) notes that while the last 50 years witnessed a notable increase in food production, “in too many places, achievements have been associated with management practices that have degraded the land and water systems upon which food production depends.”
Today a number of those systems “face the risk of progressive breakdown of their productive capacity under a combination of excessive demographic pressure and unsustainable agriculture use and practices,” the report says.

No region is immune: systems at risk can be found around the globe, from the highlands of the Andes to the steppes of Central Asia, from Australia’s Murray-Darling river basin to the central United States . . . But one of the “warning signs” flagged by the SOLAW report is that rates of growth in agricultural production have been slowing in many areas and are today only half of what they were during the heyday of the Green Revolution.”

• See the report

The water cost of what we eat

Product global average water litres footprint

Table of water use for everyday products

Source: The Water Footprint Network

Because the same, finite amount of river and ground water is owned several times over by farmers, there’s not enough for every farmer. Theft, as the data from the 2000 report above indicates, is consistent, widespread and accepted by farmers and government.

The final destructive act for the rivers is the granting of mining leases by Queensland, New South Wales and Victorian governments across millions of hectares of the river catchments and, with the leases, more licences to take more water. But there isn’t enough water for the farmers or the miners, and the data showing this was established 10 years ago and was publicised internationally.

Why is this happening?

Governments’ history of self-interested behavior – over-allocation of water to farmers and miners for political gain – explains their current conduct, it appears. And the money. Each of the states expects to receive over $40 billion in royalties from the mining they’re approving.
A water squandering madness is underway from mining out there far from the eyes of we city folk this side of the Great Dividing Ranges.

I can imagine the tragedy being averted only if the authors of the rivers’ destruction – the miners, the governments, the politicians –were to live there and depend on this resource for their food and water. Then they’d “get it”. But they don’t and they won’t.

We’re living through gross mismanagement of a scale that’s greater than that which has gone before us in our 200 years here.
I can’t believe what the map tells my eyes.

(1) Maps have been created by Bathurst Burr and graphic artist, Saima Ali based on maps published by the Queensland Murray Darling Catchment Authority in the report, Mining and Energy Industry Impact on Natural Resource Management in the Queensland Murray-Darling Basin Geoff Penton CEO QMDC; and available here

By Lynne Blundell

1 February 2012 – Smart meters, hailed by government and electricity distributors as the answer to reducing power use, have fallen victim to an inefficient distribution system, regulatory complexity and inflexible pricing. So far Victoria is the only state to mandate smart meter installation and consumers there are paying hundreds of dollars extra in electricity bills, often before they even get a meter.

Craig Memery, smart network specialist with the Alternative Technology Association, told The Fifth Estate this week that Victorian households will pay between $99.31 and $153.95 per meter during 2011, rising to between $127.46 and $219 by 2015. This money goes to distributors.

“Most customers have been paying these charges since 2010 regardless of whether they have had a meter installed. Every energy user had the levy imposed.”

Mr Memery said in NSW, where smart meters are so far voluntary, around 400,000 meters have been installed.

“COAG [the Council of Australian Governments] agreed that all states would put in smart meters but I haven’t seen any energy ministers falling over themselves to announce a mandatory program,” Mr Memery said.

In 2009 COAG committed to roll smart meters out nationally. Victoria was the first to initiate a program, mandating the installation for all residents, along with payment for the rollout by consumers. NSW was expected to follow but has since fallen silent on its intentions. Not surprising, given the Victorian rollout has been beset with cost blowouts and accusations by the current Coalition government that the previous Labor government mishandled the program.

Originally estimated to cost around $800 million the Victorian smart meter program is now expected to cost $2.3 billion.

The rollout was halted last year pending the outcome of a review by the Auditor General, and reinstated in December.

The Auditor-General stated in his report that: “If the project’s emerging risks delay the installation of smart meters it is likely that consumers will face further cost increases and gain fewer benefits”.

When announcing that the program would continue, Victorian Minister for Energy and Resources, Michael O’Brien, said the government would bring in changes, including subsidising the cost of in-house displays so consumers could see how much energy they were using.

“These changes aim to give households and business greater control of their energy consumption and their energy bills by making basic in-home display devices available at low cost to Victorian families and businesses,” Mr O’Brien said.

Smart meters are required for use by large consumers under the National Electricity Rules.

The advantage of smart meters is that they measure the amount of electricity used every 30 minutes and so allow electricity distributors and retailers to charge different rates based on time of use.

The real benefit for consumers is that they can see the true cost of their energy use and alter their consumption patterns so that they use less power at peak times. This also takes pressure off the power grid during peak usage.

The meters also have capacity for remote communication, allowing electricity suppliers to send or collect information directly from the meter and the customer, including for billing or outage notices.
However, incentives for consumers to use power more efficiently have been pushed back in Victoria with the decision by the state government to delay the introduction of flexible pricing until at least 2013. This follows protests by consumer groups that high peak pricing will disadvantage consumers.

Victorian consumers can also choose to remain on flat rates even when flexible pricing is introduced.

Unfair to low income people
A recent report by the University of Melbourne and national charity St Vincent de Paul found that unless suitable protections and policies are put in place to shelter vulnerable and low-income households from the cost impacts of time-of-use pricing and increased fixed charges, the Victorian smart meter rollout would seriously disadvantage groups such as pensioners, people on fixed incomes, and single parents, potentially adding around $300 to their annual electricity costs.

The report said low-income households were particularly disadvantaged because of their inability to take advantage of time-of-use pricing and direct load control technologies to off-set cost increases. Also, because of the low-volume of their consumption, fixed charges account for a much larger proportion of low-income household’s overall costs—so increases in fixed charges cause a more significant increase in their overall electricity costs.

“The effect of the rollout on energy affordability could be even more severe if households are put on TOU [time of use] pricing once smart meters are introduced. Two key time-of-use pricing initiatives here are time-of-use tariffs and Critical Peak Pricing tariffs,” the report said.

“These tariff structures will penalise low-income households, who tend to be peaky households with inelastic electricity use: households that mostly need to use electricity during the day-time because of (for example) disability, unemployment, retirement, or caring for young children or a relative; and which have a limited ability to shift their electricity usage in response to price signals because of their household circumstances, the types of appliances they have, the fact that little of their electricity use is discretionary consumption, or because of disability.”

Damien Moyes, Energy Project and Policy Manager with the Alternative Technology Association, told TFE that until tariffs were introduced that gave consumers an incentive to use energy more efficiently during peak times, smart meters offered few benefits to households.

“Right now any time based tariffs that do exist are cheaper from 11pm to 7am when nobody is really using power but then they rise to very expensive rate at peak times. The benefit right now is to distributors who get information from the meters,” Mr Moyes said.

The real future opportunity for distributors and retailers was in providing customers with access to their data through smart phones and web-based portals.

“It is about exploring those opportunities but until we get a tighter policy framework and more effective, well aligned tariff incentives there won’t be much benefit to consumers,” said Mr Moyes.

…. Or to energy consumption and the environment it seems.

lblundell@thefifthestate.com.au

By Dick Clarke 31 January 2012  –

The NSW Government is abandoning a leadership role in planning for Sydney’s growth (why do we assume Sydney is under some divine commandment to grow? – it’s just what keeps happening in the absence of any plan to the contrary).

Premier O’Farrell and Planning Minister Hazzard have determined that developers should be able to plan the city’s ever-westward expansion, without regard to infrastructure, transport, or nearby employment, and bypass local planning and zoning processes.

So what is currently potentially or actual productive farmland may become 10,000 houses, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Or, from the other perspective, land that you may have an option to buy now has a fast track to profit and there’s nothing those local reactionaries can do about it.

The problem with this is that Australia’s cities are already amongst the most spread-out and least dense in the world, which is a very inefficient way of making them function for transport, community cohesion, and employment.

This dysfunction is a financial burden that the whole community pays for ad infinitum. For years the struggle has been to balance the demand for growth (as distinct from the need for growth), and the future demands of sustainability.

This is a long running struggle which everybody who keeps half an eye on the news is aware of. In Sydney’s case, previous governments have established two growth corridors, with some form of mass transport at its core (although that is also an on-again off-again story), along and around which the sprawl of detached low density housing was to be clustered.

But today we learn that the O’Farrell mob can’t even stick to this simple discipline – they want anyone with an interest in any parcel of land in any location to be able to nominate it for rezoning directly by the government, bypassing council entirely.

Viewed in one way, this can be seen as a policy created by a government absolutely bankrupt of creativity and design discipline. Their excuse is that the current policy “has not worked”.

Really? By what definition? I suspect it is more to do with the free market ideology espoused by lobby groups like the Urban Development Institute of Australia, and Urban Taskforce has since joined the chorus.

I cannot help wondering if their ultimate vision is for urban sprawl to cover the whole continent: they never speak of limits, they have no long term constraints. Their rhetoric is very strong on “solving the short term problems”. (I note with wry amusement that in pursuit of this goal they will soon run headlong into the jaws of the Minerals Council, who want the whole state – every square metre of it – to be available for mining.)

It is clear to any informed observer that rezoning land based on its profit potential is an extremely poor way to plan a city, and I think that is being kind. The old saying “markets make wonderful slaves but poor masters” is as true as ever.

In world news today we also read of a 90 per cent decline in Southern Ocean jack mackerel stocks over the last 20 years. Fishing companies, often with significant government support and subsidy, have plundered – there really can be no other word – this fishery to the point of collapse in the next year or two.

Getting international agreement on such things is like herding cats, similar to the difficult progress on climate change. In climate change, all humanity has a stake and the vested interests fight to hold sway, but in fishery management, vested interests are more dominating and insidious.

Direct commercial interference is rife. Governments seem to be mesmerised, in the sway of big fishing companies like PacAndes and Thai Union Group. Never heard of them? They sell a large proportion of the world’s seafood through brands like John West.

Companies like these have undue influence on various governments, and thus have stymied efforts to limit fish takes, leading directly to the collapse of the whole food chain. The economic hurt they will suffer through their own short-sighted stupidity has not affected their decision making.

Why is it so hard for governments to adhere to good policy design in the face of pressure from vested interest groups? We see that the same principle is at work in both cases – Sydney’s “’planning” (loose use of the term), and protecting the world’s food security.

That is a question we should be asking our elected representatives. Claiming a mandate is well and good, but they must remember – or be reminded – that the mandate is from the people, not corporations.

We design buildings for the people who will occupy them, governments must also design cities for the people who live and work in them, not for the profits of land owner developers.

Good city planning takes guts as much as anything – once the design, with all its myriad inputs, is in place, you need guts to hold your nerve and say “this is where it will happen, not there.”

It seems that the new boss is just the same as the old boss: beholden to the interests of the developer lobby. And Sydney, the Great Unplanned City, suffers onwards and outwards.

Dick Clarke is director of Envirotecture.

“Environment groups are upfront about their funding, yet denialists claim privacy, ” professor Hamilton told The Brisbane Times this week, after a UK journalist’s court bid for similar revelations in relation to leading climate change sceptics.

Professor Hamilton backed the freelance journalist Brendan Montague’s appeal to the UK’s Information Rights Tribunal on 27 January,2012 for the release of a bank statement. The document is claimed to show the start-up funders of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, chaired by former UK chancellor Lord Nigel Lawson, the article said.

Mr Montague believes it will identify the source of a $50,000 seed donation.

Launched in November 2009, the foundation has consistently challenged the mainstream scientific view that human emissions of greenhouse gases represent a significant risk to the planet and societies.

Tribunal judge Alison McKenna is expected to reach a decision within four weeks.

Professor Hamilton, who is professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University and was a Greens candidate in 2009 for a by-election in the federal seat of Higgins, is a long-time critic of think-tanks promoting outlying views on the risks of human-caused climate change, including the Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs.

Read the full article

31 January 2012 –

ADMA’s chairman, Paul Sterling has described how flagrantly suppliers to the industry are ignoring Australian standards and specifier’s requirements given that so much energy in any building is spent on heating and cooling.

ADMA was regularly receiving phone calls from non ADMA members within the industry reporting negative practices of ADMA members, he told the Alliance’s 2011 annual general meeting late last year – a message he had given at the previous year’s AGM

Unregulated, non compliant, non fire rated, under-insulated flexible duct and insulation was flooding into the country from Asia and India, being imported by $2.00 companies, flexible duct installation contractors and flexible duct manufacturers alike and installed into commercial buildings, schools and homes, he said.
Issues he noted include:
• Australians are being put out of work due to unregulated, non compliant, under-insulated flexible duct being imported.
• Non fire rated duct is being installed into homes and buildings where fire rated duct is required by the Building Code of Australia.
• Australian consumer’s safety is being put at risk
• Australian consumers are not getting what they are paying for.
• Industry wide overstatement of thermal values of flexible duct by flexible duct manufacturers and distributors

With 40 – 60 per cent of an average consumer’s power bill spent on heating or cooling their home the government’s continued lack of support for an industry self regulatory body was becoming increasingly urgent, he said.

See

Tony Arnel

30 January 2012 – Victorian Building and Plumbing Industry Commissioner Mr Tony Arnel today resigned from his role after 12 years.

Mr Arnel, who is chair of the Green Building Council of Australia, will be replaced in a one year term by Michael Kefford, who was previously in the role until his retirement in 2004, while a search for a permanent replacement is undertaken.

Planning minister Matthew Guy said Mr Kefford will “advise on appropriate reforms and oversee the implementation of the government’s response to the Auditor-General’s report into the building permit system.”

