5_July_2004

CORRECTED VERSION
ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE
Inquiry into Sustainable Communities
Melbourne – 5 July 2004
Members
Ms J. Lindell Ms A. Coote
Mr D. Drum Ms J. Duncan
Mr G. Hilton Ms W. Lovell
Mr G. Seitz
Chair: Ms J. Lindell
Deputy Chair: Ms A. Coote
Staff
Executive Officer: Ms Caroline Williams
Research Officers: Mr David Fairbridge
Witnesses
Mr I. Coles, CEO, and Ms J. Pickles, Manager, Strategy and Performance,
EcoRecycle Victoria
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The CHAIR – I declare open the Environment and Natural Resources Committee inquiry into sustainable
communities open, and welcome Ian and Jenny.
All evidence taken by the committee is taken under the provisions of the Parliamentary
Committees Act and is protected from judicial review. However, any comments made outside the
precincts of this hearing are not protected by parliamentary privilege. All evidence today is being
recorded and you will receive copies of proof versions within the next couple of weeks or so. If you
would like to make your presentation, we will then ask questions.
Mr COLES – Thank you for the opportunity.
Overheads shown
I have a brief presentation and I will start by outlining what EcoRecycle is and what it does. It
is a state government agency, established in 1996 under the Environment Protection Act, and its focus
is on solid waste, reducing and recovering resources from non-hazardous solid waste and hence
promoting more sustainable use of resources. We are an outer-budget agency funded by the landfill
levy, which is collected by licensed landfills around the state. Our current budget this year will be
around $7 million, being our share of the total landfill levy. We have around 40 staff in total. Our
focus is on solid waste.
The management of solid waste within Victoria is quite complex, as this overhead demonstrates.
It is actually more complex than that; that is the simplified version. Certainly the focus of much of the
management of waste in the state falls within the province of local government, particularly at the
household municipal level. At the state government level there are three major groups of agencies – the
EPA, EcoRecycle and 16 regional waste management groups that cover the entire state. Through those
processes there is policy development, strategy development and planning for waste management at
various levels right through to local government level. And there is accountability through the
development of business programs and waste management programs to drive consistent approaches as
far as possible throughout the state, recognising the differences that obviously exist between
metropolitan and more rural areas. So it is quite a robust structure linking state government, local
government and businesses as well, which I will get to.
Looking at the past 10 years or so on both waste generation and recycling, the top of the line
there is the total waste generate in the state over that period since 1993. And there has been a fairly
steady increase over that period. But in conjunction with that, there has been a significant increase in
the amount of total waste that has been recycled – that's the width of the grey band at the top. Based on
the latest figures for 2002-2003 we are now recovering in recycling 51 per cent of the total waste that
has been generated in the state, so the amount of waste going into landfill from both industrial sources
and municipal sources has started to turn down as the amount that is recovered and recycled increases
from both those key sectors. So there is good and bad in these messages – we are recycling more but
we are still on a trend increasing the total waste generation, so sustainable resource use is probably
not – well, we are not there yet; we are recovering resources in recycling.
Looking at those numbers on a per capita and a per million dollars GSP – the per capita is the
blue line and the GSP is the light grey line – we try to account for that increase in waste. The normal
feeling is that generation of waste is linked to economic activity. The more buoyant the economy the
most waste is being produced. Over the past five years or so on the figures we have it is pretty flat.
There are some positive trends coming through some of that data, although on per capita data we are
probably still increasing our waste generation.
The sources of waste in the state – the vast majority of it comes from commerce and industry
and the construction and demolition sector. Only about a quarter of the total waste generated in the
state comes from the household sector. Each of those sectors needs to be dealt with in slightly different
ways if we are looking at more sustainable resource use, increase recovery of resources and reducing
the amount that actually gets thrown away without being recovered. Fairly logically the vast majority –
I think it is about 95 per cent of the total waste generated, which is the green line – occurs in the greater
metropolitan Melbourne area, smaller amounts in the key provincial cities and even less in rural
regions. So in focusing our programs, statewide is obviously important but the key geographical area is
within the greater metropolitan Melbourne where most of the people and the economic activity are.
In terms of looking at household waste management, we believe Victoria does lead the rest of
Australia in its implementation of best practices using mobile bin systems for kerbside recycling to
recover paper, cardboard containers, both plastic and metal; there has been an increase in use of bin–
based systems recover organic material, and greenwaste from gardens – nearly a quarter of Australian
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households now have that service. And we are just starting to see those organic materials treated with a
higher level of technology, which means greater resource recovery, and in particular a reduction in
greenhouse gas emissions. Looking elsewhere in Australia – in Sydney, they are constructing the a
new facility to deal with the residual waste, the actual garbage that is left over after the recycling
materials are taken out and converting that residual waste into compostable materials and energy. We
would see that within the next five to 10 years those sorts of facilities should be implemented within
Victoria to maximise the recovery of resources.
Overseas, our systems are probably more aligned with the US than with Europe. Europe is very
much driven by regulations under the European Union, particularly on reducing the amount of
materials going to landfill and organic material in particular, where regulations are driving a lot of
energy, conversion of waste materials to energy – either in incinerators or other mechanisms – so the
systems there are quite different to what we have in Australia.
Last year we released a draft strategy Towards Zero Waste, which plotted a path forward for
dealing with solid waste over the next 10 years. We established in that draft strategy some targets for
avoiding the reduction of waste and increasing the amount recycled. Going from where we are,
roughly 50/50 disposed to landfill recovered recycled, reducing the amount of landfill further from
where we are now and increasing our recycling rate to above 65 per cent. The more challenging target
that we have set is to avoid the generation of waste by an additional 15 per cent, which would translate
to 280 000 less waste – tonnes of household waste. So following the waste hierarchy, seeking to avoid
waste generation in the first place and to increase the recovery of resources from the residual materials
and converting that into either organic compost–type material or energy over that period. That will
require new facilities, new systems and investment by the private sector and the public sector –
particularly local government – in introducing those new technologies.
We have, over the period that EcoRecycle has been in existence, put a very high priority on
education programs. Probably 25 per cent of our budget over that seven-year period has gone into what
we call our Waste Wise program, which deals with behavioural change programs in schools, in
communities, in local government and in businesses. We have also identified that going forward, as I
mentioned, there will need to be new collection and processing systems and expanded public place and
recycling infrastructure to capture many of the resources that are still going to landfill.
Another important initiative that will be need to be identified in the draft strategy is greater
product stewardship arrangements to deal with end-of-life waste, things like electrical and electronic
products, motor vehicles, oil, paints, paints – those products we buy, use and have no good place for
them to go at the moment. There needs to be a greater sharing of responsibility for those between the
product manufacturers, the retailers, local government and state government in bringing better recovery
systems into place, and more importantly, having better design in the first place that will facilitate use
of less toxic materials and facilitate greater recovery of the materials that they are made of at the end of
life. So product stewardship arrangements will be much more important going forward.
As I mentioned, our Waste Wise program deals with schools, businesses, government and
community. It is seeking to make long-term changes in behaviour as it relates to both consumption of
resources and disposal and recycling activity. The network of education officers through the regional
waste management groups provides a very effective way of delivering a consistent, well–structured
program to communities right across the state. And we have a team of industry advisers that work
particularly with business to support waste reduction and recycling programs in business.
We have a wide range of tools for the program. Case studies in particular are very important in
spreading the good work that is being done in various communities or organisations, and we have very
strong partnerships with a range of nongovernment organisations as well as local government in
delivering that program.
As I mentioned, the 16 regional groups have all got their education plans based on this model,
and that is translated into 70 of the 79 councils where Waste Wise education strategies are in place.
Our schools program involves curriculum development and in-school practices, and we provide
training to teachers throughout the state. Over 1000 teachers have been trained in 860 schools. I think
about a third of the total schools is now implementing a schools program, and there have been some
remarkable case studies – some of which I have mentioned in our written submission – where waste
reduction of up to 95 per cent has been achieved in some schools.
In the business context, we have signed up 2000 businesses to our Waste Wise program and
again there has been a fairly dramatic waste reduction and recycling outcome in many of those
businesses. There is a lot of low–hanging fruit out there; schools, businesses and offices can achieve
15

very significant waste reduction with very little additional cost, but with having the right information,
having the right people in that organisation motivated and then having the capacity to deliver a fairly
dramatic outcome in a fairly short time.
In addition, there are 20 mobile and permanent education centres across the state that support
the Waste Wise program, and many community groups and schools make excellent use of those
facilities. EcoRecycle has put funding support into many of those. We have a strong partnership with
Environment Victoria, a long-term community-based program dealing with sustainable production and
consumption. Sustainable production and consumption is a high priority for the United Nations
program at the moment, coming out of international conferences in South Africa most recently. It
really is the challenge for the future. It is looking at the whole supply chain that links production and
consumption. It is not a chain; it is more a circle. Through the partnership with Environment Victoria
we are trying to engage communities and NGOs across the state to work with businesses to see how
they can drive better outcomes in terms of consumption and behaviour change related to consumption
back into the production of the products or the packaging. So we are putting a lot of effort into that
program. The challenge is to move community behaviour from recycling outcomes – which we have
got very positive results from over the past 10 years – into waste avoidance. That is where the
production consumption cycle becomes critical.
