An article Horne and his co-researchers wrote earlier this week<\/a> on the topic is leading to a bigger movement in advocating for a mandatory rating.<\/p>\nThe tool is otherwise exposed to too many vulnerabilities; he told The Fifth Estate in a recent interview.<\/p>\n
Even within Europe, he said, the privatised versions of the mandated housing energy rating tool have caused a loss of confidence from the market because \u201cpeople know it\u2019s actually possible to bias the results\u201d.<\/p>\n
Horne said a quality program needs to be adequately funded to ensure the results delivered are bespoke and reflect actual conditions rather than being based on modelled data.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs soon as people realise [the data] is wrong, it will lose its value.\u201d<\/p>\n
As the tool is rolled out, the existing Victorian-centred Scorecard housing energy assessment method will be phased out. But Horne is not convinced that\u2019s a good thing, and his sentiments echo passionate support from that sector.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s wrong with Scorecard \u2013 and why is it being phased out?<\/p>\n
A Scorecard assessor to his own home \u201cdid a fantastic job\u201d, being \u201cvery diligent\u201d and \u201cactually stuck their head up in the loft,\u201d Horne said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey checked things, they measured things and gave a comprehensive report, including proposed improvements and a star rating.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy is it gone? I suspect it\u2019s down to politics, and maybe a sense it costs too much.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added that there was no reason why Scorecard could not have been rolled out nationally \u2013 especially when the tool has built a large database, which would have been useful in informing future tools.<\/p>\n
He said critically that the tool was never mandated, which meant it would not be able to successfully come up with what he calls the right language to adequately describe dwellings.<\/p>\n
\u201cHouseholds have a language to describe their dwelling, but it does not involve low carbon, it does not involve performance, and it does not involve any discussion about energy efficiency or renewables as a package.\u201d<\/p>\n
The discourse can only be addressed when it becomes ubiquitous, when it is used amongst every single rental, purchases and sale.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnless we have mandatory disclosure and reporting of every dwelling, we won\u2019t have that language\u2026 embedded in society.\u201d<\/p>\n
The result will be that \u201csources of truth\u201d will be found in places where they should not be, such as what the brother-in-law said.<\/p>\n
\u201c[I\u2019m not] asking people to go and find out the truth where no truth is available about complex things, like fluid dynamics of housing.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust like a star rating on a fridge, we should be able to put a rating on a house.\u201d<\/p>\n
Australia lags on \u201caverage\u201d housing<\/p>\n
When Horne arrived in Australia in 2005 from the UK, his first research was for the Australian Greenhouse Office, investigating how eight cities around the world, similar to Australian cities, were doing in terms of housing.<\/p>\n
This includes comparing housing plans from Phoenix, Arizona, to Australia\u2019s Perth; San Francisco Bay to Melbourne; and Florida to a tropical northern Australian city.<\/p>\n
The results were, even back in 2005, standard volume builder houses overseas had an average rating of 7.2 stars amongst 100 homes, rated through CSIRO\u2019s AccuRate.<\/p>\n
US housing then was miles ahead of Australia.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody who comes to live in Australia can\u2019t believe how bad the housing is. It is a national and international laughing stock, and yet we\u2019re still listening to the housing lobby saying it\u2019s going to be too expensive to go to a certain standard. It\u2019s ludicrous.\u201d<\/p>\n
Horne said the government is responsible for not correcting \u201csystemised misinformation\u201d, which is sentencing households to paying \u201cludicrous energy bills\u201d and \u201cexacerbating climate change, exacerbating our contribution to climate change as a responsible wealthy Western nation\u201d, and wasting money.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really think that politicians have got a lot to answer for in presiding over what has been a dreadful era in building policy and climate policy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCountries much poorer than Australia are way ahead. Think of Southwest Europe, or Portugal, where housing quality is way ahead. People are much more intelligent in the way they talk about their homes and buildings.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a much greater understanding of why it\u2019s why things are like they are. It is really sad that we have resources and access to this, and yet we\u2019ve done so little about it as a nation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although Horne adds that there are always particular parts of government that are doing well in housing, despite the lack of \u201cubiquitous language and understanding of direction that we\u2019re going in\u201d. He gives credit to certain local government who are doing initiatives to have \u201cgreener footing\u201d and pioneering tools like BASIX.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll three levels of government need to come together and crack this.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS) is set to be expanded to existing homes, RMIT housing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565229,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,2572,9540,7688,189323,44,278286],"class_list":["post-565228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-energy","tag-energy-efficiency","tag-housing","tag-nathers","tag-news","tag-rating-tool"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}