See our recent articles on Mr Arnel

• Tony Arnel on opportunities we should on no account miss.
• Tony Arnel wraps up term as chair of WGBC

Since the election of the Coalition, Mr Arnel oversaw the Victorian Government’s response to the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission and introduced strengthened building standards and the development of a standard for private bushfire shelters, Mr Guy said.

The announcement is the latest in a string of departures from high profile government agency positions in Victoria and NSW.

Lisa Corbyn last week appears to have been pushed from her role at the Office of Environment and Heritage.

tperinotto@thefifthestate.com.au

The company has achieved a 100 per cent success rate of targeted ratings and even increased some ratings without increases to committed budgets, a testament to the fact that it uses Green Star as a benchmarking tool rather than a design tool, says director David Jarratt.

The company has employed its first staff member  to co-ordinate Green Star and LEED submissions.

“This service will be to assist coordinating our current Green Star submissions of which we have approximately 160 stars committed over the next two years,” Mr Jarratt said.

LETTER: 30 January 2012  – Firstly, thank-you for The Fifth Estate, I always enjoy reading it.

Interesting article on Stockland’s report about energy efficiency. I’m all for promoting the savings opportunities from high thermal performance and high efficiency appliances, and all Alan Pears’ evidence should be much more widely promoted to new home buyers.

But this article begs the question – shouldn’t Stockland be asked to explain how $6000 for free energy bills is really helping the situation? According to their figures you would only need to spend between $490 and $886 per year (plus fixed costs) on energy in your new Stockland home. But hang on, that’s only if you choose all the high efficiency options – and why would you if you get three years of free energy bills?

Nycole Wood is ESD engineer,  Moreland City Council, Melbourne. These are her personal opinions

By Tina Perinotto

27 January 2012 – Stockland has claimed the energy costs of its new homes can shave more than $2000 a year off the energy bill for an average four bedroom suburban home in Sydney’s outer western suburb of Penrith. A new three bedroom home can cost $1787 a year less to run, it says. But are these figures right?

According to leading Australian energy expert Alan Pears, there may be a few questions over methodology but in general it’s true: the energy costs of running a comfortable suburban house have fallen dramatically if the house is fitted with the latest efficient appliances ­– even a 100 cm flat screen television.

Professor Pears, adjunct professor at RMIT and director of Sustainable Solutions Pty Ltd told The Fifth Estate that the savings starting to come through on homes fitted with modern electronic appliances and fittings are “pretty impressive”.

For example, “the best 420 litre family fridge is now rated 318 kWh compared with about 1200-1400 kwh in the mid-late 1980s,” Professor Pears said.

“Efficient lighting is giving 80 per cent savings. A good solar hot water service is cutting hot water bills by 70 per cent plus. The latest Samsung 100cm TV uses 30 watts – older flat screen TVs that size use 200-450 watts.

“Even a large old CRT TV (say 76 cm) uses around 130 watts. Also the best aircons [airconditioning units] are twice as efficient as 1980s technology. So if you put everything together, it all adds up.”

The stunning turnaround in outlook is recent, professor Pears said.

“I suspect [the energy efficiency of new appliances] are part of the reason for the decline in residential electricity consumption, plus a bit of behaviour change due to the big price rises recently.”

Stockland attributes its savings in part to inbuilt energy savings appliances but also to better design which general manager corporate responsibility and sustainability Siobhan Toohill said have led to reduced need for heating and cooling.

Table showing average energy consumption costs for suburban housing.

Souce: Stockland

According to Stockland an average four bedroom older style home with two bathrooms and a two car garage in Sydney’s Penrith costs around $2775 in energy a year to run. But a new home with the same facilities costs an average of $578 a year, showing a savings of $2197.

For a three bedroom home the claims are similar: $2277 a year for an older style three bedroom, two bath, two car garage in Penrith; $490 for a newer version.

In Melbourne, the costs for a three bedroom house are $2032 a year for an older home and $753 for a new home. In North Queensland the comparable costs are $1623 and $696.

Professor Pears said that the Australian Bureau of Statistics household expenditure survey in 2009-10 found average Australian household annual energy bills were $1690. “If we allow for say 30 per cent increase since then, the average would be around $2200. So Stockland’s ‘standard’ existing home energy bills sound reasonable.”

However, he said that Stockland’s figures probably related to consumption of energy rather than total costs including fixed energy charges.  (Stockland has since clarified that this is the case.)

“For example, if the home is connected to both gas and electricity, the annual fixed supply charges could be $200-$280 for electricity and $150 or more for gas – total $350 or more before you use any energy.

“A pretty good household would use … around $300 or more for electricity and $150-$250 for gas.”

Interestingly, however, he said that although it would be a challenge to get under $800 for total energy costs it is possible with solar power.

In a new home fitted with a solar photo voltaic system even total costs might fall within the ranges shown in the Stockland table and the figures might even be “on the low side,” Professor Pears said.

“One kW of PV will generate 1200-1500 kWh a year. Even just offsetting actual usage would save $300-$400, and with the feed-in tariffs it would save even more. And most people now install 1.5kW to 2 kW.”

Stockland’s study does not include PV systems in the homes.

Mr Pears said a counterweight to the sharp fall in energy consumption of appliances, however, had been that energy companies were pushing up fixed price charges.

“The big worry is the way the energy supply industry is cranking up the fixed charges, which you can’t avoid without getting off the grid.”

Stockland said modelling was based on “a sensible approach to operating household appliances, items including those that are either legislated or a necessity to occupy a home.”

Calculations are based on 2-3 occupants.

“Predicted thermal performance has been calculated with BERSpro version 4.2 (which was recently recognised as the first software package that fully complies with the NatHERS accreditation procedures.”

Typical construction methods have been assumed.

Stockland recently introduced an incentive to market house and land packages – a $6000 Visa Energy Card to go towards paying the household’s energy bills for up to three years.

tperinotto@thefifthestate.com.au

Stockland ranked 63rd on the Corporate Knights list, compiled from data on 3500 companies, and was the only Australian property group recognised on the list.

Stockland General Manager Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, said that since 2006 the company had reduced greenhouse gas emissions intensity by 38 per cent across its office properties and by 18 per cent across its retail centres.

It was now designing an index to measure the ‘liveability’ of its residential communities and had engaged KPMG to assist.

Last year Stockland was named the most sustainable property company in the world in the 2011/12 Dow Jones Sustainability Index.

The 706 prominent AO recipients have endorsed a statement supporting UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s call for negotiations on a treaty to outlaw and eliminate all nuclear weapons.

This new project from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has garnered the support of prominent Australians including writer Bryce Courtenay, media personality Ita Buttrose, sportsperson Liz Ellis, former Victorian premier Steve Bracks and former Australian Prime Ministers Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke and Gough Whitlam.

Message needs to stick

27 January 2012 –Paul Keating not long ago lashed out at “sandal-wearing, muesli-chewing, bike-riding pedestrians”.

It was another Keatingesque king-hit. He somehow managed to lump the whole green/climate change/design-sensitive agenda under same limp wet blanket.

Our most amusing former prime minister might want to respect greenies and climate change champions. Instead he mocks them. Why?

Because when it comes the media and marketing the green/climate message has failed to ignite the imagination and fire in the belly of mainstream audiences.

In fact the polls say support is going backwards. And this for the most mission-critical time-critical agenda we know.

Yet green, sustainability and climate change champions are the smartest people in the room. They’re the change agents, the cool ones. (Let’s face it, who wants to get stuck talking to the climate dinosaur in the puffed-up chest?).

In November last year the Total Environment Centre’s Green Capital seized this issue in a stunning forum in Melbourne and Sydney that asked what had gone wrong with the climate change and green message.

It brought together some of the best minds in the media and political strategy business. It nailed some of the most important failures, truths and successes in the game. No holds barred.

And it was amongst friends, all passionate people who want to know why the movement is losing ground in the mainstream and how to re-seize the momentum.

After all the most powerful side of doing good work is its potential to ignite motivation, mass action and viral inspiration.

Like the wise man said “everything, in the end, is about marketing.”

In one of our slimmest issues ever, this is a behemoth of an article and will take you longest to read. But once we started work on it, it was impossible to stop. So many good quotes. So many insights.

Together with new download material since posted by Green Capital, we think it’s a gem.

We hope you agree.

Someone is listening
But maybe the media message is not altogether failing.

In the property world you can argue it’s pushing ahead in leaps and bounds. There also seems to be an amazing transformation underway in attitudes to energy consumption.

Our story on Stockland and Alan Pears for instance.

Stockland started a small firestorm this week when it released a new study of comparative energy costs between a new home and an old one. At least in TFE’s mind.

The savings it was claiming were so large ¬– energy bills slashed by three quarters in some cases – that we thought it best to run the figures past leading energy expert Alan Pears, adjunct professor at RMIT.

Pears thought the numbers stacked up. But the big reason, he says, could be that the running costs of modern household appliances have been slashed.

“Efficient lighting is giving 80 per cent savings,” he says.

“A good solar hot water service is cutting hot water bills by 70 per cent plus.”

Even that old nasty, the flat screen television, has been overhauled. According to Pears the latest Samsung 100cm TV uses 30 watts, compared with older models that consume 200-450 watts.

It’s a recent turnaround, and it is partly a function of a change in consumer behaviour, partly a change in strategy for appliance manufacturers, partly a case of better housing design for companies such as Stockland and if you throw photo voltaics into the mix, a case of better technology.

But in all those elements, the common thread is a message that is seeping through.

tperinotto@thefifthestate.com.au

A Fifth Estate Special Report  

25 January 2012 – In November last year Green Capital pulled out all stops to find out why the  green and climate change agenda has failed to deliver the media and marketing wins that are now critically urgent. In a forum held in Sydney and Melbourne some of the best experts in the business distilled  key messages. It was a no holds barred look at what works and what doesn’t.

The Fifth Estate recorded the Sydney session and below brings you our edited excerpts. In the meantime Green Capital has also released videos and downloads related to the events. (See below) as well as 10 key messages compiled by Murray Hogarth, a Green Capital senior adviser.

Together this material makes for essential scrutiny by those who want to fast track change in sustainability and climate change action.

Keynote speakers were:

Panel members were:

Chairs were:

• Simon Marnie, Presenter, ABC 702 (Sydney)
• Tanya Ha, Environmentalist and Author (Melbourne)

What they said: edited transcripts of the forum, from The Fifth Estate

Andrew McNally:

Nine major trends
There are about nine trends that I’ve identified that are really important in terms of sustainability in marketing.  The first one is about the need for companies to have credibility, and that is led by social activism, awakening consumers’ recognition of this growing market.

Social responsibility – companies are now more aware than ever that whilst they’re making profits they need to be contributing back and giving back to issues and causes.  Probably you might argue that sometimes it may look cynical but at other times it’s quite a commitment from the company, and it’s part of their DNA.

Provenance – provenance in the area of food has become a very big issue in terms of food security.  Now, the idea behind this that I think is fundamentally important is knowing where that food has come from and what it’s been treated with, and the like.

And that is becoming more and more an issue for consumers and it’s becoming an issue framed around coal-seam gas and everything that we’re seeing at the moment.  And that will continue.

And often that trend is led by restaurants.  And if you look to the restaurants, what happens in a restaurant today will replicate itself within the supermarket within five years.  Six years ago it was organics within restaurants.  Today the top chefs across Sydney and the world are into foraging and looking for food and product that is sourced locally and can be found within the community.  So don’t be surprised if you see the likes of Mark Best [from Marques Restaurant] out there in your local park looking for fennel, or the like.

The other thing from a media point of view is this idea of always on.  I’ve mentioned about the technology in terms of scanning and the like.  Consumers are always on.  We’re not tied to our newspaper, we’re not tied to our TV, and we’re not even tied to the internet at our desk.  It is about mobile phones and  vbb the impact that that has and how that can share information peer-to-peer as opposed to from many-to-one.  Sharing is really important, and the idea behind most campaigns today is how do we get animation and scale.

We may have a budget of half a million, but we want to achieve impressions of over two million.  And so to do that you want to tell a story that is compelling.  And compelling stories are more important than ever, whether that’s from somebody’s firsthand experience, or creating something around the product.  I’m going to show you a fantastic from Häagen-Dazs in the States, that does this beautifully, and it sort of wraps all this thing up together.

Because the other important thing is around the idea of authenticity.  There are more sceptics out there than you can poke a stick at, so you’re going to be tested on it, and you’re going to be found out if you’re telling half-truths and lies.

And finally, what we’ve seen and what I’ve seen over at Cannes over the last few years in terms of worldwide campaigns, is sustainability is coming through more and more, in particular in the States and in particular in Europe. In the countries of South America and Asia, it’s still emerging from a marketing point of view, but it is very strong in those more established economies.

Now, why do we buy into social responsibility?  Because consumers expect it today.  And more importantly, the propensity to buy from a company that has a clear social responsibility mandate and is visibly doing things actually increases.  And that was discovered in a recent survey from Reader’s Digest.

Now, keeping that in mind, I want to share with you this next story from Häagen-Dazs.  Now, Häagen-Dazs is an ice cream brand in the States.  There’s a fundamental issue going on in North America at the moment in terms of the death of the honey bee.  And this campaign was a huge success from a sales point of view and really well celebrated in terms of what a campaign should look like.  And it wraps up those ideas I’ve just talked about.