The other potential barrier to better resource use in Victoria is the relatively low cost of landfill.
It is still significantly cheaper to throw materials away at the end of one use in most cases than it is to
recover and reprocess and re-use those materials.
The incentive to reduce waste disposal – there is not a strong economic incentive to reduce
waste disposal. The benefits of reducing waste disposal through recycling or waste avoidance are quite
strong, and we have done many reviews of the environmental benefits of less waste more recycling
which show a very strong and positive overall benefit to the State of Victoria through less water use,
less energy use, less air pollution, less water pollution – those sorts of things throw up very significant
net economic benefits to the state, but they do come at a cost in the short–term if we are looking at
investment in new processing and recovery facilities.
There are some slides of some of the things that we have supported through our infrastructure
grants program – many sorting facilities for kerbside materials, advanced technology to sort different
colours of glass at Laverton. Most licensed landfills around the state now have well-constructed
drop-off facilities for recyclable materials so that they are taken out before going into landfill and the
transfer station. Over half of the Victorian population is served by a best practice recycling system at
kerbside with smaller waste bins, larger recycling bins and now in many cases organic bins as well.
We are working with Bunnings and Dulux on a paint product stewardship program that was
very successful in a trial recently at Bayswater, and those companies are looking at extending it across
the state. Similarly, the electronic manufacturers are working up a product recovery scheme for
electrical materials – one of those product stewardship arrangements that I talked about. That is being
done in the context of national initiatives to deal with many of those end-of-life products.
Regional education – the 20 education officers around the state are very effective in working
with their communities with their local government colleagues, both at events they run and linking in to
other events to spread the Waste Wise message. There will be an increasing amount of
away-from-home recycling capability introduced in key public spaces and at events over the next three
years.
That is my presentation. I am happy to answer any questions.
The CHAIR – Thank you very much, Ian.
Mr DRUM – I am a little bit surprised – is it right that only half of the population would be well served by
bins? Is that what you are pushing?
Mr COLES – No. Some 95 per cent of Victorians have a kerbside recycling service; half of them have what
we would call best practice. There are still many situations where people have crates, and that may still
be appropriate in many of the rural locations.
Mr DRUM – I have had a few councils question the way that they fund EcoRecycle in relation to their waste
levy. Have you looked at the funding model, and do you think it is the right way for you guys to be
funded?
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Mr COLES – We get a regulated proportion of the total levy. Of the total level, councils contribute on the
latest figures about 25 per cent of the levy; industrial waste makes up 75 per cent of the levy
contribution.
Mr DRUM – So how does that work? Is that different from a domestic payment?
Mr COLES – Yes. When the truck comes up to the weighbridge at the landfill it is assessed is it from
residential sources or industrial sources, because a different levy rate applies to municipal versus
industrial waste. There is a higher amount for industrial waste. So depending on what the
classification is, the landfill operator collects the levy, pays it quarterly to EPA; EPA then divide up the
levy in accordance with the regulations and we get – I think at the moment about 55 per cent –
Ms PICKLES – It is a little higher than that –
Mr COLES – It is a decreasing amount in percentage terms, but it will still be increasing because the levy
itself wraps it up, so I think it is appropriate. The converse of that funding, where 75 per cent comes
from the industrial sector and 25 per cent from municipal: our programs deliver – roughly 60 per cent
of the funding goes to municipal programs, the sorts of kerbside sorting collection systems that I have
outlined, and only 40 per cent goes to industrial, so there is a sort of cross-subsidy, if you like, funding
municipal-based programs from the industrial waste levy collections.
Mr HILTON – You mentioned low-hanging fruit, low-cost, dramatic outputs in a short period of time. Could
you be a bit more precise as to the examples you have for that.
Mr COLES – One example I saw recently was out at Holeproof in Nunawadding–
Mr HILTON – I am thinking particularly at the household level.
Mr COLES – Those comments I made relate more to situations like schools, offices and businesses rather
than at the household level. I think in the household it is very difficult to reduce waste. We are really
captive to the pollution cycle, if you like. There is not much out there about the marketplace to
discriminate the products or the packaging. We are really left with very few options. The focus that
we have had on the household is to improve the recycling systems so that we are getting the paper, the
containers, out of the waste stream into the recycling stream where they can be converted, re-used and
recycled, and I think we have done a very good job there. The big and most difficult challenge is how
we can get householders producing less waste in the first place. There is no simple solution.
Mr HILTON – The household waste per capita, how does Australia compare with other similar countries?
Mr COLES – Unfortunately we are right up there in the top two or three, and we produce nearly a tonne per
household.
Mr HILTON – Not two or three of the best?
Mr COLES – No, the worst. US is probably just ahead of us.
Mr HILTON – So which countries similar to Australia would be far better at producing less waste on a per
capita basis?
Ms PICKLES – It is a very difficult one, because we are quite unique in ourselves in where we reside and our
whole structures and everything. The Europeans, I suppose, do some of the better stuff, but they do it
in the context cost of landfill of $200 a tonne, and they do it in the context of quite strong regulations.
And Australia has not had a strong regulatory environment for this, so quite different circumstances, I
suppose. Israel is doing some interesting stuff at the moment.
Mr COLES – Probably the Scandinavians, but it is very hard to make good comparisons, different data. We
are now looking at our green organics as part of the waste stream. Not many other countries,
particularly European countries, would have a service that collects organics because they don't have the
same quarter-acre block garden estate-type living situation, so we are including more now in what we
call waste. We are recovering some of it, but we are including more, so it is very hard to make valid
comparisons internationally, but I think by any measure we produce a lot of waste per household.
Mr HILTON – These statistics, they are available, are they, on a per capita basis?
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Mr COLES – Yes.
Ms PICKLES – They are very infrequently collected. OECD does do regular surveys, but one of the points
of frustration for us is that they can often cover a number of years, and when it does come out it is
about four, five years different data for every country, so making comparisons is very difficult in terms
of recording as well.
Mr COLES – We do have that information, but you always question whether it is consistently together.
Ms COOTE – I have two questions. First of all, as you said, you seek to make long-term changes, and if you
had a look at the diagrams you gave us early on, you said there was a 51 per cent increase in waste to
start with – and I certainly commend you on teaching the children, because I think that is the way of the
future – but we have behavioural changes as part of our brief. Obviously your experience has been it
will take a significantly long time, unless we go into some sort of regulatory program, to change those
behavioural patterns. Is that your feeling about it? You have been going eight years, and from your
own acknowledgement it looks as if it is going backwards, so where do we go?
Mr COLES – I don't think we are going backwards. We have stabilised waste generation, and we are
certainly recovering more. We have set ourselves a target over the next 10 years to reverse those to
turn down the waste generation curve and to continue to increase the resource recovery proportion. I
think it does take time, and I don't think we can regulate behaviour change that effectively. I think you
have to work with schools and communities to get a better understanding. As I was saying before we
started the presentation, things like a drought focus the community's mind on resource issues generally.
We can take advantage of that situation, if you like, to really highlight some of the sustainability issues
of the unsustainable practices that we have got, not only related to water but to other resources as well.
We generate waste with the inefficient use of resources, so I think the community has certainly shown
an incredible capacity to pick up household recycling programs. It has been extraordinary in the last
15 years – the extent of programs that have been rolled out across the state and the commitment of the
community to do that. I think we have to take advantage of that and start influencing the waste
generation messages linked to that, and that will take more time. It is a long-term change.
Ms COOTE – The second part of my question is not directly related to we are not looking at industry as
such – but I would be really interested in hearing from you about which businesses have been actually
doing better since you have had them under analysis, or which industry sectors are in fact doing better.
Mr COLES – It is difficult to single – I mean, we can use case studies. Ian mentioned Holeproof, and we
have worked with Master Foods. I think the big challenge for us is in the small to medium enterprise
businesses, where there are hundreds of thousands of them in the state very focused on short-term
financial survival. It is very hard to engage in a discussion about sustainable resource use. You would
have to be one-on-one with 200 000 businesses, and it is not because they are not interested; their focus
has to be elsewhere. So collectively it is that large number of small to medium enterprises that
probably don't have the capacity to deal with these issues at the moment. Most of the larger
organisations, you can engage them from a cost-saving point of view, from a corporate citizenship
point of view; they want to do the right thing and be seen to do the right thing and they can see good
outcomes, but for most of the smaller businesses it is very hard to engage on that basis.
Ms COOTE – So to tie both of those in – the changes that you are hoping to make behaviourally with the
students – hopefully, some of those people will be the small to medium-size enterprise leaders into the
future. And are you expecting to have the behaviour change translate into better practices when they
get there?
Mr COLES – The school, into the home, into the workplace, that is the sort of relationship that we are trying
to build.
Ms COOTE – Thank you.
Ms PICKLES – I think in the actual submission we sent in on Friday we do cover some of those issues in
terms of how there has – based on some of the case study work – been the transition from school into
the home and into the workplace.