Video voiceover:

We don’t know if it’s an advertising truth or not, but if your client has to appear before Congress, you either did something really good or really bad.  It turns out it was something really good.  The client in the hot seat, Häagen-Dazs, makes a super premium ice cream, a brand that in 2008 put its faith in the idea of walking away from conventional advertising and turned its marketing lens instead towards the unsung workforce responsible for creating their ice cream’s all-natural ingredients, a natural workforce that’s in grave danger.

Honey bees are disappearing, and nobody knows why, an alarming fact that few people were even aware of.  Alarming, because without the bees to pollinate them, close to one third of all the natural foods we humans eat would disappear.  For Häagen-Dazs the writing on the wall was all too clear.  And so Häagen-Dazs launched a fully-integrated marketing effort to help bring the honey bees back.

First, Häagen-Dazs launched a program, “HD loves HB”, by creating a new flavour, Vanilla Honey Bee.  All proceeds were donated to Penn State and University of California’s Davis Western Institute for Food Safety and Security to help fund honey bee research.  Incidentally, that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars, and counting.

A print campaign for the new flavour let people know they could help the cause simply by enjoying their ice cream.  We ran a magazine insert made of seed paper.  Consumers could crumple it up, bury it in the ground and grow wild flowers for the honey bees to feed on.To dramatise the plight of the bees, we brought to life their symbiotic relationship with flowers in an epic television commercial.

Helpthehoneybees.com gave visitors a space to learn about the problem, donate to the research program and help spread the word.  A series of dance videos brought the problem to the attention of millions of earth-conscious YouTubers, one of which was awarded [AP-WA’s  Best Bio 6:55] Video of the Year Award for 2008.

And soon bee lovers of all ages were creating their own.

Where are all the bees?

Finally, samples of Vanilla Honey Bee ice cream and millions of wildflower seeds were handed out at farmers’ markets across the US.  Community groups and schools were encouraged to join in and help foster community gardens and farms.  Before long, our efforts reached a flashpoint.  Every major media channel in America picked up on the story and helped champion our cause.

The American bee population has fallen by 30 per cent in the last year and no one knows why.  It may just be ice cream maker Häagen-Dazs which comes up with the answer.

Just one week after launch, the campaign generated over 125 million PR impressions, our goal for the entire year.  Grocery retailer, Wholefoods, was so inspired by the campaign that one location removed every bee-dependent product from its shelves for a day.  And in June of 2008, Häagen-Dazs, together with a coalition of national bee keepers, testified on the bees’ behalf in front of Senator Hilary Clinton and the House Agricultural Subcommittee on Capitol Hill.

Häagen-Dazs has a major stake in the health of America’s honey bees.

In the world of integrated marketing, what greater expression could there be of a brand’s passion for its suddenly threatened all-natural ingredient?

Andrew McNally:

Now, there’s an absolute authenticity to that. It goes central to the core of the brand and what the brand stands for.  But it would’ve been pretty easy for the marketers in that room to take a safer course of action, because many of these corporations are driven by a short-term goal, and the short-term goal is what’s happening on the next quarterly profit; what is the share point.

It takes brave marketers to take a longer-term view.  Because that campaign would have taken some time to initiate, whereas a coupon-based or promotional offer may have worked more effectively in the short term.  So I think that campaign has a lot of merit and has a lot going for it.

And the simple fact is that, as consumers, we place a measure on our value, on the value of something, versus our values. And we still have a situation where often creating a product that is natural or sustainable costs more from a production point of view. Now, the thing is that people are prepared to pay more, but it’s just a question of how much more they’re prepared to pay.

Paying more  for better products
And in this study by E-marketer, similar studies come up with pretty much the same figure. There seems to be a range within consumer products of around 19 to 20 per cent within these developed countries. But within the likes of Singapore and these places it seems to be lower at about 8 per cent. But people are prepared to make that change.

And if we look at this in a negative way, 78 per cent of Australian shoppers, by this survey in 2010, aren’t prepared to pay more. But that’s a big market, 22 per cent of Australian shoppers who are prepared to pay something more for a green product, and I think it’s worth focusing on the positive out of that.

Innovation
Innovation is the key, and innovation comes from many sources. But.. there are not a lot of companies that can truly say they’re committed to innovation. Often innovation comes from your competitors or cottage industries.

Social activism builds awareness for consumers about a campaign which creates an audience or an opportunity. As small players identify that opportunity, the market expands. But the market really scales up once we get a bigger corporation recognising this fact and animating it through their distribution chain.

Natural baby food turned Heinz on its head
Now a good example of this, and how it works, is with clients. For 25 years we served babies the same food full of additives, thickeners, and the like. Along came this guy, a restaurateur, Adrian Pike, and he started this product in 2007 called Rafferty’s. It’s all natural, it has no fillers, no additives, no thickeners and locally sourced produce.  And it was a game changer.

And this one small guy with a bit of venture capital sat Heinz on its head.  Heinz had to redefine the recipe within that product, and then to compete they brought out a range of this product.  All the time that has grown the base of people looking for a more natural and less harmful product on the community and the environment per se.

Similarly, Green Works, Clorox – and Clorox are in a space of cleaning chemicals and cleaning agents – they produced a product in 2009 that was all based on natural products.  Now, that came into a market where the other competing brands were holding 1 per cent and 3 per cent of the market respectively, and they grew that market exponentially in terms of the share they took for this product when they launched it.

And to that point, they don’t have any certification around this product because there’s no standard, and there probably is an issue around labelling and what should be put on it.

They’ve defined it as, is 99 per cent natural, it’s not made from petroleum-based products, but organic products.  It has grown the market.  The campaign they used … was an environmental piece around a technique of reverse graffiti and it was hugely successful.

[A recent study has found that in four years the number of green products in the US has grown by 73 per cent)

Similarly, we had a groundswell of support when we gave away free energy-saving globes with Bunnings.  And that allowed Bunnings to leverage the campaign and showcase how they are helping the planet and the environment in a fairly significant way.

Ownerless products
There’s a bunch of other ideas out there that are innovations, I guess, that I think will emerge and become mainstream over time.  The idea of ownerless products – BrightFarms in the States, their model is based on funding market gardens on the rooftops of supermarkets, and they’re building the first one by 2012, fully funded.  The product then walks downstairs, it’s on sale in that supermarket.  They’ve got 10 chains in the US signed to this.  Now it’s not big in terms of the range of that store, but it’s a start.  And it moves us away from this model in terms of how we currently grow and transport, and everything.

Bicycles, the return of the dynamo, which used to power your light on your bike – this bike’s just been developed; it has a USB hub to power your phone or whatever else, and it’s driven off the power you generate.  In Holland, this company here, Cargo Hopper, distribute products across the city – because they have a block-out on traffic in certain cities in Holland – and they do that with a solar-powered van that reduces emissions, or the number of kilometres, by 100,000 van kilometres per year by doing that.  And it’s a significant saving in terms of carbon dioxide.

Garage sales and recycling
The idea that products can be reused in a very smart way is impactful, and you’ll hear from Matt Perry today, in terms of the garage sale.  This product – and take the time to ask Matt a question about this – but this event and this whole thing has absolute momentum.  It started in one area two years ago, it’s up to 23 councils, and it’s going to take the world by storm, and it’s got fantastic values at its core.

Campaign pitfalls
There are campaign pitfalls, and it’s all about lack of proof, irrelevant claims, being vague about those claims, false endorsement, and trading one thing as green when [it's] not.  And really, we’ve seen examples of companies being caught on that, and Saab have been an obvious example from a few years ago when they proposed that for each car we sold, 17 trees made the car carbon neutral.

But if you’re true to your game, and you approach it in the right way, stick to the facts, get out ahead and tell a good story, be authentic and honest, don’t gloat about your achievements, but show humility through the process, and embrace your critics, you’re going to go a long way to creating an effective campaign.

That’s my point of view.  I think there’s a lot of work to be done, from corporations at all levels.  I think companies are recognising it and making a step in the right direction, including our own.

Tony Douglas:

What went wrong with the climate change message?
Thanks very much. I’ve come to talk today about the issue of climate change, because nearly everybody I speak to across the green movement, people interested in sustainability generally, really are questioning what went wrong with this. Even though we have a carbon tax in, it’s very unpopular and in fact it could well be the issue that determines government at the next election.  So I just wanted to give people an analysis of what we think went wrong, because out of communications campaigns that don’t work, you can probably learn a bit.

The problem we’ve noticed in researching this issue over the last four or five years is that never at any stage have we had enough people who actually agree about what the problem is, how difficult the problem is.  Those are the numbers going back three or four years.

We’ve never had more than 53 per cent of people in Australia actually accepting that climate change was caused by human activity.  If you haven’t got enough people agreeing on the problem, you’re never going to get them to buy your solution.   And this, I guess, particularly for non-government organisations who campaign on climate change, and for people in government, there needed to be a role probably played by the NGOs that, rather than start to talk about the solutions or try and shape the solutions that government were talking about, needed to keep talking about the problem, to make sure that more than 50 per cent of people thought there was a problem that we could solve out there.

The issue here is that once the election was held in 2007, when Kevin Rudd was elected – and this issue was one of the reasons he was elected – we never had, even at the hub, more than 54 per cent of people actually thinking that climate change was a man-made problem.  And that dropped by about 10 points the moment the fossil industries got involved and started muddying the waters on this issue, and it dropped down to 45 points.  So that has been the basic problem all along: we just haven’t got enough people signed up to the way we see the problem.

And of course, most people reject the solution, particularly if the solution is a tax, particularly if the solution appears to be something that is going to cost them money.

Which brings us to the core of the communications issue that we need to confront on this.  Just giving people facts is not going to change people’s minds.  We needed to create a narrative, and for us the narrative structure is: What is the problem? What is the solution to that problem?  Who’s going to benefit?  And how are they going to benefit?  Because if we can’t tell a story about what the benefits or costs are in this for you, how you are going to benefit from the solution, or how you are going to suffer from not dealing with the problem, you can’t personalise this issue in a way that people are going to relate to what you’re talking about.

You need a good narrative
The more we put up scientists to talk about it, the more removed the general public were from this issue. The more we talked about what was going to happen with the Greenland ice shelf in 2040, the more removed people became from the issue that we were talking about.  So the campaign did not have an effective narrative structure to actually convince people to change. So messages by themselves don’t change people’s views.  Facts certainly don’t by themselves change people’s views.  But a properly organised narrative structure will begin to tell a story to people that they can relate to.

In this debate, of course, once people realise that it might cost them more for their electricity, they all believed generally they would be worse off.  And once you’ve got things like that, then everybody earning under $60,000 a year in this country is going to think, this is going to cost me more money than I actually can afford.

Where’s the story about benefits?
We have had a debate about climate change in this country for the last two or three years that has been totally about the costs to the public, nothing about any of the benefits.  So we’ve had – ever since Tony Abbott’s been the Opposition leader – a relentless debate about costs and nothing about benefit.  And he succeeded brilliantly in keeping the focus there, and the green movement, the government and everybody else have failed miserably, to actually provide an alternative view,  or to begin to talk about the benefits in any meaningful way to people.

However, there are some messages that can change this if you can stick with them and get them through.  But the current government has really not been able to stick at a message for more than a couple of days before getting dragged back into Tony Abbott’s views of these issues.

So when you put up an argument that talks about who is going to be taxed, and that you are going to get compensation, you get a 10-point jump, and that jump’s almost entirely amongst Labor voters or people with Labor Party identification.  So we didn’t talk about the compensation enough; we could’ve changed what people thought about the carbon tax, probably still can, amongst a particular group of voters, and they’re the ones who earn under $60,000 a year and they are hard put to make ends meet on a weekly basis.  So that’s one thing that could’ve been said by the government to actually change people’s view on this issue.

A whole debate really around this needs to be reframed away from the idea that everything you do about the environment is going to cost jobs or cost money.  This is a basic question we put in our research to see where people sit in actually framing environment away from being the wedge issue it has been in our community for 20 years – to talk about the environment and the economy together.

A strong economy depends on maintaining a healthy environment.  That’s the kind of message that now needs to be the frame of the message for everything we say about the environment to avoid wedge politics being claimed with groups of people earning under $60,000 or groups of people in industries that, you know, use natural resources.

So how do you make people accept the problem and the solution?  You’ve got to define the problem in terms of a desired outcome that you have. If you define the problem, you get to define the solution. Ensure that the solution will benefit people like the people you’re communicating with, so you’re communicating with a particular group of people.  There are various groups of people in the community you need to communicate with.

Don’t talk to the converted
In the environmental movement, a lot of people communicate like they’re talking about people like themselves, but they’re generally already convinced.  You actually need to talk to people who are not like yourself.  You need to find that 65 per cent of people or groups in that 65 per cent who think that a strong economy is dependent on a healthy environment and start talking to them to convince them of your issue.  And you’ve got to show how and why change will actually benefit people.

Too much is talked about just the environment in these debates, rather than what the benefits are of protecting the environment for you.

And for this campaign, you’ve [had] so much locked into the government agenda of trying to sell a carbon tax.  There’s been no big picture plan out there that talks about what the future should look like, and what are all the things that we can do to actually solve the problem of climate change.  And the other failure in this has been to fail to identify who the enemy is, and to fail to convince people that there are a small self-interested few that work on their own interests and not for your interests. What’s happened is that it’s broken virtually every rule in communicating public issues to people.

If [the message is] seen as part of an overall plan, and a vision of the future which has got people in it, and prospering in it, and it seems to be good for the country, you’re far more likely to be able to connect with more people by having something that’s big picture.  So we’ve tested this and the individual things rate well or not so well according to where people sit, but the overall picture rates better collectively than any of the individual ideas in that campaign.  But nobody has campaigned to say we need to do all these things to solve the problem.

If we’ve talked about climate change as the biggest challenge and a really big problem and we’re trying to tell people a tax will solve it, most people don’t actually believe that.  They believe something more like that.  And yet, nobody has had that big picture campaign out there that have constantly put pressure on government in a number of ways and created debates on this issue that engage Australians.

Who is sending the message?
In the messaging there’s also something pretty important about who says what.  When we worked for the CSIRO for a while, we found that when that brand name was out there talking about sea level rises, and what had already happened in terms of sea level rises round the Australian continent, that was absolutely believed by 90 per cent of the people.

The fact that those sea level rises had already occurred over the last 15 or 20 years alarmed people; the fact that the CSIRO was saying it was proof enough that it was happening.  Once that fact was put in front of people, it meant a whole lot of things to people.  For example It meant beach culture dies in this country in 20 or 30 years because if the sea level keeps rising, our beaches will be flooded.

But talking about what’s happened with the Arctic ice shelf, or talking about what’s happening in Greenland had no impact on Australians at all, and it was something in the future, and people are very wary of predictions that happen 20 years in the future.  But talking about something that had actually happened in Australia and was happening now, and could be proven was much more powerful.  The Bureau of Meteorology talking about actual temperature increases in Australia in the last 50 years was very powerful, a very trusted sort of brand talking about something that had actually happened, was happening here to us.  .

The mining campaign success
There was one campaign that the Miners Union ran with us in 2007.  Interestingly enough, Australia’s got the only coal mining industry union in the world that actually supports real action on climate change.  And they wanted to campaign in the seats where their members were,  in North Queensland seats, and the Hunter Valley.  The Hunter Valley seats were not worth spending a lot of money on because they were all Labor seats anyway, but seats like Leichhardt, Dawson, Flynn and Hinkler along coastal Queensland have a lot of Miners Union members in it.

They wanted to run a campaign against the Howard Government’s lack of action on climate change.  And we went up and talked to people in those electorates and talked to them about climate change, and saw that there was a National Party scare campaign already in the mix, about this is going to cost jobs.  But when we asked questions about, well, what’s going to happen to your industry and your job over the next 10 or 20 years if these claims on climate change are true, people paused and thought about that, and thought that that might be a problem for them.  So this ad was made on the basis of that research and what people told us in that research, and this is what it was.

Video

You know global warming is putting our jobs and industries at risk.

If we don’t act, we could lose a $6 billion tourism industry.

It could mean the end of a $9 billion farm industry.

All of our jobs could be gone if the coal industry isn’t cleaned up.  John Howard refused to sign Kyoto …

And he won’t even set targets for reducing greenhouse emissions.

We need a government that will take climate change seriously.

Authorised Mining and Energy Union, Sydney.

Tony Douglas:

They’ve spent about $700,000 placing that ad in those four seats.  And those seats swung 15 per cent, Leichhardt, and Howard lost the seat.  Dawson swung nearly 13 per cent and they lost that.  Flynn swung 10 per cent and they lost that, and Hinkler swung 9 per cent and they held onto that by about 1 per cent.  And the member for Dawson, De-Anne Kelly, when asked why she’d lost, said “because the Miners Union told their members and public to vote against us”.

The point being here, this is not exactly café latte central, coastal Queensland. It’s actually people are more suspicious of messages about the environment than anybody else. But if you make the message relevant to them, their lives, the industries they work in – and they are the three big industries in that area, the pastoral industry, the mining industry and the tourism industry – if you make what’s going to happen relevant to them, then they will listen to the message that you’re delivering.  And I guess if you can convince people in coastal Queensland of this issue, you can probably convince most people in the country that there’s a problem with climate change.

Skye Laris:

On government communications
I don’t want to overlap too much with what Tony’s said, but I certainly share some of those concerns that he’s raised.  I want to start actually on a bit of a higher note, when we go through which government communications work and which ones don’t work.

Video:

We need to think through energy beyond just this year, or even the next decade.

For a long time, coal will remain a significant proportion of our generation, but we should have a much higher proportion of renewables to reduce the impact of that fossil fuel.

Letting winds give us power must be an option.

The idea of thinking about this alternative energy is well and truly passed.

Other countries around the world are doing it, because it’s building a huge industry on the back of it.  And those jobs should and could just as well be here.

We’re seeing the amount of money that Germany is throwing towards research and development of solar power.  And they’ve got stuff-all sun.

There’s so much potential there to really become one of the world’s leaders in this technology.

And the transformation that we are about to undergo is a similar transformation to the industrial revolution.

Authorised by the Australian Government, Canberra.

Skye Laris:

So, before I start trashing government communications, I think that’s actually a very fine example of what should have been happening all along. You’ve got in there the CSIRO, you’ve got that expert opinion, you’ve got a very hopeful view about what can happen.  And you’ve also got your regular Joe Blow types that, you know, “they’ve got stuff-all sun.”  It’s gold.  So I think you know at long last, and I’ve been watching these sort of communications – and many of you have as well – for many, many years, and being extremely frustrated by that temptation to go into too much detail, to misunderstand your audience.

Details are a turnoff
So, what goes wrong when we try to explain it in too much detail, people lose interest.  It’s simply not interesting because it’s not relevant to their lives at that time.  We often target the wrong audience, and by that I mean we imagine because we like an ad that our audience will.  So imagine if you were watching that ad and you were a mum in Kellyville with a couple of kids, 1.5 incomes, and you’re thinking probably “I don’t really know, but a lot of people seem to be bagging out this carbon tax, it can’t be a good thing”.  I think when you’re watching that, you’d think well, maybe it’s all right, probably not still completely persuaded; there’s more work to be done.  But the temptation to speak to ourselves is something that has to be avoided, because it doesn’t work.

Wrong methods.  I mean, I’m glad to see that the brochure has almost died, but it’s still something people love to produce, it’s evidence of what they’ve done.  Doesn’t do much more than that.  When you consider literacy levels through the country, or even time – I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t have time to read it – that booklet that was sent around to every household on what this means – Household compensation: what this means for every household – didn’t have time to read it.

Also didn’t like it because … it told me I was going to get compensated so obviously something bad was going to happen, otherwise I wouldn’t need compensation.  And it didn’t tell me why. It didn’t talk about renewables investment, it didn’t talk about what was going on.  So I thought that was a complete flop, and an expensive one.

Another thing that government tends to get wrong a lot is timing.  And being bureaucratic in its nature it often cannot roll out good communications in a timely manner.  And there’s more recently been some further restrictions put on that through advertising guidelines.  So in an effort to make sure that everybody knew the government was terribly accountable and wouldn’t use government funds for campaigning purposes, further restrictions have been put on advertising, which makes it virtually impossible to respond in a timely manner through advertising.

We frequently overestimate people’s interest and knowledge; we frequently underestimate their commonsense.  And by that I mean, people do know when they’re being conned, and I think because things are complicated, sometimes we skip over, we try to make the message simpler and there’s a transaction there, a delicate balancing act which we have to watch.  Because sometimes in making something simpler, we offer an argument that is not compelling and not believable.  And people see through that.  Again, timing, I think is extremely important.

That tendency to preach never works.  And that’s very much linked to that issue of whether or not you’ve got communication that builds – whether it’s bottom-up or top-down.  Now, advertising in its nature is top-down.  So what sort of efforts can we go to reach into communities and have a more genuine community engagement.  Because if you’re looking for behavioural change, and to a lesser extent opinion change, then you need to be in at that community level.

And the last point I’d make is that the doomsday and guilt message is actually ineffective.  An example of that is a great deal of research that’s been done on farmers’ opinions of climate change.  And this is a section of the community that tends to say that climate change isn’t happening, and that it’s cyclical, and look, it’s rained again recently, so everything’s okay.  When you look at what a cyclical process is for people through that, you’re telling farmers that not only their income but their very identity is under threat.  And it’s not surprising that people respond by rejecting that idea.

Farmers get it
It’s interesting to see what happens for people when you go straight to adaptation for farmers.  We talk to them about adaptation and risk management, and managing their businesses, and they seem to make that step with a great deal more willingness.  And having done that, and feeling a little bit safer in what the future holds for them, they’ve been able to look at what really is happening in climate change, and are more prepared to accept it.  So I really think that the doomsday/guilt message actually, for people who don’t feel they  can do anything about it, simply switches them off, and I think that fails as a message. So have a look at this one.

Video:

Scientists warn Australia will be hit hard by climate change, with temperatures rising, water more scarce, and economists wanting to protect our economy.  We must act now.  We’re developing a carbon pollution reduction scheme to tackle climate change, putting a limit on carbon pollution and encouraging cleaner energy solutions.  Think climate, think change.  We can’t afford not to.  Find out more.  Have your say at climatechange.gov.au.  Authorised by the Australian Government.

Skye Laris:

Now, clearly there were political reasons rather than marketing reasons why the CPRS failed.  But I don’t think the CPRS was going to be helped by that.  I’m feeling a little stressed even with the rapid changing of those images.

The thing that I think is a huge opportunity in government communications, and is not utilised all that well, is ministers.  Ministers get more free media than anyone.  And they coordinate the message; there’s, you know, the notorious government lines, so everyone’s saying the same sort of thing, so that you’ve got that echo effect.  The catch being that it also doesn’t sound genuine.  You might want to communicate a lot of themes without necessarily communicating precisely the same lines, but that’s a matter of recruiting people who are good at performing like that.  And there are certainly a bunch of them, but not all of them.

The other thing of course is that those messages are tested.  And there’s a question about how you use testing of messages, clearly.  Do you use it to work out what people want to hear?  And that feedback certainly comes back, and you can just cycle through: well, people don’t really like to hear about climate change impact, so we’ll just talk about the nice stuff, whatever it is.

Or do you use it to work out what the gaps are between how you’re communicating currently and what needs to be said to be able to lead a community to that next step, without getting too far in front, because when you do that, in Paul Keating’s words: “They’re waiting for you with a baseball bat”.

So I think there’s still a gap, and it’s probably ultimately a question of whether political leaders are leaders, or how much they play into that game of wanting to win the polls.  And neither of them is doing terribly well, so I think there’s a role for focus group testing and polling, but I’m not sure that we’re quite using that in the most effective way that we can yet.

Stop wasting time
[Another]  opportunity is backbench communication.  When I talk about localising media, here’s a huge opportunity.  They have an allowance to direct-mail their entire electorate; they have an allowance for four newsletters a year; they can by-pass – I’m sorry, Andrew – by-pass News Limited, which increasingly on this issue is necessary; stop wasting our time with people who are not interested in communicating anything but a negative message; reach directly to the community.  And there is an opportunity there in that, and it is more important and more powerful than ever, and it’s usually wasted.

The other really important thing is linking up communications.  So no one believes politicians, and what they really, really need are third parties to step in when they’re saying something that makes sense, and endorse it.

Now a lot of NGOs I’ve heard say, look, that’s too political; we won’t get involved.  Well, it’s a political debate, and if you don’t get involved, we lose it.  So, no-one’s going to believe politicians and that’s the nature of our community.  Everybody accepts that.  So when, as business people, and as NGOs, as activists, we criticise government communications, we also need to be mindful about the role that we can play in making the messages that they do get right resonate in the community and be much more believable.  So I think that’s an important role going forward in terms of winning this debate.

I won’t go through that, because I think I’m repeating the parts.  But just to wrap it up: localise, use social media, by-pass media that isn’t working, invite people to have conversations.  So when I talk about use social media, or localise communication, invite people to be talking with each other, because that’s how we’re going to reach people and broaden that discussion more so than through some of the other methods of communication.  So thank you.

John Collee:

Man the barricades
I think people need to be sort of frightened as well as be offered a solution.  And if you don’t realise that the enemy is at the gate, then are you actually going to man the barricades?  And I think we have got to that point.  This is probably exactly the wrong message for people who are more interested in marketing and so forth, but in terms of saving the planet we’re absolutely backs against the wall now.  And there needs to be a space for that urgency to be conveyed.

Chair, Simon Marnie:

We need a ratbag
I’ll come to Bernard in a minute, but Matt, do we need a ratbag at the gates?  Is that what you would like to see?

Matt Perry:

I think that the challenge that the space has is that… it lacks a central message.  It’s such a complicated and convoluted story that I think often there’s a temptation for, whether it be government or NGOs, or even brands and companies, to feel that they need to tell every aspect of this story.

And in fact, actually, the way that communication works is keeping it simple.  You know, we’ve heard it a million times before but it’s amazing how often things are over-complicated.  And often for the wrong reasons.

They’re complicated, or made complicated, because somebody’s got an agenda, somebody on the board thinks this, the research says that, and suddenly you end up with this sort of very short passage of time, this short moment of time that people may dedicate a nanosecond to, to deliver 58 messages that apparently need to be delivered in order for anybody to understand the real issues.

And I think that that’s probably essentially – I think, getting onto the ratbag question, I think what we saw with using Cate Blanchett in the “Say Yes” work was – she didn’t appeal to everybody, and certainly, it must be said, generated a major debate.  What she did do was cut through, she made it simple, it was a black and white thing.  You either agreed with what she was saying or you didn’t agree with what she was saying.  I think that seems to be to me what’s missing.