Ms COOTE – Thank you very much.
The CHAIR – Ian, can I go back to the packaging – and I think in answering one of Geoff's questions you
mentioned the inability of households to make a lot of change, because whatever they buy is packaged
four times and always very difficult to open. There is a covenant.
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Mr COLES – Yes.
The CHAIR – Can you make some comments about the success or otherwise of the packaging –
Mr COLES – The covenant has had its first five years, and it has been extensively – independently reviewed
in the last six months. I think there were three different reviews, and they all concluded that it hadn't
delivered what it set out to do, and there were a number of reasons for that. I think any objective
review would have to agree that it really hasn't delivered what the original expectations were. I think in
looking forward to a new covenant, the shortfalls from the last five years have been well recognised –
and certainly the proposals that are out for consultation at the moment on a new covenant do pick up
the weaknesses, getting stronger commitments from the packaging community in terms of their action
plans, being much more accountable for delivering on those action plans. I think that is the key
weakness. The focus, I guess, in the five years has been more on getting people signed up and involved
rather than the next step of sign-up, involved and delivery of outcomes. I think that is where we have
to ensure that we have got the right sort of balance of cooperation and regulation, if you like, to ensure
that the commitments are actually delivered.
The CHAIR – Your strategy Towards Zero Waste is draft form?
Mr COLES – Yes.
The CHAIR – What is the process from here?
Mr COLES – We went to the minister, who looked at it around the end of last year. They wanted some more
work done on the impact of the strategy, on the various sectors – households, commerce and industry
and the construction and demolition sector. We commissioned a number of additional studies and we
are rewriting the strategy at the moment, so we are hoping to have it back to the minister within a
month or so.
The CHAIR – The targets that you have set in the strategy, what do you think are the biggest challenges?
Mr COLES – I think the avoidance one is the biggest challenge – turning that curve down, reducing the
amount generated by the 15 per cent of or 286 000 tonnes in real terms, that is going to be hard.
The CHAIR – Thank you very much for your time this morning.
Mr COLES – Thank you.
Witnesses withdrew
19

CORRECTED VERSION
ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE
Inquiry into Sustainable Communities
Melbourne – 5 July 2004
Members
Ms J. Lindell Ms A. Coote
Mr D. Drum Ms J. Duncan
Mr G. Hilton Ms W. Lovell
Mr G. Seitz
Chair: Ms J. Lindell
Deputy Chair: Ms A. Coote
Staff
Executive Officer: Ms Caroline Williams
Research Officers: Mr David Fairbridge
Witnesses
M. Bourke, Chairman and Dr E. Philips, Manager
Neighbourhood Environment Improvement Program, EPA.
20

The CHAIR – All evidence taken by the committee is taken under the provisions of the Parliamentary
Committees Act and is protected from judicial review. However, any comments made outside the
precincts of this hearing are not protected by parliamentary privilege. If you’d like to make a start, we
will then ask questions, thank you, Mick.
Mr BOURKE – Certainly. We thank the committee for the opportunity to make a presentation, and we will
follow up with a submission later on. We’ll probably take about 20 minutes in presentation; it’ll leave
plenty of time for questions, and Emily will, as I finish some of my comments, speak a little bit more
about neighbourhood environment improvement plans, which we think are a significant way to bring
about increased capacity in community and also some of the behavioural change needs that seem to be
identified regularly.
Could I just say at the outset that we’re all creatures of behaviour and we all suffer information
overload, which makes it very difficult for us to make changes efficiently. This room is not a bad
example. The lighting in this room will probably be somewhere between 300 per cent and 400 per cent
of the minimum standards required under the building and lighting regulations. We could in fact
delamp this building – this room 50% – and still have adequate light and reduce greenhouse emissions.
We just recently did that across our business. We’re a small organization, 350-plus people, over seven
or eight sites. The de-lamping program will generate enough greenhouse gas emission savings that
would otherwise be generated by 26 motor vehicles a year. So it’s not insignificant, but it is about
behavioural change.
At a household level, due to the fact that I live between two major cities – Melbourne and
Bendigo – and because we can’t quite make the weekly rubbish collection, we got a compost bin a
couple of years ago for the food scraps – the kitchen vegetable scraps, not the meat. When you get that
compost bin that big you think to yourself, “About three months and I’ll have that full”. We’ve been
running for three years and it’s not half full yet. So only as you start to practice processes like
composting do you realise how much in breakdown those waste materials take and the benefit of reuse
within your own property. Some 25 years ago the City of Castlemaine, where I was, was giving away
compost bins to anyone who wanted them. There weren’t too many takers. I wish I had’ve taken a
couple then.
So again, what drives behavioural change? For me it was necessity; for our organisation it’s
environment improvement plans within our business, and at the household level we need to use the
combination of information, necessity and some planning. Information alone does not bring about
behavioural change. However, when it comes to making some lifestyle decisions, it is useful to have
access to relevant useful information. Again I say that we have a lot of information coming at us as
members of the community. At our metropolitan and regional service centres we try to set up one-stop
shops for public industry and environment groups and government.
Last year at those centres we handled more than 80 000 phone calls seeking helpful information.
Just to break those down a little bit – this year we’ll get 18 000 calls, which are reports to our litter line,
which is obstensibly litter thrown from vehicles. The community is active, is participating and is
generating inquiries to make a difference in respect to litter. We’ll get about 15 000 approaches from
the community on smokey vehicles. If we can reduce smokey vehicles, we are in fact reducing
greenhouse emission and pollution and health impacts in the community. And we’ll get probably about
20 000 contacts on our pollution line for pollution events or concerns about the simplest of things –
household asbestos and the like – which are important issues to deal with on a regular basis. So we’re
able to deal with the community in those ways reasonably efficiently and at reasonably low cost. In
fact, the litter line basically helps sponsor the rest of it, given that each litter offence carries on average
a $100 to $200 penalty. So that gives us a source of revenue to man those services.
Other examples of the information we provide: every day you can pick up the Herald Sun or the
Age and look at Melbourne’s air quality, and the prediction of air quality over the next week. It also
references in television weather reports. We do, during the summer months, the beach reports so the
community can assess where it is safe and healthy to swim and where it isn’t. We do that on a daily
basis. Certainly during tragic events like bushfires, we provide a lot of information in concert with the
Department of Human Services on how people should protect themselves from any health impacts of
those types of events.
Campaigns we run are a bit aligned to those reporting avenues I spoke about before: smoky
vehicle campaigns – we run radio campaigns at least once a year; vehicle maintenance campaigns
featuring Peter Brock have been run for the last three or four years; the litter campaign was launched in
regional Victoria this year – mobile billboards across most major centres in Victoria as well as radio
advertisements – and people have probably heard some of those advertisements. My favourite – and
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it’s all along the theme that it’s alright to report these things, that it’s not un-Australian to dob in a
litterer or someone who’s got a smokey vehicle. We use the analogy that if it’s okay to call an umpire a
white maggot, then it’s okay to dob in someone who litters at the event. We’ve removed that ad
because it was offensive to the umpiring fraternity. I still like it.
Mr HILTON – Plus it’s offensive to white maggots!
Mr BOURKE – We’ll soon run out a campaign on wood smoke from solid fuel heaters. And we might talk
about that a little bit, more because that’s one of the levels of energy use in homes; it’s quite
predominant in regional Victoria and some of the suburbs of Melbourne – some by necessity, some by
choice. The EPA Internet site – we get about 250 000 hits a month, so a lot of information is sourced
from that site. And we put out probably 100-plus publications each year. Given the nature of our
organisation, many of those reports are technical in nature, but about 15 to 20 of those reports focus on
something that householders can consider and the community in general can consider.
A couple of the programs or activity areas that we’ve been focusing on – perhaps I might just
deal with environmental regulation, because that’s our main business and it does have a bit impact on
households. Emerging issues and issues we’ve been working on for a little while are what are the right
standards – if we can use that word – or guidelines is the document that’ll be carrying them, for
recycled water. So whether it’s a household or vegetable facility or other agricultural facility, EPA
Victoria will be the ones who set standards to be met, and that incorporates the health requirements of
DHS, so the community can feel that both reused water that comes to their household for garden
watering or for toilet cistern charging is in fact good for the environment or safe for the environment
and safe in a health sense. We think that that will be very important for communities and households to
take up recycled water into the future. We think that’s a building block regulatory position. And that
means not just treated effluent from wastewater facilities, but also treated stormwater, or how you
manage greywater within your own home site. I do note government’s recent White Paper has an
expectation that that will be delivered more fully.