Simon Marnie:

But she’s not a ratbag.

Matt Perry:

No, she’s certainly not a ratbag.  No. I mean, maybe she needed to be a bit more ratbag-like to appeal to some of the audiences it was trying to get to.  But what I’m saying is, a ratbag, or somebody who’s got a profile has that ability to cut through in a way that 15 different messages said by 15 different people kind of lacks something.

Simon Marnie:

Bernard, whilst new media and the websites that you post that are topic-based have been very successful, some of your best campaigns have actually been outside of new media, or even existing media.  And I’m thinking about getting kids into libraries, and the like.  How do you approach a message?

Bernard Carlon:

Well, I think this particular focus on climate change is the core for the communications issue that everyone’s grappling with right now, but for 30 years sustainability messages, sustainability programming, sustainability communications have been going on, growing as a discipline.  And I think that, as Skye pointed out, we need really robust integrated solutions to public policy changes.  So in this instance, you know, it doesn’t have to be boring either.

The litter campaign’s “Don’t be a tosser” which was a bit edgy, actually has very good cut-through, but was invisible to a lot of people.  We trained 800 enforcement officers around local councils; we updated the laws at the time; we did a whole lot of … of infrastructure for litter prevention; we did partnerships with Keep Australia Beautiful and Clean Up Australia.  So all that integrated approach as a bottom-up, top-down for tackling issues like this I think is critical.

And then you can do, within that, interesting things like on our Black Balloons campaign. We do have kids that are actually in libraries right across the state, which enabled people to actually borrow them out, and come home, and do their own assessment of all their own energy use, and then have an action plan themselves.

I think one of the issues I heard a little bit in the presentations is about authenticity, that the message actually has to have some reality in it for people.  The product or the service that underpins it actually has to deliver on, in advertising speak, the value proposition.  If we’re not actually delivering the services, helping people understand, improving people’s knowledge, their skills, working on their attitudes, and supporting their behaviours through an integrated approach, then just sending out messages isn’t, or doesn’t seem to be working in some contexts.

John Collee:

Well, I’m agreeing with that, but I also was very taken with the notion that we have to really break this down into telling people how it’s going to affect them, the simplicity of that message.  And it’s absolutely true that we’ve been – certainly at 350.org – trying to kind of explain the science, and I do believe that’s probably the wrong approach, certainly endorsed by most of the speakers this morning.

Always back the horse called Self Interest
But if you’re speaking to Australians about how it’s going to affect them, Paul Keating said “Always back the horse called Self Interest”.  And I think that sounds right.  Speak to surfers at the beach, they’re going to go; tell golfers at the golf course they’re going to go; tell fishermen that the fish are going to go; tell miners that the mines are going to go.  All these things will happen, it’s almost written on the wall.  But we, as a human species, anything more than ten years ahead, we’re not really interested in looking at.

I think those personal messages, speaking to the people, to the other 48 per cent that you don’t get it, absolutely we need to get personal about it and get specific about it.

Simon Marnie:

Matt, bearing that in mind, how do you reflect on the success of your Gruen Transfer ad which was not actually a placed ad, it was almost an inadvertent success – and I don’t downplay it by saying that.  How do you reflect upon how that took a foothold?

Matt Perry:

I think that particular example was a lot of luck.  You know, it was a TV show that more Australians watch than any other TV show.  It was during an election time, and dare I say, I hope there’s no Greens in the room, but the Greens advertising wasn’t particularly very good at that time.

And none of the political advertising was particularly good at that time because it lacked the one thing that we’re all talking about here, which is it lacked a vision, it lacked emotion, it lacked self-interest – you know, why should I care?

It just seemed like wallpaper.  And I think that what we identified in the Greens was that they had – people perceived them to be this, you know, entity that no sane, normal human being would possibly be able to vote for.  But actually we looked at their policy document, which was like a brick – actually, Ben, my partner, who’s the creative guy who wrote the idea, was sitting at a café, and the Avant Card stand was there, after we got the brief from the Gruen show.  And it must’ve been in the gods, because they were right there in front of him.

On the Avant Card stand was a book from the Greens about their policies.  So everything else was a postcard with this simple message on it.  There was this 115-page manifesto.  So we took that, and went, Well, actually if you take five key points out that people care about, and the five or six that were in the ad that you may remember, and then translate them from something that is really rational and serious and actually quite worrying, and turn it into something that mainstream Australia can resonate with and understand – and realise that boat people are real people; and everybody should have dental care; and all this kind of stuff – and it just struck a chord, I think.  All the feedback we got online just said, you explained it in a way that I didn’t understand before.  And it wasn’t really that complicated.

Simon Marnie:

So it wasn’t really a lot of luck, is what you’re saying?  I do want to open the questions up now.  If you would like to join in the conversation, please do so.  Put your hand in the air, or also I will be passing my eyes around the room, so grab my eye and I’ll try and get to you.

We saw there that Tony Douglas was saying that we made a mistake of talking about the solutions first and not actually outlining climate change.  Do you, as a panel, agree with that?  And who would like to take that first? Did we get caught up in the solution without outlining the problem?

John Collee:

I think that really we need a couple more talk fests like this because there has been a huge diffusion of the message.  There’s my organisation, there’s GetUp, there’s a bunch of other organisations out there, plus the government, and the governments of other countries, and organisations of other countries, and the scientists, all trying to sell the message in different ways.  And one of the things that you finally get some kind of clarity on after beating your head against the wall for years on this, is that there is one message:

The environment is the economy.
And I think that came up in a couple of presentations now, and you can break that down into everybody’s environment and their money – every golfer, every fisher, whatever, whatever – whatever they do, the environment is the economy is the thing we’re trying to sell.  And weirdly in Australia there’s such a focus – there’s a daily tide of information about money; every Joe Bloggs is telling you about share prices and the global financial crisis, and this and that – very few people are saying, Actually, you know, rather than having a roundup of share prices at the end of the nightly news, we should have a roundup of the environmental facts in the world:

What are our fish stocks doing?  What are the carbon dioxide evels doing?  What’s the acidity of the oceans doing?  What are the coral reefs doing?  These things are actually far more important to most average Australians than the price of bloody BHP.  And if we could focus that as a green community on that simple message, that the environment is the economy, and then kind of use that as a sort of banner headline on everything we do, then we’d probably be making more progress.

Simon Marnie:

The question that then comes out of that is, if the environment is the economy, sustainability becomes a brand, then awareness becomes a product, and therefore it goes with none of the restraint that we see.  And thus green wash or green marketing can sometimes obscure the truth.  Matt?

Matt Perry:

Yes, I think it comes back to authenticity and honestly.  With what we saw earlier on with Andrew’s examples, particularly the Häagen-Dazs case study, you could easily look at that and be quite cynical and go, it’s just a brand trying to jump on the bandwagon and sell its ice cream essentially.  Which of course it is, it’s a business trying to sell ice cream.  But actually when you look to the depth and the authenticity and the support and the credibility that it had through the people that it brought around there, I think you realise that if you do these things really well – and I guess you don’t get dragged up in front of the US Senate Committee unless they think it’s important – then you avoid green wash.

I think most brands at least have realised that by simply putting the green logo or colouring their logo green or whatever, to try and jump on the bandwagon is a pointless exercise and in fact actually just damages the brand.  A lot of people talk about green wash being a good thing, in the sense that it’s the first rung on the ladder; at least they’re thinking about it; once they get attacked for doing the wrong thing, then they realise what the right thing is.  And I think we’re quite sophisticated in this space now, and you don’t actually need to make those mistakes any more.

Simon Marnie:

From the floor, and please introduce yourself to the room, everybody, before you ask a question.

Question from Monica Richter of the Australian Conservation Foundation:

Within the environment movement at the moment, we’re starting to look at issues beyond climate change, and some of the issues that you were talking about, John Colley, and the fact that we’re recognising that we are in an emergency scenario.  And of  course there are people within the environment movement saying we can’t use the term “emergency”.  And we’re also recognising that incrementalism in policy gains aren’t going to solve the problems that we’re facing at the moment, that we actually need to be looking at transformational change.

So within this context of how we try and communicate to an audience who are people who may not necessarily understand that we’re in this phase in our human/global culture and in planetary place, that we’ve got 7 billion people, resource constraints, it’s very wasteful, all of the issues that we’re facing. What recommendations do you have for us within the environment movement of how we might best communicate these kind of challenges?  And as well, not just the challenges but the solutions; how do we actually frame this?

John Collee:

I would say two things which have come out from this morning which I think are very instructive:  One is focus on the individuals and what they’re getting at, so speak to individuals within the community, individual groups: the fishermen, the golfers, etc.

But also, I think we need as environmental groups, a unified banner message along the lines of “The environment is the economy”, or something.  There’s probably a better way of expressing that.  But certainly we need both a kind of unifying message that we’re all clearly singing from the same sheet, and that we’re definite. Rather than speaking in vague scientific terms, speak in specific terms about how this problem is serving to impact everything that all Australians do in their own field.

Bernard Carlon:

I think Monica is absolutely right that there needs to be a new way of thinking around how do you get society to act or to actually engage.  One of the positive things that I’ve noticed over the last five years is the level of engagement of corporates in Australia in this issue and their willingness to change their way of operating their businesses outside of the norm, you know, create different sorts of businesses, different sorts of products and services around a sustainability agenda.

And I do think that the rise of GetUp and a whole range of other more community-engaged social drivers, rather than the traditional democratic systems that actually operate very slowly in a public policy perspective, and are naturally conservative in the way we actually do change, that those institutions will need take a really strong role out in our communities, in our businesses, the people who actually do control the way in which society works.

And so it’s not about, let’s educate the kids so that in 20, 30 years’ time things are going to change.  We actually need to get those leading institutions now to actually engage in a different way of doing business.

John Collee:

I think we also need to – I like the phrase in one of the presentations – we need to identify the enemy.  One thing we’ve not discussed yet is the fact that there is a massive lobby acting against change, including Andrew’s The Australian newspaper, which as you say, they have editorial independence, but they are running an incredibly effective spoiling game, and they’re very rarely called on it.  You know, we’re actually taking {one of the newspapers}  to court – to the Press Complaints Committee – for their deliberate misinformation on sea level rises.  But I think we probably need to be more confrontational with the people who are actually telling a campaign of lies.  You know, this is not just {this newspaper) it’s the whole oil and coal fossil fuel industry.  But there has been a deliberate, well-documented campaign of misinformation that I think it’s our duty now as environmentalists, to actually attack that head on and call it for what it is.

Question from Cameron Love of Energetics:

I come to this as a parent, and I was interested to hear that it’s not about educating the kids.  But I think it is.  I think there’s a simplified message that you can deliver to children, or can be delivered by children, that may have some cut-through. You were talking about The Gruen Transfer, there was a very clever ad on last night about gambling, that was delivered by a 10 year old boy, and it was extremely effective.  And I’m just wondering – because essentially the future that we’re worried about is our children’s future, and their children’s future – I wonder if there’s a unifying message that can be created to the children, or by the children, that can create the table conversations at home with the parents about issues that resonate with them as parents, in every industry, whether or not there’s a simple message in there.

Bernard Carlon:

I do think we invest a huge amount in working with the Department of Education, Catholic schools,  in sustainable schools, in getting integrated into our curriculum relevant programs for doing exactly what you’re saying.  And they’re having an impact, and yes, there are table conversations going on because of those changes that happened over the last decade in the way in which environmental education, sustainability education has developed through the education system, and I think that’s fantastic and has its role.

Transforming our society in the time frame that’s necessary for sustainability is a shorter time-frame than that.  We have to transform our institutions, the way in which our businesses, government and other institutions work.  Young people have a role in that, and there’s some fantastic ones – Young People Climate Action Network – which are very positive in this role as both with politicians and with business.  So I think we do have to work in all areas of our society. But the big game changer for transforming our relationship to this particular issue has to happen much more quickly than that.

Cameron Love:

Then maybe concentrate on the children of effective communicators.  Let’s take Tony Abbott’s children and target them.

John Collee:

You know from your experience that your children bring ideas home from school that you may disagree with, but they’re incredibly good at persuading you otherwise.  And I think they’re a fantastically good of bunch of fifth columnists, and we should use them as that.  I was chastened by, watching a BBC program on the history of science, which said that every big scientific idea takes a generation to change.  And no matter how patently true, it will always take a generation.  The old stalwarts who clung to the idea that the earth is flat have to die before people who know the earth is round grow up and take over.  And what Bernard says is absolutely right.  Unfortunately we don’t have the luxury of time with this problem, that the grownups are going to have to sort it out.  And we are the grownups, which is a shocking but true realisation.

Question from Anthony Hobley:

Two very quick questions: one, why do we let those who oppose this set the agenda?  I mean, everyone here talks about a carbon tax, but it’s not a carbon tax.  You know, and nobody has corrected that, so we’re fighting on ground they set; and secondly, I’ve been very involved in Businesses for a Clean Economy, which is an umbrella group actually getting 330-plus companies out there, saying we want a price on carbon, it’s good for the economy, etc. And there’s many more with their heads below the parapet because of the political debate.  And it’s very different to my experience in the UK and Europe, where businesses have been very active in this debate.