I’ve mentioned before solid fuel heaters, where the government has recently made a waste
management policy, a regulatory instrument or a policy setting for regulatory instruments. Some
60 per cent of the air pollution that we have during the winter months is largely from domestic wood
fires. That’s a very large amount. It’s quite an accurate picture. What we need to do is make sure
we’ve got the most efficient wood heaters in homes. So many homes in regional Victoria have little
option but to use wood as a source of energy. Some make a lifestyle choice, I suspect, where there are
other fuels available. But in all of those instances we’d like to ensure that those solid fuel heaters are
efficient in their design and their manufacture. Recent reports have shown that that is not the case,
regardless of how they’re attested. Over 50 per cent – even those that were said to be compliant with
Australian standards – were in fact not compliant. So we want to make sure that we at a state level can
ensure that those products meet the standards, and that through local government and through our own
campaigns we can provide information on how best to use them. Dry wood burning bright is the best
way to get good heat and low-air emissions. That’s a simple message we’ll be selling.
Ms COOTE – What did you say, “dry wood burning bright”?
Mr BOURKE – Dry wood burning bright, yes. So that’s what we’re trying to encourage, and we hold no
shares in wood plantations or solid fuel heater manufacturers, so we do that with a degree of
independence. And we’ll have an enforcement capacity behind that not to go into homes and take away
wood heaters, I don’t think that’s where we want to head by any means, but certainly to make sure that
at a design and manufacture level wood heaters are fit for the purpose that the standards dictate. Ian
Coles from EcoRecycle touched a little bit before on product stewardship and lifecycle approaches. He
talked about those being the way of the future, and they certainly are. We see it as critical at product
design stage that we get the most environmentally efficient, or effective product. It’s too late at the
waste end to try to – well, it’s not too late, but it’s harder at the waste end to do something about those
redundant products than it is at the front end. If you look at our website, you’ll see that we have a
curious home hint about using yoghurt tubs for pot plant holders and the like. Why would we do
something as strange as that? Because your little yoghurt tub is not recyclable, so until it is recyclable,
until there’s a market capacity there for that, we’d rather people think about another use than just
putting it to landfill.
Ms COOTE – You’ll have to change the shape.
Mr BOURKE – Yes, we’ll have to make them a bit bigger. But I think that there is an issue in the economics
of getting recycling for all materials. It’s not there yet. Volume is an important part; technology is
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another. Ian Coles and his team do a terrific job in moving that forward, and they talked about their
paint back program, which I saw on the weekend. I talk to manufacturers such as Dulux, and they put
out the recycled paint at the same price as new paint. They’re selling 10 tubs of the new paint and nine
tubs of the recycled paint. The community is willing to take it up without discrimination. I know Ian
didn’t reference it, and I’ll mention it anyway, but the program that EcoRecycle do in chemical
collection from households I think is phenomenal. In terms of sustainability at a household waste level
to move things like paint and chemicals out of homes when they’re not fully utilised is important. The
lifecycle approaches go further. The discussion was around the national packaging covenant. We’d
like to see that moved forward to ensure that we do reduce the levels of packaging volume over time. I
think it hasn’t been well measured in the past, and one of the features going forward will be to have
definite targets and definite measurements – and the state is supporting a very stringent change to the
packaging covenant at the moment.
But this lifecycle approach to design is a critical one if we’re going to reduce our ecological
impact. We have measures that I’ll talk about in a moment that are useful in that sphere. When we talk
about greenhouse gas emission and other things that households can take and make an impact on –
some of the simple things are not necessarily within the household but related. Your mode of transport
is critical. In Victoria we have a fairly low take-up in terms of public transport, but it is growing
steadily, there’s no doubt about that. We have a lot of motor vehicles on the road, and a lot of the work
that we do as an environmental regulator is to ensure that that gets better. So we put in place, along
with all others at a national level, standards to ensure that motor vehicle fuels become less hazardous to
the environment and that motor vehicles are able to burn those fuels in a more efficient way. So by
2006-2007, for instance, diesel fuels will reduce from 500 parts per million sulfur to 50 parts per
million. We think that’s pretty good. In Europe they’re already shooting for 10 and 5, so we will
always keep moving in that direction. The refinery capacity in Australian means that we can take steps
only at a certain level. So there are some market implications about how fast – and even in the motor
vehicle industry, the retooling for Ford to produce the motors we require to meet the standards in that
same time frame will probably cost them $30 million or $40 million, and that has to be spread
efficiently over vehicle costs in the community.
Just slightly off the tangent of regulation – we are also involved with the United Nations
environment program finance initiative in the Asia-Pacific. We run that program on their behalf. In
recent times we’re seeing an emergence out of some of the finance sector in a great many ways towards
environmental care and responsibility. One, a credit union here in Victoria, has launched green loans,
particularly for motor vehicles at this stage, so you’ll pay less for a loan if you were purchasing an
environmentally efficient four-cylinder vehicle versus a Toorak tractor, for instance. And that reduction
is quite important, particularly if you’re targeting that at the second car in the home, or the young
person entering the motor vehicle fleet. That vehicle also has sequestration of carbon emissions through
Green Fleet, so its carbon impacts are offset in that same process. I think that’s more of these bundled
packages, so that you do offset your emission at the front end, and it is a very responsible way to move
foreward. If I can remember the name of the credit union I’d give it a plug, but I can’t
Just quickly before I hand to Emily, so as not to take too much time – sustainability covenants
are also an important feature of the resource efficiency legislation in the last couple of years. They’re
allowing us to improve resource efficiency and to reduce the ecological footprint, whether at an industry
level or at a community level if we so desire. One we’re developing at the moment is a sustainable
residential development, and that residential development will in fact set a standard we hope that other
residential developments can follow into the future. No only will it engage the five-star standard house
designs, but will go beyond that and engage a third-pipe recycled system, access to transport and those
types of issues. Ecological footprint is a concept we’ve found to be effective in communication about
the environmental impacts of everyday activities. So again, we sit here as good Victorians concerned
about our environment. Ecological footprint measures the amount of land you would need to sustain
our lifestyles. Each of us needs a land requirement so that if we multiplied it across the base of the
earth we’d need three planets to sustain us. That can be a little bit of a depressing thought, but what it
does is indicate is that we have to compress our ecological footprint to be sustainable well into the
future, and all the things this committee is looking at a household and community level are vital if we’re
going to shrink our footprint – and this process was used recently by the City of Port Phillip in one of its
programs. They set some targets that were not unaligned to this committee’s charter about reductions
within households, as I understand it, of water, of energy and waste. They used the ecological footprint
as a measure of where they were before they started in a household and what size footprint they had as
they started to meet these targets. While in that process they found their targets were a little ambitious,
it certainly gave them good information to work out where the main changes can occur. And they may
well be worthwhile – so hopefully they’ll put a submission to your committee on that process.
The other thing I want to introduce and ask Emily if she could speak to is neighbourhood
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environment improvement plans – again, a fairly recent initiative. We’ve got three pilot programs well
under way and several others kicking off at the moment. Communities around Victoria are using
neighbourhood environment improvement plans to deal with a variety of issues ranging from local
pollution problems to generating community and household behaviour change. Emily will speak about
that change in respect of Anglesea. Just checking my notes, I probably need to leave it about there,
otherwise Emily won’t have much to say.
Dr PHILIPS – Thanks, Mick. I’m assuming everyone knows where Anglesea is, before I launch off into
discussion. Anglesea has approximately 2000 permanent residents, and as you know, being a tourist
town, that number expands dramatically in the tourist season; it goes as high as 10 000 in peak times.
Because of its location and because of the nature of its economy with tourism, the town is under
significant pressure to expand, but it is surrounded by forests, heath lands and the ocean, so there is a
range of factors that makes expansion an interesting challenge for them locally. A growing number of
the residential population in Anglesea in particular, but also some of the part-time residents who have
holiday houses down there, are really interested in working to achieve a more environmental
sustainable lifestyle within the town and to protect the natural assets in their local environment. In
recognition of this, Surf Coast Shire who is the council down there, decided to sponsor the
development of the Neighbourhood Environment Improvement Plan – or Neighbourhood EIP as I refer
to them, if that’s okay as it’s such a mouthful – for the township of Anglesea.
There are a number of partners aside from the council who are involved, and they include
Alcoa, Corangamite Catchment Management Authority, Barwon Water, the Local Tourism and Traders
Association, the local schools, and a range of government agencies, including DSE, have been heavily
involved; a plethora of local community groups. Anglesea is an extremely active local community,
with permanent and part-time residents. Many of these partners have invested significant time and
resources into this project, ranging from monetary contributions right down to the local Lions Club
doing the barbeques at social events – the absolute full range. The community has set up a community
leadership group, which is a combination of some of these partners who are investing in this process,
and a range of local residents – in particular, ones who are seen as leaders in the local community and
who it is believed can generate change among their peers in the community. They’ve worked together
to identify some key objectives for Anglesea. They want the Neighbourhood EIP to build community
capacity to live more sustainably in their town, to protect their natural ecological values, to reduce their
ecological footprint – as Mick mentioned – and to develop a model program for community
sustainability and household change, which can be learnt from by others.
Now in order to achieve these objectives, there has been a major focus on the household
level and how to generate household change, and the recognition that a lot of the issues around
sustainability in Anglesea are the result of households behaving in certain ways – and there is also a
need to kick off a lot of this change at household level. Some of the things that have been going on are
that residents and households have calculated their ecological footprint using the calculators that Mick
mentioned, and households have developed sustainability action plans for their own household to
reduce their household footprint. This has involved doing things such as reducing water use, reducing
energy use, looking at their waste creation and ways that they can minimise that. Local residents have
been trained up to do household audits, and they’ve been going around to each other’s houses and doing
audits of their energy use, water use, and other activities like that, to enable households to easily
identify things they can do to make some changes. There has been a retrofit program with things like
showerheads and energy efficient light bulbs, and a whole range of things. It’s been brokered in from
lots of different agencies, but locals have been able to talk to other locals to make changes in their
households.
They’ve set up a community vegetable garden and a composting facility to deal with
greenwaste and there’s been a pest plant removal and fire management audit developed by the local
community with CFA with the idea that a small group of locals, along with the CFA, go around each
other’s blocks, look at pest plants on the block and look at how they can remove those in order to
reduce the fire load on the block. So it’s got mutual benefits for biodiversity locally and also for fire
management.
One of the interesting challenges for a community like Anglesea, as it is a mixture of
permanent and part-time residents, was the degree to which the part-timers aren’t really interested in the
sustainability of the township. There has also been tension between the part-time and permanent
community around a whole lot of issues, and they saw this as one possible way to reduce some of that
tension. As a starting point they’ve developed this thing called bin buddies. One of the burning issues
in Anglesea is the fact that part-timers leave their bins out, put them out way before the rubbish is
collected, so it blows around – or they leave their bins out for weeks on end and the bins blow around
the streets, and this was causing a high level of angst. The bin buddies scheme matches up a local
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Anglesea resident with a part-timer and they make arrangements about bringing the bins in. It sounds
like a small thing, but it’s linking parts of the community together, getting them to talk about issues of
household sustainability, and from that they’re now starting to deal with other environmental issues in
the households.
Other activities and initiatives of the Surf Coast Shire – in particular the community has
undertaken to run social events. The Anglesea process has been a very social thing. The Anglesea
community deliberately set out to have the dual objectives of improving household sustainability but
getting to know one another and building a community that can do these kinds of things as well. So
they’ve run social events with high-profile speakers; they’ve had a sustainability forum down the Great
Ocean Road, and borrowing from the Sustainable Living-At-Home model the City of Port Phillip has
developed, they’ve run seminars on key sustainability themes in the town around things like water use,
energy use, the way they’ve brokered in support from water authorities and other places to bring them
technical advice, and also to provide freebies for people – like free showerheads and those types of
things – so they’ll actually come. They’ve found those have been very effective in moving beyond the
early “adopters” we like to call them – who are the households you can quite easily get to make these
changes – to others who are um-ing and ah-ing on the edges but if there’s something free involved will
come along and will make some of the changes.
Anglesea is also going to be the first plastic-bag-free community in Victoria – and this
Neighbourhood EIP process and the community leadership group have created the drive for that.
They’ve brought the traders and the local businesses on board to achieve that.
Mr DRUM – Sorry, Emily, what was that? Free –
Dr PHILIPS – Plastic bag.
Mr DRUM – Plastic-bag-free, yes.
Dr PHILIPS – Where are we up to now? The plan is almost completed; it will be coming into EPA for
endorsement in a couple of months. Once it’s finalised, the community leadership group will continue
to exist; they will oversee its implementation – participating households who’ve signed on will
continue to report on their environmental improvements at the household level, and continue to
encourage other households to join in, which is very important. Finally, it’s been very interesting.
EPA has run this pretty much as a pilot. We haven’t really done anything like this before, and I don’t
think there is anything similar to NEIPs around even Australia, or internationally, that have a statutory
basis as these do. We’re finding some very interesting things about how to generate household
behaviour change. Firstly, how effective localised approaches are. If things are made locally relevant,
they are just so much more important to people who live in those localities; that it’s very important
when you design these kinds of programs to identify local barriers and specifically try to address those
and not to assume that there are global barriers in this sort of behaviour change, that there are some
very locally specific things.
Households actually are quite willing to make a lot of these changes if they’re approached in
the right sort of way and have some control over the process themselves, and if it’s done in a social
context where there are a lot of other community benefits along the way other than just making
environmental changes in the home. But it is building increased trust and improved relationships in the
Anglesea community, particularly between the permanent and part-time residents. The statutory basis
of Neighbourhood EIPs: when the plan comes into EPA it becomes a statutory binding document and
all the parties who’ve signed onto it – the statutory nature means that the community, their local
business and the local government agencies are making a serious commitment to action, they’re making
a public commitment to action, and that means they’re much more likely to follow through on those
behaviour changes and keep maintaining them into the future.
Mr BOURKE – If I could pick up just on two things before we close off. The work we do and the work that
Emily and her team do, but right across the EPA – we find that there’s any amount of willingness,
cooperation and spirit to implement more environmentally sustainable activities, whether it’s in
households, community or industry in Victoria. What we find, though, is all of those places are saying,
“Show us how to do it”. We’re having difficulty in working out the best way to convert the spirit that’s
there to the actions that we know are possible. I imagine that that’s something that will trouble the
community as well. NEIPs are showing us a way to do that in some areas. We don’t know yet, but we
believe that that would be quite replicable, and we should get some real efficiencies in delivering that
further into the future. We’re also investing in understanding some of the other tools of behavioural
change – non-regulatory – further over the next year or so.
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Just to hark back to a question Damian asked earlier of Ian Coles about landfill levies,
because levies as economic drivers are often a factor in environment improvement as well: if we look at
a household level, the current landfill levy for municipal waste is probably about $5 to $10 a tonne, and
it will grow to about $9 to $10 a tonne over the next four years. But $5 to $6 a tonne, given that about
half of what comes out of a household ends up in a landfill, the levy is probably a $3 driver a year in
your rates – in your garbage rates, or whatever we call them these days. We call them garbage rates –
$3 of it is a landfill levy, and the other $200 is the logistics and whatever else – council managing in
that package as well. The council is doing a terrific job in waste. It is the foundation that links the
notions of the community to action to the state-based programs in waste. So the councils are critical in
converting the spirit of the community to meet the aspirations of our plans for waste reductions at a
municipal level. The levies themselves are important to fund our programs and ends, but the economic
driver alone isn’t enough. We run the lowest cost landfills in Australia in Victoria, which is an
impediment to recycling. Anyway got that ad in.
The CHAIR – Damian questions?
Mr DRUM – Thank you and thanks very much for the presentations. They were both very, very good. I’d
just like to talk a little bit about water – and obviously Mick has his experience with Bendigo – I
understand that we’re on stage four up there.
Mr BOURKE – Indeed.
Mr DRUM – The thought in some of the other towns in relation to my area, such as Ouyen, where they’re
thinking about – or they’re going onto sewerage – and the readiness of the relevant authorities, whether
it be Department of Water or whether it’s EPA or whoever is letting out the contracts, to actually reuse
the reusable water after it’s been out and been treated, seems to be lagging very much behind. And
right throughout this baron part of Victoria we’re still pouring drinking water onto our golf fields, our
sporting reserves and our nature strips. I suppose the question I want to ask is, are we doing enough in
that area?
Mr BOURKE – I think the government’s White Paper it put out a couple of weeks ago starts to approach
more support for those initiatives. In Melbourne we’re shooting for a target of 20 per cent of reuse of
treated wastewater by 2010. In non-metropolitan Victoria we know that we’re already achieving 50 per
cent reuse and in 1989 before EPA put out its first State Environmental Protection Policy, Waters of
Victoria, that was about 4 per cent. So the policy driver that we have has been important in bringing
about that change. When we get to the specifics of Damian’s question, I believe we should be using a
lot more of that treated effluent adequately on public lands and sporting facilities. Certainly there are
three grades of wastewater that are important to think of – or recycled water – A, B and C. A being
something that while we wouldn’t drink it, we could grow our vegetables with it, wash them with it and
send them to international markets from it; B is really useful if you’re wanting to wash down dairy
sheds and facilities like that; and C is generally good enough for most forms of agriculture and very
very limited human contact. So it could work if you watered sports grounds at night, for instance, and
didn’t play for say 24 hours thereafter. So that’s quite possible in a lot of small communities. Most
wastewater treatment plants across Victoria will be producing at least class C. So the opportunity is
there in a lot of those small towns to get beneficial reuse, and I would hope that out of the White Paper
we get some more support for funds from environmental levies to allow that to occur in those towns.
Mr HILTON – Thanks, Emily. Certainly the NEIP idea seems to go to the very heart of this committee’s
inquiry as to what we can do at the local level to become more environmentally sustainable. In your
written submission I would like to see a lot of detail as to the objectives of this program; whether
you’re setting yourself targets of a reduction in waste or energy management, and what can be done to
achieve those targets. I suppose it all comes down as well in the final analysis to behavioural change.
I’m wondering how you see penalties being part of behavioural change, because I know in Ireland
when they introduced their charge for a plastic bag, the use of plastic bags went down 90 per cent
almost overnight. We haven’t done that in Australia, and I’m just wondering from your perspective
whether if such a regime is introduced for energy waste or water management, how effective that
would be.