So why is it so difficult to get the message out that there is actually a lot of businesses that support this, and it’s not all business opposes it, when actually probably 50/50 at worse?  And why are so many businesses here so much more reticent to be involved in the debate around climate change than in Europe, even in the US where many have been very active?

Simon Marnie:

Let’s run through the panel first of all.  Bernard, do you want to grab the two questions?

Bernard Carlon:

Look, I think that there was a period of time where senior businesses leaders in our nation actually were more proactive in this area about eight or 10 years ago, taking a very strong leadership role.  That does seem to have fragmented a little.  And I think businesses have been focusing inward on their own business operations about how they are actually going to transform their business model within their business with– over the last few years – very tough economic circumstances.  But I can see that there are core sustainability principles in many of those businesses in the way they’re doing that work, but yes, there’s been a failure I think in the political advocacy in the public domain.

My answer to that is that this is trench warfare that we’re fighting.  The Opposition had their fantastically successful strategy of defending one position then moving back a yard, defending the next position, moving back a yard, defending the next position.

This is what they’ve done basically for the last 20 years, first of all denying that it exists, denying that it’s a human problem, denying that it’s serious, pretending that actually, you know, some technological fix will happen.  So they move back incrementally.  We on the other side, anyone who sticks their head above the parapet gets shot, you know.

And you look at the Cate Blanchett experience, for instance, and you see that anybody who stands up as an apologist for this cause immediately becomes a target.  And the people who suffer worst from that of course are the scientists who get, literally, sackfuls of hate mail.  So of course, are you going to be discouraged if you’re a captain of industry or a corporate leader from putting your head up?  The only way to win a trench war I believe is for everyone to charge together.  We actually have to have a unifying theme, and we need to all pop our heads up together.

Simon Marnie:

Hopefully led by a ratbag.

Download presentations and videos:

Andrew McNally, presentation part 1 and part 2

• Häagen-Dazs
• Greenworks
• Reverse Graffiti
• Behaviour change

Tony Douglas, Director, Essential Media Communications – presenter in Sydney & Melbourne

• Download presentation here
• A narrative: CFMEU

Skye Laris

• Download presentation here
• What works: Clean Energy Future
• Common Mistakes: Think Climate
• Ministers: Gillard Explains Carbon Price

Blair Palese

• Download presentation here
• What’s worked: Clean Energy Future (also in Skye’s links)
• What’s worked: Black Balloons
• Tea Party Tactics: Anti-carbon tax ad

Following are 10 key messages from the event, compiled by Murray Hogarth, a Green Capital senior adviser.

1 Build towards an enduring narrative. ?Achieving sustainability, and especially the transition to a sustainable economy, needs a meta-narrative that brings socio-economic and environmental wellbeing together as one story that engages people as a “universal truth”. This is the holy grail of communications, reflecting cultural acceptance, and most likely will only emerge as the product of a series of more specific narrative building blocks. Tony Douglas, from Essential Media Communications, suggested the right narrative for the current era is: A strong economy is dependent on a healthy environment.

2. The “story-telling” is everything. Having the right story or narrative is vital, but how it is told trumps all. To paraphrase Andrew McNally, of NewsNet: “You have to be there telling a story … it’s no good just putting up an ad”. Film screenwriter John Collee, of 350Australia, used the analogy of a screenplay in three parts – the problem, the complications and the resolution. There is much discussion of different media channels, for example traditional PR-driven media coverage and advertising versus new social media, but in the end there are many channels in play to tell a story and reach an audience. Whatever ones are used, it’s the power and integrity of the storyline that will decide if people tune in and respond appropriately i.e. act in the way the communication is intended to achieve, whether that is buy, vote, or change behaviour.

3. Authenticity is a killer app. There actually isn’t an easy plug-in app for building a story that is authentic for your organisation to tell. And while the ingredients are simple to list, they can be hard to put into effect. Ideally you need a genuine public interest issue that is relevant to your organisation, brand, program or product and to which you can respond in a meaningful way. An example cited at MMGM was a hugely successful campaign in the US by natural ingredients ice cream maker Haagen Dazs to help save the world’s honeybees (http://www.helpthehoneybees.com/). NewsNet’s Andrew McNally says you need ‘values’ at the core, and warned: ‘You will be found out if you are telling half truths or lies.’

4. New social media is a game-changer. Get Up’s communications director Skye Laris is glad to see “the brochure has almost died’”as the Internet provides such an effective alternative platform to deliver information for influencing from the bottom up (“top down never works for behaviour change”). Nadya Krienke-Becker, of The Shaper Group, says social media and social networks have given us a “platform for dialogue” that transcends traditional media. To paraphrase her, “we are all food editors and travel writers now”. NewsNet’s Andrew McNally says that in this new operating environment, every organisation is a media business, with its own publishing assets to “get the story out”; and “share-ability” is vital, with marketers seeking to get exposure across millions of page impressions using diverse media platforms.

5. Don’t write off traditional media just yet. High repetition delivery of marketing messages via traditional television, media and print advertising can still work very well if you get the story and the timing right. These tactics, however, are more suited to short-term objectives like winning an election or stopping a particular policy change (think the mining industry assault on the original super profits tax) than long-term behaviour change.

6. People are “always on”. There is no downtime for media and marketing now, with the 24-hour news cycle, the Internet, pervasive social networks and screen-based mobile devices that travel with people wherever they go, whatever time of the day.

7. Choose your battlegrounds & know that good outcomes have to be earned. Winning in the public arena is tough territory, especially when issues like putting a price on carbon pollution are deeply polarised at a political and public level. Many businesses have chosen to shy away from positioning themselves on public policy issues in favour of looking inwards to engage their own people and transform their own business models. They nonetheless are building their stories and, potentially, a platform to go public when the time is more suitable, because you can’t buy credibility on sustainability overnight nor conjure up values without effort. NewsNet’s Andrew McNally says: “It is no longer about the paid media. It’s about the earned media.”

8. Shape your message to the audience, not vice versa.There’s a warning for any organisation wanting to tell its story and promote its product – whether that’s a consumable, a service, a policy, a campaign, or an idea.  Don’t get trapped into messaging that tells the audience what you want to hear (such as we have to “educate the population” to think like us). Effective marketing communications for sustainability needs to lay the breadcrumbs for the audience to discover and follow to where you want them to end up. Matt Perry, of Republic of Everyone, noted: ‘The key problem with government advertising is that there is so much focus on the politics … they forget human beings are quite simple creatures.”

The result is that by trying to be politically clever, and cover all bases, such ads can miss the mark in terms of informing or persuading the population. That said, Tony Wright of December Media, makers of the ABC-TV Carbon Cops series, warned at MMGM that: “Science is such a tricky area to communicate.” This adds to the communication challenge, when rigorous fact checking is demanded, and scientific complexity defies being dumbed down. The answer is to treat both the content and the audience with respect.

9. We’re actually good at achieving behaviour change. Most people can cite examples of behaviour change challenges that have been overcome by effective public policy strategies that include media and marketing communications. Examples include using sun protection, responding to HIV-Aids, wearing seat belts, stopping smoking and littering. The underlying message, however, is that successful campaigns are “deep” and extend far beyond the communications – which is merely the shop front.

Bernard Carlon from the NSW Government’s Office of Environment and Heritage used the example of its campaign to reduce littering with cigarette butts. The visible part of the campaign was the memorable “Don’t be a tosser” copy line, yet the unseen work included deep engagement of local councils and training for 800+ enforcement officers.

On climate change, Carlon conceded: “We just haven’t cracked it on this one yet.” PR specialist Blair Palese, of 350Australia, is ultimately optimistic: “We are good communicators in Australia, and we have a good story to tell.”

10. All big change takes time and mistakes can be made. There’s no sign of a quick fix on sustainability and climate change – despite the urgency,. Nor have we yet achieved the necessary sense of  cut through – that was created, for example, by the memorable initial HIV-Aids ‘Grim Reaper’ TV ads.

Matt Perry of Republic of Everyone says we are still looking for a “seminal moment” that will crystallise action on climate change. EMC’s Tony Douglas still holds out hope for government communications recovering from early inadequacies, finally winning over the public to climate action including a price on carbon: “It’s a communications failure that still has the chance to be righted.”

Which brings us back to having a compelling, authentic story to tell and embedding the cultural belief and associated actions that recognise the environment is the economy.

24 January 2012 –

The funds surveyed including AustralianSuper and VicSuper had combined assets of almost $US2 trillion ($1.9 trillion).

The funds were surveyed to determine what action they had taken since Mercer found in a earlier report, Climate Change Scenarios – Implications for Strategic Asset Allocation that climate could account for 10 per cent of typical portfolio risk.

AustralianSuper, which has significant property assets, reported that the potential risks posed by climate change to its top 20 property assets and top 20 infrastructure assets’ were being seriously addressed.

Other key findings of this latest Mercer report, Through the Looking Glass – How Investors are Applying the Results of the Climate Change Scenarios Study are:

• 50 per cent of project partners have undertaken or plan to make changes to their actual asset allocations
• 80 per cent of partners have or will increase their engagement on climate change with companies and policy makers
• One-third of project participants have begun to or plan to allocate more to “climate sensitive assets” (identified in the report as real estate, infrastructure, private equity, sustainable equities (listed and unlisted), efficiency/renewables (listed and unlisted) and commodities (including agricultural land and timberland)
• More than half of participants either have, or plan to review, climate risks within climate-sensitive asset classes identified in the report

Global head of responsible investment for Mercer Jane Ambachtsheer, who launched the report at the investor network on climate risk meeting and investor summit on climate risk and energy solutions in New York said: “We are encouraged to see that partners have clearly made efforts to understand and act on the findings from our climate change report. As expected, priorities and areas of focus differ among the partners, and in some cases, the findings have been used to support decisions which were already under consideration, such as an enhanced allocation to infrastructure investments.”

Helga Birgden, head of responsible investing for Asia Pacific at Mercer, said there is still a long road ahead both globally and locally.

“The recent climate negotiations in Durban suggest that we are a long way off from seeing strong, internationally coordinated action on climate policy, and this creates a significant investment risk for the foreseeable future.”

“However, Australia’s decision to adopt a carbon tax now means that investors in our region are required to recognise capital market signals associated with climate change entailing costs and prudent risk management,” she said.

Findings from the Looking Glass report show participant education of boards on the report’s conclusions and policy implications is currently about 50 per cent complete.

Many partners have indicated that they are focused on training asset class teams about the study, as well as leveraging the asset class and regional-level findings in order to develop a deeper understanding of climate change risks and opportunities in existing and future investments and engagements.

AustralianSuper
Part of the report focused on analysis of AustralianSuper’s current asset allocation, which revealed a number of climate change risks across various assets in its portfolios.

Property
In property AustralianSuper conducted a “high level assessment” of the impact of climate change-related policies and potential environmental impact on its top 20 property and infrastructure assets, which are all in Australia.

Risks vary but could include “increased days of extreme heat, fire risk, higher rainfall levels and greater wind speed,” leading to higher building operating costs, and greater capital expenditure to mitigate these environmental impacts, AustralianSuper said in the report.

The institution last year joined the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark, an initiative that will assist it to assess its performance in areas such as environmental and social performance, peer benchmarking and reporting by region, sector, and investment universe.

Infrastructure
In infrastructure AustralianSuper’s top 20 assets, could be at risk of impact from heat, fire risk, flooding and storm damage, the review found.

“As a result of this high level review, AustralianSuper is working with a specialist engineering firm to undertake a thorough assessment of the physical risks that could impact our assets due to climate change up to the years 2030 and 2050,” AustralianSuper said in the report.

“Good risk management requires us to understand the risks that are posed by climate change. Following the engineering firm’s review, AustralianSuper aims to incorporate climate change risk management as standard practice into due diligence and ESG processes.

“AustralianSuper will then  work with fund managers and management at the companies in which they are invested to ensure decisions relating to these investments are made in the context of likely future scenarios.”

Equities
In equities AustralianSuper said it had commissioned Trucost to analyse the carbon footprints of its total equities portfolio.

“AustralianSuper then engaged with its Australian equities fund managers on this data. In addition, AustralianSuper undertook a carbon valuation analysis on its portfolio, based on the upcoming Australian carbon price scheme.”

See the reports http://www.mercer.com/climatechange

By Lyn Drummond and Tina Perinotto

24 January 2012 – A total of 784 schools have each been awarded grants of up to $50 000 under the  2011-12 national solar schools program, Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, Mark Dreyfus said today.

The funds will help save and generate energy, as well as use water more wisely by installing solar and other renewable power systems, rainwater tanks and a range of energy efficiency measures.

The program gave school children the opportunity to see energy generation and learn the importance of water and energy conservation first hand, Mr Dreyfus said. So far 3800 schools across Australia have been awarded grants under the program.

“The combination of renewable energy systems installed under this program will generate approximately 20 megawatts of solar power – the equivalent of powering around 4,200 average households each day,” he said.

Applications for the 2012-13 program’s final round will open on 13 February, 2012.

Further information

Tom Goode, writing in the January issue of Urbis Insights, says a less interventionist approach from the NSW government towards local authorities means that it is now left to local government to deal with increasing numbers of larger and more intricate projects.

Urbis analysed data on council development assessment performance between 2007 and 2010 including information on application determination times and success rates, new dwelling approvals as a percentage of strategic plan targets and Land and Environment Court determinations.