Mr BOURKE – That’s an interesting one, Geoff, and I know Emily can speak on targets that may or may not
be set in NEIPs. But the notion of penalties is more interesting. We have de facto penalties, I suppose,
in waste levies; the more you discharge the more you pay. In water, the more you use, the more you
pay. In energy, the more you use, the more you pay. We’ve always been seen to express those in the
positive in the Australian experience. We don’t seem to actually set up – so, you know, it is true that
the less you use in energy and the less water and the less waste, then the less you will pay. I don’t
know if that’s altogether clear to a householder as to whether that’s enough incentive. To go the other
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way, to say if you don’t reduce then you will pay a higher penalty, is interesting. If I can quote an
example that I have seen – and it’s not of my making, so it’s probably best to talk to DSE or someone –
but the White Paper on water is now projecting an inclining step tariff for water, so that you will pay
significantly more as you get to the higher levels of usage. Those types of things could be of use.
Again, I don’t say this from an EPA perspective, but from a background in water and looking at energy
often we have to be careful with those who are the higher users who don’t have other alternatives who
may be of low income having some way to manage through that. The plastic bag instance is a concept
that the ministers for environment of all states and the commonwealth must look at, as it is a cost
embedded within your supermarket bill – the cost of plastic bags now. It’s not that we don’t pay; it’s
just that it’s not transparent.
Mr HILTON – It’s not seen.
Mr BOURKE – And I think one thing that the minister was keen on here was to try to make that transparent,
but at a national level that wasn’t possible. And certainly I think the Irish did a very good job of not
only making it transparent but also enhancing the price a bit to get immediate behaviour change. I
think that is an effective way on issues where the community have a [indistinct].
Mr HILTON – In terms of the international perspective, I think Emily said you thought that these NEIPs were
unique. Are there any other authorities, jurisdictions that you did look at before you came up with this
concept?
Dr PHILIPS – The Neighbourhood EIP legislation was written and passed in parliament before I started at the
EPA. However, I know that they did look extensively around the world at other models. There are lots
of models around, and in fact there are models in Victoria. There’s a provision under the Catchment
Land Protection Act, for example – I think they’re called Local Area Plans – whereby rural
communities can get together to determine resource use and sustainability type issue. However, the
difference is that NEIPs have a statutory base in the sense that it is a binding commitment, essentially.
There are lots of other planning provisions around – this is what I’m saying – the same sort of
community development theory that is about bringing together communities to work on things. My
reading of the international literature around this, and a lot of the studies that have happened overseas,
suggests that the commitment process is actually very important. One of the drivers of behaviour in
communities is the desire to be seen to be consistent publicly with what the community stands for, and
by making a public commitment through a process like this, individuals, businesses and local
government agencies are committing themselves publicly to doing things that they then have to be seen
to do, and that commitment is formal.
Mr HILTON – But that commitment is optional?
Dr PHILIPS – Oh, absolutely. There is no way under the legislation that anyone is forced to participate in
this process, but we need to bring into play a range of social mechanisms, which mean that local
communities apply pressure internally to ensure as many people as possible are involved. For example,
it’s very important that certain businesses are involved, or certain organisations are involved, that
communities work that stuff through themselves. And we’re finding that this just hasn’t been an issue
at all; they’re lining up.
Ms COOTE – My question is actually very much along those lines too, about the community itself. Now
obviously there are some driving this – there are some people who are enthusiastic and want to embrace
this at this stage and maybe into the future – or hopefully there would be some more to follow behind
them. I think Mick said before that partly we’re very anxious and very willing to be participants in
recycling and sustainability, but we don’t know how to do it as a community. But I don’t see that we
get sufficient feedback to say, “Yes, we have in fact altered that footprint” or that by recycling all that
glass and all that plastic we have actually made a difference – and “What the little bit that I can do will
make a difference”. Now in a situation where you’ve got a microcosm really down there, with
everybody working together and going into what Geoff said before about problem monitoring
long-term, is that feedback built into the next program? Can you see that it’s actually been very
effective and efficient?
Dr PHILIPS – Absolutely. Households are reporting annually on the changes they’ve made and measuring
their changes in energy use and water use, et cetera, et cetera – which is being gathered together and
fed back into Anglesea’s overall ecological footprint. The idea being that these “early adopter
households” – and at the moment it is predominantly what we call “earlier adopter households” who are
participating – as you expect, when something like this is new, the idea being that that will then
leverage other people to get involved as they see the changes.
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Mr BOURKE – I think, Andrea, one of the difficulties is that communities don’t really understand the impact
they have if they do reduce, and I think that’s what you’re saying. So what is the feedback mechanism?
We recently signed a sustainability covenant with City West Water, a water retailer on the western and
CBD areas of Melbourne. As part of that they’re trying to take the ecological footprint and develop
that as a mechanism they will use on their water bill, so that they can show a footprint of an efficient
house, for instance, and match that against what your footprint actually is in a month, or the quarter, or
whatever it happens to be. So you get some very graphic – just graphics – but very simple
understanding that you’re either better then or worse then in terms of ecological impact. And maybe
there is room to think about how we do that messaging across broader things – not only say all our
utility-type invoicing so you can wrap in the energy, you can wrap in the gas, and so on.
Ms COOTE – My understanding is – I mean, if it’s simple, you’ll do it. I recently had the example of a new
toner at home. It came with all these 55 million directions about what I can do to recycle this thing,
and I thought – I was in a hurry – I thought this is much too difficult, and into the rubbish tin it went.
So the reality is I’m happy with the glass, I’m happy with the green stuff, I’m happy with the paper and
all those other things – plastics I’m really good at – but the reality is it needs to be really simpler. I
don’t think the message for us is to take it to the next stage. Is that your responsibility? Is that going to
be EPA? Who in all these agencies out there is going to be responsible for this particular aspect of it
all?
Mr BOURKE – There have been attempts to lead a simplification of what and how we recycle for a long
time. So we need to do it at a national level. And the best place to do that, I think, is at the
Environmental Protection and Heritage Council level, where our Minister for Environment is
represented. It may be time to lead that again, but there was a proposal many years ago, along with the
coding that says what level of recyclable material is written on the bottom on the bottle, that either the
bottle has a red dot on it or a green dot, and the green dot means you put it in the recycle bin and it goes
away into packaging, and if it’s red, you put it into the other one. Something as simple as that appears
to me to be something we really need to come back to talk about. Even I, as someone who is meant to
have some reasonable knowledge of what’s recyclable, was taken by surprise when I found out the
yoghurt container wasn’t recyclable.
Ms COOTE – And the Vegemite lid isn’t either.
Mr BOURKE – That’s right. So do we deal with it in a more simplistic form? I think that’s something we
have to do at the national level.
Ms COOTE – So that’s something, presumably, you’ll be able to do in your NEIPs; if there’s something
there, you can test it and road test it in this NEIPs situation.
Dr PHILIPS – Absolutely. And the idea with the training up of local people to do the household audits too is
that every resident has someone local that they can go to and ask for this type of information and
support. You don’t have to access written material and do all those things that put us off.
Mr BOURKE – Not to take up the committee’s time, but I ran into a gentleman last week, a resident of
Melbourne, and he got two water bills in a row from Yarra Valley Water, I understand. With the
second bill he got a phone call to say, “Your water bill is too high for the property you’re in, do you
need a household audit?” And he said, “Oh, why not?” So they came and they audited his property – it
didn’t cost him anything – and worked out he has some leaking taps and some leaking cisterns and he
repaired those at his cost and his water bill commensurately reduced. He wouldn’t have done anything
if he hadn’t had a call from that utility. It’s a utility the government own, and they extend those
services on a willing basis. They appear to me to be very practical ways for people to get that feedback
you’re talking about.
Ms COOTE – Absolutely. Thank you very much.
Ms LOVELL – Emily, you spoke about Anglesea and their plastic-bag-free policy. You might be interested
to know that Violet Town is also investigating becoming plastic-bag-free, and that also came out of
something else that you mentioned, that often communities don’t participate in programs until there is a
local threat. Of course, Violet Town was one of the sites chosen for a toxic waste dump, so they’re now
investigating ways that they can create less toxic waste in their own environment. But I would be
interested to know, or you enlightening us a bit, about whether it’s easier to implement programs in the
metropolitan area or in regional areas – apart from the obvious ones you mentioned, Mick, where rural
people don’t have the opportunity of natural gas always for low-cost heating and don’t have the
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opportunity of using the public transport system that we do here in Melbourne. Are metropolitan
people more responsive to taking up programs, or is it easier in the smaller environment of rural
communities to implement a program?
Mr BOURKE – I think that Emily would say that community based action is the most powerful. Certainly
we do see that the highest recycling rate in Victoria comes out of the desert fringe region, which is Nhill
and Horsham, those types of town. So for the curbside recycling, the highest rate of achievement is in
rural Victoria. Also the lowest level of curbside recycling is in regional Victoria, where the economies
of scale make it hard for people to bring about the number of bins that are required and the collection
rates.