Other results from the research include:

• Smaller and less-resourced councils are less able to deliver good determination times and rates of approval, as well as having some of the highest rates of merit appeals to the Land and Environment Court
• Inner west councils of Ashfield, Leichhardt and Marrickville are well below the average for development application determination times, proportion of applications approved and the potential for council staff to determine applications under delegated authority; and
• Councils that include major urban renewal precincts, such as City of Sydney, Rockdale, Canada Bay and Ryde generally have good performance indicators that reflect a positive and engaging attitude towards development by their staff and councillors.

The fund would largely replace the 3500 jobs lost from forestry since 2008, Senator Brown said.

“But this money will only flow if there is a strong conservation legislative outcome by June this year.”

Senator Brown said he asked for the report to show Tasmanians the sorts of ideas that could be implemented to create an environment that will help small businesses flourish, with protection of the forests at the heart of reforms.

The report is a springboard for discussion, he said. “I’ve got a few ideas of my own, including establishing an institute to foster and retain Tasmania’s world-leading track-building skills and promoting the far south as a tourism destination for its interesting mix of tourist railway, caves, spectacular coastal walking and historical sites of French arrival.”

See the report by Naomi Edwards and Jamie Hanson

27 January 2012 –

The Climate and Health Alliance also this week rejected claims of anti-wind farm groups that wind power poses a health threat.

These claims, however, have succeeded in virtually halting wind farm development in Victoria and NSW despite no corresponding claims in Europe where wind farms are widespread. An ABC Four Corners report last year showed strong links between the anti wind farm lobby and anti climate change interests, in particular the Institute of Public Affairs.

• So our article on this, Lead anti wind campaigners have a political, not health agenda http://www.thefifthestate.com.au/archives/27205

Mr Walker said the FOI request resulted in about 1200 pages of documents being provided. Most are studies and other papers in the public domain, he said.

Some of the documents also related to correspondence received from Dr Sarah Laurie of the Waubra Foundation.

Other documents relate to a study by another doctor, Nina Pierpoint, which forms the basis of much of the Waubro claims.

Mr Walker said highlights from the documents include:

[Paper No 25] “NSW Health has met with Dr Sarah Laurie…There is a clear hierarchy in scientific evidence and case reports [as provided] fall into the lowest category of scientific evidence. On this basis, such studies can be regarded as hypotheses generating and not as hypotheses proving. In other words, they raise a question, but do not provide an answer. To be widely accepted as evidence for adverse health effects, the study design, methodology and analysis has to be peer reviewed. This is lacking for the critical information presented by Dr. Laurie.”

[Paper No 24] “In July 2010, the National Health and Medical Research Council released a Position Statement on Wind Turbines and Health effects and concluded, “There are no direct pathological effects from wind farms and that any potential impact on humans can be minimised by following existing planning guidelines…..NSW Health accepts the NHMRC’s public statement on wind turbines and health. The national approach is consistent with the international scientific opinion, which is based on lack of a current link between wind turbines and adverse health effects.”

Health Issues asserted in a presentation by [name is blacked out] appear to be misleading. For instance in PowerPoint slide 10 statement is a statement that “Extensive concerns are being raised within the NHMRC”.

A comment from the Environmental Health Branch of NSW Health states: “This statement is inaccurate and unsubstantiated. The information that NSW Health has received from NHMRC does not support this statement.”

On PowerPoint slide 10 states”Increasing volume of reported illness, as the Turbines get larger and the so called “farms” get bigger.”

The EHB comment is: “There may be reports of illness, but these illnesses may have occurred in the community in any case, and no comparison population or other appropriate epidemiological evidence is available: making assertions of causal links to wind turbines without proper studies is unjustified. [Information contained in the person's] own presentation contradicts this statement by saying that direct cause for these symptoms is unknown.”

PowerPoint slide 29 on “Recent Studies and Surveys: Dr Nina Pierpont—Case Series Crossover Study complete; findings published in “Wind Turbine Syndrome”

EHB Comment is: “Dr. Nina Pierpoint’s ‘study’ forms the basis of much of the [Waubra Foundation's] assertions. This ‘study’ is not a rigorous epidemiological study; it is a case series of 10 families drawn from a wide range of locations. This work has not been properly peer-reviewed, nor has it been published in the peer-reviewed literature. The findings are not scientifically valid, with major methodological flaws stemming from the poor design of the study. This ‘study’ is not of sufficient scientific rigour. It raises hypotheses, it does not prove them.”

The Climate and Health Alliance also rejected claims of health issues in relation to wind farms.

“There is no credible peer reviewed scientific evidence that demonstrates a link between wind turbines and direct adverse health impacts in people living in proximity to them,” CAHA convenor Fiona Armstrong said.

“In contrast, Australia’s current energy generation that relies on the burning of fossils fuels such as coal and gas is not only contributing to climate change but (particularly in the case of coal) also poses significant threats to human health.”

The Health and Wind Turbines paper  www.caha.org.au finds while large-scale commercial wind farms have been in operation internationally for many decades, often in close proximity to thousands of people, there is no scientifically validated evidence of any associated increase in ill-health in these populations.

“The balance of current scientific evidence indicates that while a small proportion of people may experience annoyance associated with wind turbines, on the whole no direct adverse physiological health effects related to wind turbines have been demonstrated,” Ms Armstrong said.

“In contrast however, there are well documented and serious threats to human health from burning fossil fuels for electricity generation and transport in the form of cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease and cancer,” Ms Armstrong said.

“It is estimated that the harm to health from emissions from Australian coal-fired power stations is costing the Australia community $A2.6 billion annually. Together with the health damage from fossil fuel powered transport emissions, this amounts to an annual health bill of almost $6 billion, as well as contributing to more than 1000 deaths each year.”

See report in Fairfax newspapers on this issue here

cam

Mr Walker said the FOI request resulted in about 1200 pages of documents being provided. Most are studies and other papers in the public domain, he said.

Some of the documents also related to correspondence received from Dr Sarah Laurie of the Waubra Foundation.

Other documents relate to a study by another doctor, Nina Pierpoint, which forms the basis of much of the Waubro claims.

Mr Walker said highlights from the documents include:

* “NSW Health has met with Dr Sarah Laurie…There is a clear hierarchy in scientific evidence and case reports [as provided by Dr. Laurie] fall into the lowest category of scientific evidence. On this basis, such studies can be regarded as hypotheses generating and not as hypotheses proving. In other words, they raise a question, but do not provide an answer. To be widely accepted as evidence for adverse health effects, the study design, methodology and analysis has to be peer reviewed. This is lacking for the critical information presented by Dr. Laurie.” [Paper No 25]

* “In July 2010, the National Health and Medical Research Council released a Position Statement on Wind Turbines and Health effects and concluded, “There are no direct pathological effects from wind farms and that any potential impact on humans can be minimised by following existing planning guidelines…..NSW Health accepts the NHMRC’s public statement on wind turbines and health. The national approach is consistent with the international scientific opinion, which is based on lack of a current link between wind turbines and adverse health effects.” [Paper No 24]

* Health Issues asserted in a presentation by [a person whose name is blacked out] appear to be misleading. For instance in PowerPoint slide 10 statement is a statement that “Extensive concerns are being raised within the NHMRC”.

A comment from the Environmental Health Branch of NSW Health states: “This statement is inaccurate and unsubstantiated. The information that NSW Health has received from NHMRC does not support this statement.”

On PowerPoint slide 10 states”Increasing volume of reported illness, as the Turbines get larger and the so called “farms” get bigger.”

The EHB comment is: “There may be reports of illness, but these illnesses may have occurred in the community in any case, and no comparison population or other appropriate epidemiological evidence is available: making assertions of causal links to wind turbines without proper studies is unjustified. [Information contained in the person's] own presentation contradicts this statement by saying that direct cause for these symptoms is unknown.”

PowerPoint slide 29 on “Recent Studies and Surveys: Dr Nina Pierpont—Case Series Crossover Study complete; findings published in “Wind Turbine Syndrome”

EHB Comment is: “Dr. Nina Pierpoint’s ‘study’ forms the basis of much of the [Waubra Foundation's] assertions. This ‘study’ is not a rigorous epidemiological study; it is a case series of 10 families drawn from a wide range of locations. This work has not been properly peer-reviewed, nor has it been published in the peer-reviewed literature. The findings are not scientifically valid, with major methodological flaws stemming from the poor design of the study. This ‘study’ is not of sufficient scientific rigour. It raises hypotheses, it does not prove them.”

See report in Fairfax newspapers on this issue here

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/energy-smart/science-on-wind-turbine-illness-dubious-say-experts-20120123-1qe98.html

This standard sets an environmental performance benchmark for hard surfacing products such as natural stone, agglomerated stones, concrete paving units, terrazzo tiles, ceramic tiles, clay tiles and glass tiles.

This is the fifth GECA standard to be recognised by the GBCA under their product certification scheme which clarifies best practice benchmarks and establishes expectations for manufacturers and suppliers of fitout products, as well as for product certification schemes that are recognised through Green Star.

Fitout products (such as flooring and loose furniture) that have been certified for their environmental merit by a GBCA-recognised product certification scheme are rewarded in Green Star Material Calculators credits. Schemes are recognised by the GBCA on the basis of their assessment framework for product certification schemes.

GECA partnered with the Australian Stone Advisory Association and the Australian Tile Council to develop and promote the hard surfacing standard.

ASAA chief executive officer, Anthony Stock said, “The annual value of local stone production exceeds $100 million and imports of stone are rising. The combination of ceramic tile imports and local production in 2011 exceeded 42 million square metres, so GBCA recognition of GECA’s hard surface standard is good news for both industry sectors.”

Whilst many exceptional Green Star projects have featured tile or stone, there has been no opportunity to claim Green Star points for use of these products until now.

With the standard being recognised by the GBCA, GECA expects to see hard surface manufacturers opting for GECA certification and broadening the market to include a new range of surfaces available to Green Star projects that are eligible to earn full points.

Details

New York fresh food markets

23 January 2012 – New York’s city zoning comes in for an entertaining analysis in this article by Julie V Iovine from The Wall Street JournaI that shows that NSW is not the only state to suffer from frustrating zoning laws.  Sydney’s “sociable  seating” is one of a range of cosmopolitan influences adopted by the city, it says, (clearly not the steel convex seating at bus stops designed to deter homeless people from getting comfortable).

New York’s zoning codes regulating the size, use and location of buildings could sap the life force out of all but the most zealous urban enthusiasts. Their technical language is intelligible only to initiated bureaucrats – probably with pocket protectors – and a handful of canny developers, certainly with a gleam in their eye.

Or so it is believed. But times have changed and so has the New York City Zoning Resolution, which just passed its 50th anniversary last month. Once regarded with frustration and loathing, zoning in middle age is hot: more flexible and dynamic than ever.

Actually, urban planners are more likely to invoke a thermostat metaphor –noting that zoning can raise or lower the habitability of the city by degrees. The layperson might also think of it as planning’s magic wand – an implementation technique, not an avoid-at-all-costs, manipulate-as-possible rule or regulation.

And in the Bloomberg administration, as wielded by the New York City Planning Commission and its director, Amanda Burden, zoning has assumed a more activist role than ever before. It not only shapes the blocks and writes the skyline, but also aims to curb obesity by offering incentives for fresh-food markets in low-income neighborhoods; buck up the mom-and-pop store; and promote an astonishing range of other quality-of-life benefits.

“Zoning has always concerned itself, for better or worse, with social matters, such as banishing noxious uses,” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association.

“What’s different now is that the planning commission is moving from zoning that’s negative on social issues to being positive, like mandating green markets and bike rooms. It’s reasonable for city government to encourage people to move in a beneficial direction. Whether zoning is the correct device is another matter. A market person might say it’s better to go with incentives than mandates.” As such, zoning is something of which every New Yorker and visitor ought to be aware.

It has all become very cosmopolitan. The city’s selective bus lanes were inspired by the rapid-transit bus system in Bogotá, Colombia; the newly accessible waterfront borrows its sociable seating arrangements from Sydney, Australia; even New York’s controversial bike lanes come by way of close attention to those in Copenhagen. By tweaking the number, type and location of everything from bus lanes to street benches, zoning makes places more welcoming to visit and inviting to use.

Last month, the planning commission submitted a new initiative to public review. Called Zone Green, it will promote energy efficiency by making it easier to add photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, greenhouses and shading devices to the roofs and sides of older buildings.

On January 3, Commissioner Burden introduced a zoning amendment that will preserve small shops on avenues with a residential character and force new banks on the Upper West Side to shift most of their services from extended street fronts to second-floor locations.

“We want New York to be a walkable city,” Ms. Burden said, “with active, tree-lined streets and active retail frontages. This modest proposal will preserve that small-store character by allowing stores and banks a maximum of 25 feet ( 7.62 metres) on the street.”

Read the full story

The event, the Re-thinkers, is at the National Australia Bank, Level 15, 255 George Street, Sydney from 8.30-4pm.

Register

GEC chief executive officer Zach Rose said while there were plenty of options for students to purchase printed flashcards for the LEED examinations, there were no apps that allowed study directly from an iPhone,

The application includes more than 350 flashcards and instructor support  New features include categorical studying, a “remember position” feature, a shuffle option to mix up the cards, and the option to contact a LEED teacher while studying the cards.

“Attaining a LEED credential is of the utmost importance,”  Mr Rose said. “For those seeking employment in the construction industry, it is literally a prerequisite to even be considered for any job opportunities. Furthermore, companies are now required to have LEED professionals on staff in order to submit bids for professional services.”