Ms COOTE – Or in South Yarra, if they don’t like the colour coordination –
Mr BOURKE – Well, that’s right. I don’t know that we’re seeing any difference in willingness, but certainly
there are some economy-of-scale issues in regional settings that are important to recognise. They have
been recognised to some extent. I know that again EcoRecycle are the ones with the good news;
they’ve always got a cheque they can write. We’re there to hit people if they don’t do what they’re told.
But EcoRecycle does a fantastic job. And of the landfill levies that are collected, a more than fair
proportion find their way to regional Victoria to support better waste management programs there. I
think it’s important we continue to endorse and allow for that sort of fairness in distribution of funds,
because there are economy issues in regional Victoria.
Ms LOVELL – Those economy issues are certainly at the fore at the moment, with all the councils talking
about increases in rates over the next five years – and apart from the obvious and a couple of the smaller
rural shires, where they talk about infrastructure being their main problem – every council is talking
about the increased cost of waste being one of the major contributors.
The CHAIR – Caroline, do you have any questions? David? No. Thank you very much for your time, Mick
and Emily.
Witnesses withdrew
Committee adjourned
29

CORRECTED VERSION
ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE
Inquiry into Sustainable Communities
Melbourne – 5 July 2004
Members
Ms J. Lindell Ms A. Coote
Mr D. Drum Ms J. Duncan
Mr G. Hilton Ms W. Lovell
Mr G. Seitz
Chair: Ms J. Lindell
Deputy Chair: Ms A. Coote
Staff
Executive Officer: Ms Caroline Williams
Research Officers: Mr David Fairbridge
Witnesses
Mr W. Wescott, CEO, and Ms M.Simonelli, Manager and Campaign Director,
International Council for Local Environment Initiatives – Australia / New Zealand
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The CHAIR – All evidence is taken under the provisions of the Parliamentary Committees Act and is
protected from judicial review. However, if you make comments outside the precincts of the hearing,
they are not covered by parliamentary privilege. I’ll get you, Wayne, to do the presentation, and then
leave some time for questions. Thank you very much.
Mr WESCOTT – We have a presentation here, but obviously, we’re happy to be interrupted as we go. It
works well for us; it makes it a little bit easier for you. Firstly, thank you very much for your time
today. Let me just give you some background on us first, because although you may have heard of us
tangentially, I should talk a bit about who we are. The International Council for Local Environmental
Initiatives is a nonprofit local government association – a slightly unusual association that works at the
local level, but of course has an international profile. That creates an interesting set of challenges for us.
Our headquarters is based in Toronto, and in this region we have offices in Tokyo and Seoul as well as
in Melbourne. The Melbourne office – the office that I run here – is responsible for Australia and New
Zealand, but increasingly we’re starting to do work throughout our region. ICLEI is active throughout
the Asia-Pacific region, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Japan, China, and so on. And
that’s growing as the population grows and as the kinds of issues we’re dealing with grow and as
people become more and more involved with ICLEI in some of those issues.
We are a democratic association. We have a membership, and we have a democratically
elect executive committee. You’ll be familiar with councilor David Ristrom from the City of
Melbourne, who sits on our executive committee – voted internationally. Of course, he’ll be going off
soon, and we hope that the City of Melbourne has a continued association as our host city, the host of
ICLEI in this region; they’ll have a continued strong association. We’re very clear that we focus on
what we call capacity building – and that’s a terrible eye-glazing phrase – but for us it’s something that
we passionately believe in. We’re not consultants; we believe consultants have a very important role in
the work we do in local governments, but that’s not what we do. We don’t do the work for local
governments. We believe very strongly that our sector needs to build up its achievements and to
become a practical implementer of sustainable development. We have a multitude of very good
examples, and we’ll go through some of the methodology before we take on that as well.
The other part of that fourth point in particular is that we’re a very practical organisation. Our
sector is a particularly practical and pragmatic sector. Associations that aren’t also practical and
pragmatic don’t last very long, in our view. We focus very much on implementation, and we believe
policy, and so on, are done at other levels – specifically groups like the Municipal Association of
Victoria, the Victorian Local Governance Association and the Australian Local Government
Association. The ALGA – that last one – is a member of ICLEI, and we feed our work directly to
them.
We’re a large organisation in terms of our regional impact with 32 staff at the moment, and
we’re still recruiting. We’re in four offices, so we cover WA, South Australian, here, and now New
Zealand. That again is part of our growth pattern. We are certainly growing very strongly at the
moment, and that’s probably a good sign for all of us – that these issues are very much being picked up
by local governments, as I’m sure you’ve had reflected back to you so far by various players.
A quick summary of what we do. Firstly, the numbers of local governments that are actually
members in Australia and New Zealand is 76, and that’s growing at the moment – again, rapid growth
over the past two years. These are councils that join us, regardless of doing anything; they just want to
join us and support our work. It’s not a strong focus for us as we are very much practical implementers
of campaigns in this region, but we think membership is important for political credibility as well. We
run three campaigns – local Agenda 21, cities for climate protection and the water campaign. So a very
simple story in that we can talk to councils about the way we work. I’ll talk about the methodology in
a minute, but just to give you a sense of where we’re working: local Agenda 21, in 1992 at the Earth
Summit in Rio De Janeiro, I think you’ll all be familiar with Agenda 21 – it’s the first time really that
internationally the nations around the world got together to try to come up with some coherent plan
about how to deal with our problems internationally. Chapter 28 was written effectively by the
founders of our organisation, ICLEI, and talked about local government’s role in sustainable
development, which at the time in the early ‘90s was seen as very much instrumental. You know, they
do what they need to do and get on with it.
The World Summit on Sustainable Development 10 years later – to move forward to 2002 –
in Johannesburg ICLEI ran a 900-member local government conference as part of that world summit.
At that world summit it was universally agreed that local governments had been incredibly successful.
In fact, it was the only real success story other than the ozone work around Toronto and Montreal that
had come out of that. So the work that local governments have been doing over the last decade – more
than 6000 councils internationally are now doing local Agenda 21s. In some ways local governments
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argued that while the important international disputes revolved around getting nations to work together
cooperatively with all the significant political issues they bring up are of significant importance – ones
of economic interest and sovereignty, and so on, which are important and difficult to deal with – that
while that has been occurring over the years, local governments have been able to demonstrate some
very practical things happening on the ground in the areas that we’re working in.
So local Agenda 21 we’ve now broadened, and I’ll talk about how we deal with that in
Australia in a minute. But just to give you an idea – around 176 councils in Australia self identify as
having done or are doing local Agenda 21 programs. That’s probably up there with CCP as about 70
per cent of the Australian population. So we’re talking about the large urbans especially. But
increasingly rural councils are trying to use some kind of umbrella approach. Cities for Climate
Protection is really our great success story. Although there are internationally 570 councils, we have by
far the largest program in the world happening in Australia. It’s been one that now has been going for
seven years since the announcement by the Minister for Environment, Senator Robert Hill in 1997. It’s
been a model for a tripartite cooperation, which we’ll talk about in a minute. One of the significant
obstacles for sustainable development in this country is cooperation across the public sector, and we all
know how difficult that can be. There are lots of challenges, but I think CCP is a fantastic success
story that we should be promoting very strongly. As with a couple of others that demonstrate that
cooperation, it can have some huge win-wins for all levels of government as well as down to the private
sector and community organisations, and so on.
We now luckily – or I should say “luckily” because it’s a hell of a job to get it all going –
have New Zealand government approval to begin what is called our Communities for Climate
Protection in New Zealand, a three-year program we’re starting up right now. We’re in the middle of
it; we’ve already got more than 10 local governments in New Zealand very interested, and we’ll have
those councils on the program over the next month or so. Maria and I are backwards and forwards to
New Zealand at the moment. That’s exciting, because the Australian and New Zealand cooperation,
which is theoretically in our name – Australia and New Zealand is very difficult to do in practice –
have made an enormous leap forward, especially in energy and transportation, some areas in New
Zealand. And I think we have a great deal to teach them as well.
Our water campaign, which I’ll go through as well: three years ago internationally ICLEI
began the water campaign, from an international directive. We were asked to get it going in Australia,
and we are now the first and only – still only – water campaign running internationally. It uses the
same methodology that we developed with Cities for Climate Protection – a very practical focus, which
again I’ll take you through. Again, it is a very nice example of cooperation between federal, state and
local governments. Of course we all know water is huge, and has jumped over the last year or two onto
the political agenda; it has jumped up the list. We take the view, generally speaking, that resource
management ecosystems, sustainable development issues shouldn’t all be tied into direct crisis. The
concern always is that when the crisis is over, the public attention leaves it. We think there is actually
value in this work, regardless of droughts, regardless of energy pricing, and so on. We think there’s
enormous value in the work, and we set ourselves the task of trying to understand that value and market
that within local government.