For details

It will include former South Australian Premier Mike Rann, former Deputy Prime Minister Brian Howe  current head of the Local Government Association Genia McCaffery, and the deputy chief executive of the Business Council of Australia Maria Tarrant.

Other members include the Green Building Council of Australia’s Romilly Madew, the Property Council of Australia’s Peter Verwer,  the Planning Institute of Australia’s Kirsty Kelly, the Australian Institute of Architects’ David Parken and Consult Australia’s Megan Motto.

It will be chaired by the Secretary of the Department of Infrastructure and Transport Mike Mrdak.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the forum would complement earlier urban policy initiatives:

• Creation of the Major Cities Unit
• Release of the National Urban Policy—Our Cities, Our Future—a long term blueprint for Australia’s 18 biggest cities and regional centres
• Development of Creating Places for People: an urban design protocol for Australian cities, a tool to improve the quality and useability of our public spaces and city buildings
• A commitment of more Federal infrastructure dollars to urban public transport than all our predecessors combined since Federation ($7.3 billion)
• Establishment of a $20 million Liveable Cities program to support high-quality demonstration urban design projects and better urban plans
• Requiring all state and territory governments to have strategic planning systems in place for their capital cities
• Publishing a regular State of Australian Cities report to monitor the performance of our 18 biggest cities over time so policy-makers can measure and assess progress towards more productive, sustainable and liveable cities.

The full list of forum members and brief profiles comprises:

• Mike Mrdak (Chair) –Mike Mrdak is the Secretary of the Department of Infrastructure and Transport, having previously been the Deputy Secretary (Governance) at Prime Minister and Cabinet. Mr Mrdak has extensive experience in government, and has served much of his public service career in the Infrastructure Department and its predecessors.
• Mike Rann – Mike Rann was the member for Ramsay in the South Australian Parliament until his resignation on 13 January 2012. He is the former Premier of South Australia. First elected to the Parliament of South Australia in 1985, Mr Rann entered Cabinet in December 1989 as Minister for Employment and Further Education, Minister of Youth Affairs, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Minister assisting in Ethnic Affairs. In September 1992 he became Minister for Business and Regional Development, Minister of Tourism and Minister of State Services. After Labor lost government in December 1993, Mr Rann was elected Deputy Leader of the Opposition, and in September 1994 was elected unopposed as the Leader of the Opposition. He then served as Premier from March 2002 till his resignation as Premier in October 2011.
• Genia McCaffery – Genia McCaffery is President of the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA). Ms McCaffery was elected President in November 2010, and has been a Director of ALGA since June 2006. Ms McCaffery was President of the Local Government Association of New South Wales from 2004–10, and has been a member of the Executive since 1998. Ms McCaffery was elected as full-time Mayor of North Sydney in 1995 and was re-elected in 1999, 2004 and 2008. She is also on the Board of the Sydney Metropolitan Catchment Management Authority, the NSW Environment Protection Authority, and the NSW Environmental Trust.
• Lisa Scaffidi – Lord Mayor Ms Lisa Scaffidi is the chair elect of the Council of Capital City Lord Mayor’s. Ms Scaffidi was elected as the Lord Mayor of the City of Perth in 2007, and again in 2011, after serving seven years as a Councillor. For 10 years prior to her election she was Executive Director of the Western Australian office of the Committee for Economic Development of Australia.
• Clover Moore – Clover Moore was elected Lord Mayor of Sydney in March 2004 and re-elected in 2008. Ms Moore chairs the Central Sydney Planning Committee and the Sydney Festival. She represents Sydney at the C40 major cities conference established to address global warming, and in 2009 was chair of the Council of Capital City Lord Mayors. Ms Moore is also the State Member for Sydney (formerly Bligh) and is currently serving her sixth term as an independent in the Legislative Assembly of the NSW Parliament.
• Val Schier – Valerie “Val” Schier is the inaugural Mayor of Cairns Regional Council in Queensland, following the amalgamation of three regional in March 2008. She also holds a number of senior positions in a range of community organizations.
• Prior to becoming Mayor Ms Schier held a number of senior management positions in the state government public service, and has a diverse background of experiences in the private and public sector.
• Paul Pisasale – Paul Pisasale is the Mayor of the City of Ipswich in Queensland. Mr Pisasale was elected to Council in March 1991, elected Deputy Mayor in April 2000 and has been Mayor of the City of Ipswich since March 2004. Mr Pisasale has an active interest in business and youth initiatives, community organisations and employment enterprises and is Patron of over 40 organisations. He is currently Chair of the National Growth Areas Alliance representing local governments experiencing significant growth pressures.
• Brian Howe – Professor Brian Howe is Chair of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Cities Expert Panel. Elected to the federal parliament in 1977 Prof. Howe represented the seat of Batman until 1996. Elected to the Ministry in 1983 and appointed to the Minister for Defence Support he subsequently served in social policy related Ministries including Social Security, Health and Housing. He was Deputy Prime Minister from 1991–1995. Since leaving politics in 1996 Prof. Howe has been a Professorial Associate at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Public Policy. He is also Chairman of the Victorian based Disability Housing Trust and a member of the Board of the Australian and New Zealand School of Government.
• Owen Donald – Dr Donald is Chair of the National Housing Supply Council. Dr Donald is a social policy consultant and was formerly the Victorian Director of Housing. Dr Donald has held senior positions in the private and public sectors including Executive Director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, General Manager of the IPA Group Pty Ltd and Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Employment Services Regulatory Authority.
• Sue Holliday – Sue Holliday is Chair of the Built Environment Industry Innovation Council and a member of the COAG Cities Expert Panel. From 2003 to 2006 Ms Holliday worked for a strategic business consultancy firm, DEGW, before establishing her own consulting company called Strategies for Change in 2007. Ms Holliday is an urban planner and economist and was Director General of Planning in NSW from 1997 to 2003.
• John Thwaites – John Thwaites is Chair of the Australian Building Codes Board and a Professorial Fellow at Monash University. He also chairs the Monash Sustainability Institute, ClimateWorks Australia, the Climate Group Ltd in Australia, the Peter Cullen Water and Environment Trust, and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. He is also a director of the Australian Green Building Council. Prof. Thwaites became a Member of the Victorian Parliament in 1992 and was Deputy Premier of Victoria from 1999 until his retirement in 2007. During this period he was Minister for Health, Minister for Planning, Minister for Environment, Minister for Water, Minister for Victorian Communities and Victoria’s first Minister for Climate Change. Prior to entering Parliament he was a barrister practicing in planning and administrative law, and was a Councillor for the City of South Melbourne (1985–1993) and Mayor in 1991–1992.
• Monica Richter – Monica Richter has been the Sustainable Australia Program Manager for the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) since 2003. Prior to this Ms Richter worked for Greenpeace as the Corporate Environmental Campaigner, and at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
• Peter Verwer – Peter Verwer is Chief Executive Officer of the Property Council Australia. Mr Verwer is also Chair of Liveable Housing Australia, the Construction Forecasting Council, and the National Counter Terrorism Committee (NCTC)—Mass Gatherings Strategy Group (MGSG), as well being a member of many other public and private sector bodies. He has also been appointed one of six Disability Community Leaders by the Australian Government.
• Romilly Madew – Romilly Madew is the Chair of the Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council (ASBEC) Cities Task Group and Chief Executive of the Green Building Council of Australia. Ms Madew is also Chair of the International Rating Tools Committee for the World Green Building Council (WorldGBC), and a committee member of the World GBC International Policy Task group. She is also a steering committee member of the Business Leaders Forum on Sustainable Development, and the Built Environment Meets Parliament (BEMP) initiative. She was also the national winner of the Telstra Business Women’s Awards 2009 (Community and Government).
• Megan Motto – Megan Motto is Chief Executive Officer of Consult Australia (formerly the Association of Consulting Engineers Australia). Ms Motto is also a Director of the Australian Construction Industry Forum, Vice Chair of the Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council (ASBEC), and a Councillor of the NSW Business Chamber and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Prior to being appointed CEO in 2005, she had served in senior positions at the Association of Consulting Engineers Australia.
• Brendon Lyon– Brendan Lyon is the Chief Executive Officer of Infrastructure Partnerships Australia. Brendan joined IPA in early 2006 and he initially served in IPA’s policy and research team and later led the organisation’s media and government relations functions. He was appointed to head the organization in 2008. Brendan also serves on the Board of the Sydney Business School, the Federal Government’s Infrastructure Finance Advisory Group; the ACCC’s Infrastructure Regulation Advisory Group and was recently appointed to serve on the steering group of the Commonwealth Government’s High Speed Rail Study.
• John Lee – John Lee was appointed to the role of Chief Executive Officer of the Tourism and Transport Forum (TTF) in 2010. Prior to that, Mr Lee had held a range of senior management positions in the public and private sector including as Director General of NSW’s Department of Premier and Cabinet, and Department of Commerce, and CEO of the State Transit Authority of NSW.
• Maria Tarrant Maria Tarrant is the Deputy Chief Executive of the Business Council of Australia (BCA). Ms Tarrant has worked at the BCA since 2001 and prior to her appointment as Deputy Chief Executive in 2011 she held the position of Director of Policy. Prior to joining the BCA she was Chief Executive of RMIT Training P/L, and has worked in both the public and private sectors in the fields of infrastructure, education services, human resources management and marketing.
• Kirsty Kelly – Kirsty Kelly is the Chief Executive Officer of the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA). Prior to being appointed CEO, Ms Kelly had served in a number of roles with PIA including Chief Operating Officer, National Policy Manager, SA State Manager, SA Division President, SA National Councillor and National Young Planner Convenor. Ms Kelly is a Certified Practising Planner and before joining PIA she worked in consulting, and in state and local government in South Australia and in the Northern Territory.
• David Parken – David Parken is the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Institute of Architects. For the past eight years he has also served as a Director of the Institute’s associated publishing company Architecture Media and more recently as a Director of Insurance Brokers (IBL) Limited and Archicentre which are both wholly owned by the Institute. David is also a Director of the Australian Services Roundtable, a member of the Executive of the Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council (ASBEC), Chair of ASBEC’s Climate Change Task Group, and a member of the Australian Construction Industry Forum.
• Stephen Hodge – Stephen Hodge is Government Relations Manager for the Cycling Promotion Fund. Mr Hodge is also a Board member of the Amy Gillett Foundation, Vice President of Cycling Australia and also fulfils several roles for charitable causes in Australia. He is also a Director of corporate affairs firm Day & Hodge Associates. Notably, Mr Hodge competed at 10 World Championships, Commonwealth and Olympic Games and finished 6 Tours de France in his 10 year professional cycling career.
• Adrian Pisarski – Adrian Pisarski is the Chairperson of National Shelter. He has a 30 year history in the community sector including roles with housing and youth peak bodies in Tasmania, Victoria, NSW, Queensland and nationally. He has been the Executive Officer of Queensland Shelter since 2002, is a member of the Affordable Housing Summit Group, and has served as Deputy President of ACOSS.
• Cassandra Goldie – Cassandra Goldie is the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Council of Social Service. Dr Goldie was appointed CEO in July 2010 and prior to that had been the Director of the Sex and Age Discrimination Unit at the Australian Human Rights Commission. She has previously been the Director of the Homelessness Legal Rights Project at UNSW, a consultant to UN Habitat, Solicitor in Charge of Client Services with Legal Aid in Western Australia and Executive Officer of the Darwin Community Legal Service. Ms Goldie has also been President of NTCOSS and Board Member of ACOSS (2001–2002) and was an ACOSS Law and Justice Policy Advisor (2000–2006).
• Robert Morris-Nunn – Robert Morris-Nunn is a Director of Circa Architecture. Regarded as one of Tasmania’s most adventurous architects, he has won over 40 state and 3 national architectural awards, his work has been illustrated in international publications and he has been invited to lecture at many Australian and international conferences about his work. In 2008 he was appointed the Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the University of Tasmania.
• Stephen Alchin – Stephen is the Executive Director, Planning at Infrastructure Australia. Since joining Infrastructure Australia in 2008 Stephen has overseen the development of the Infrastructure Priority Lists that have been recommended to governments, a review of major infrastructure approval processes sponsored by the Council of Australian Governments, and also worked on projections of long-term infrastructure costs. Prior to joining Infrastructure Australia, Stephen gained extensive experience in urban and infrastructure planning (especially transport planning) in the private sector, and in state and local government.
• Gary White – Gary White is the Government Planner at the Queensland Government’s Department of Local Government and Planning (DLGP). Prior to joining DLGP, Gary held key planning positions within the Redlands, Gold Coast and Ipswich councils. Gary has been President of the Queensland Division of the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) and is Queensland’s representative on the National Council of the PIA. He chairs the national Planning Officials’ Group which comprises heads of State and Territory planning agencies and provides strategic planning advice to ministerial councils and actions relevant Council of Australian Governments reforms.
• Richard Lindsay – Richard Lindsay is the Chief Executive Officer of the Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA). Prior to his role at UDIA he held a number of senior industry positions including, Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Seafood Industry Council, General Manager—Government and Public Affairs with the Australian Information Industry Association, Manager—Government Affairs with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia, and as a Senior Consultant with political consulting firm Government Relations Australia. He has also worked for the Federal Government as a public servant in the Departments of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Finance, and Communications, and as a political adviser.