Lastly here, just a quick summary of the work that we’re doing. We’ve currently got
10 councils around Australia and New Zealand focusing on sustainability reporting, which is a whole
new interesting area, working closely with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) which is international
default essentially in sustainability reporting – trying to get a sense of how local governments make
decisions and how they take into account what we call a triple bottom line. It’s some very interesting
work we’ve done with the City of Melbourne that you may be aware of. And again, we can provide you
with a whole range of information on that. Let me talk to you briefly about our approach to culture
change. As I’ve talked about capacity building, we’re focusing very much on long-term capacity
building. We have a very powerful vision that by the end of the decade local governments will become
the sector in the public sector that will be driving very hard and advocating towards other levels of the
public sector, and indeed with their own local communities, the business communities and so on. That
sustainable development has now a powerful business case. For instance, we’ve been running a
leadership program with CEOs in Victoria over the last eight months with 10 CEOs from around
Victoria to slowly build this sector. So we very much have a sense of our sector becoming a leader.
That’s our view, and I know we’re talking across sectors here, but we think we’ve got pretty good
interest by people – obviously like Minister Thwaites and Minister Kemp – crossing all the political
boundaries. We’re not interested in the politics of this; we’re really interested in sustainable
development as a way to practically implement the kind of core business things that local governments
are trying to develop.
We focus on tangible benefits. We think that unless there’s a tangible benefit, we suspect
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our work hasn’t achieved anything. We focus on process where it has a clear outcome. We therefore
use performance-based milestones. It’s not rocket science, I’ve got to tell you, but it’s a very simple
picture. In local government land there are a million rabbits running across the paddock. There are a
thousand things every day – probably as with all of you – so we focus on a very simple story that works
councillors through that process. And I think if you talk to our councillors you get feedback that that
works very well for them. We work very much across all local governments, internally across all of
local government. We work with elected officials, advocate mayors and councillors who oppose this
kind of work. That’s fine; we want to argue this, this is an argument, this is a democracy, so we’re into
argument big time. Senior managers, CEOs and senior directors – we’re very concerned there
obviously. The holder of the budgets – in many cases the framer of the budget is very important, to deal
with him; so we do a lot of work with the CEOs and senior managers and council officers who do the
grunt work on the ground where a lot of decision making occurs in terms of day-to-day purchasing in
terms of retrofit of libraries – all the basic stuff that we’re doing constantly. So we work across all
three, which is probably also a bit unusual for an association like ours.
Again, it is focusing on actual changes, but we don’t think that just doing things tomorrow is
good enough; there’s got to be a coherent long-term vision, and we do that through our target setting, as
we have long-term targets. Our councils are well known – I’ll take you through some briefly –
especially in greenhouse, with a 20 per cent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the
decade. You’re probably aware now of the culture change model that the City of Melbourne is looking
at – zero net emissions by the end of 2020. I don’t know whether they’re speaking to you, but there’s
an interesting case. They’re quite a conservative council in many ways, realising that they can move
down the track. The actual changes work, and therefore they are happy with the long-term vision that is
quite a challenge for them. The last point is really about we’re pretty passionate about quantification.
We believe the successes of the past 20 or 30 years of the environment movement have not been
quantified, and therefore a lot of the good work that was achieved hasn’t really been able to be
demonstrated. So we demonstrate our work every day and we focus very much on that. We also
believe that that quantification is on what we call triple bottom line – a familiar term to you, I’m sure –
the economic, social and environmental benefits of any decision. So we talk about Co2 reduction, we
also talk about job creation, dollars saved, dollars leveraged, and so on. Do you want to pick this one
up?
Ms SIMONELLI – Local greenhouse action, which is our Cities for Climate Protection program. In
Australia we have, as you can see, 191 councils in the program. We’ve been going for six years, seven
years – moving into our seventh year – and that covers around about 75 per cent of the population. So
that municipal area councils have responsibility for is how we do that figure. We’ve got a very very
strong program in Victoria, largely because of the tripartite arrangement we have in place with DSE,
who support our rural program – which I’ll talk about in a moment – and our Australian program,
which is supported by the Australian Greenhouse Office, and then also local governments who also
support the program. Okay, let’s keep going. I’m wondering if we have a milestone slide first.
Mr WESCOTT – No, we don’t actually; that’s in the water campaign.
Ms SIMONELLI – Okay, maybe if I just quickly tell you how the program is run. Wayne said it’s not rocket
science, and I think that’s the key to this – that we keep these things simple and we keep them tangible
so we can measure progress across the way. We have five milestones, and basically that is a program
management tool that we introduce to councils. At milestone one they do a full inventory to get a sense
of where their emissions are, and we relate that back to what their energy use is, what their fuel usage
is, where their waste is coming from. So they get a sense of what the problem is, if you like, and then
they set a goal. So in the next 10 years or so, if you didn’t do anything, what would happen, and if you
did do something, what would happen? So what’s the goal that you want to set based on the priorities
that are coming out of your inventory? The third step is to put a plan in place – simple. The fourth step
is to do it, which is the hardest bit; and the fifth step is to actually review your progress. In Australia’s
case and in Victoria’s case over about three years councils will move through this milestone
framework. At milestone four, which is where you actually implement the actions, we call that the
measures reporting process, if you like, and this is where these figures have come through. So about
half our councils have got to milestone four, and we’re looking at the sorts of actions that they’re
doing, and that’s given us these cumulative figures. Our mission statement is that one or two actions
may not make a difference, but if you add those actions together you’ll get massive change happening.
And the change that’s happening is 1.8 million tonnes of greenhouse gases over the last four years
since our measurements have started and $3.3 million in job creation, so we’ve measured what impact
our actions have had at the council level in terms of job creation for their communities and for their
own councils, and then $67 million has been invested by local government in these actions. So they’re
pretty strong figures now.
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The sorts of action they’re doing will impact on what they do in their own corporate area.
So what are they directly influencing – their fleet, their assets in terms of their buildings, what sort of
energy is being used in their own buildings in terms of town halls, but also in terms of what they can
influence in terms of their libraries, their child-care centres, those types of areas. We also look at waste.
So we look at the sorts of landfills that are being managed by councils and where there can be methane
extraction there. We look at fleet management. Street lighting is a very big one that’s coming through
now across all of the rural and urban fringes; it’s a huge area in terms of their energy. We also look at
how they can influence planning and infrastructure within their own municipal area; so how they’re
planning for more sustainable communities, if you like. These are the sorts of actions that are coming
up and are quantified as we work through.
That’s probably where we’re going. We’ve been going for six to seven years now, so this is
a long-term program, and we’re now talking about where do we want to be at the end of the decade.
Councils are embracing this: where do they want to be. We’ve had councils that have been on the
program for three or four years – or well actually, since the beginning – for six years now. And they’re
not dropping off; they’re staying on the program. So once they’ve moved through the program, a new
program called CCP plus – which we joke is the low-fat version of CCP – but it’s a way of engaging
them still and reflecting on what actions have worked well, what hasn’t, do you need to revisit your
goal, what are the sorts of community regional approaches you’d like to take now? Some of the hard
stuff around street lighting can only have a cooperative regional approach if they’re going to have any
impact at all. So these are the sorts of things that are coming through. That’s the methodology, and it
would be useful to talk through that one later, if you like, because that’s had a very very strong rural
focus to it, and it’s a really positive story about how even small under-resourced councils can actually
still get a benefit by working on this sort of program. The methodology has been transferred to the
water campaign, which again is a voluntary campaign that works with all councils across Australia.
Our mission in this context is to look at sustainable use of water, which looks at the water conservation
elements, quantity elements as well as water quality elements.
Mr WESCOTT – Just to give you a sense of it, so we talk about what councils can do directly. The things
they do directly in water would be things like their open-space management, depots and so on; what
councils can influence through their policies and partnerships within their own municipality, which is
an important next step, and also what they can do collaboratively around catchments. Now that might
sound obtuse, but it’s very important, because we believe local government should do something in its
own backyard before it can then go out and advocate to other levels of government, or to its local
communities. So we focus them on that, and they work through their inventories, their targets and so,
on in all these things and here they are all here. So there’s a lot of lead-time work that councils do in
terms of understanding data. We work very closely with the water utilities here; in Melbourne, for
instance, we have good memorandums of understanding with Yarra Valley Water, South East Water
and City West Water. We work closely with them because they are the retailers who have that direct
data. We obviously focus our goals working closely with them as well, and so on. This is now taking
off, and I just want to give you a quick sense of some of the things that come up when they talk about
what councils can do in terms of water quality. When we ask them where they think their priorities are,
you can see they start to talk about gross litter pollution, wastewater treatment, erosion, sediment
control, et cetera. Funnily enough, they do a lot of work on swimming pools from our energy work,
because many of these councils are already working with us on energy. So there’s a lot of work that
they’re already able to do. I should belt through this.
There’s also this material that will all be given to you as well. We also look at where they
spend their money. You can see straight away that open space and playing fields is where the serious
levers are for local governments. This is what our retailers are telling us we should be dealing with as
well. Therefore, if we can reduce water consumption, obviously it has an impact in terms of water, but
also it in terms of council budgets, which is not a bad. That’s just starting to work around the triple
bottom line that we work on. As well, they set conservation goals – and these are very important in
local government because, as I mentioned before, these goals can be quite significant as the national
campaigns – it’s beyond just Victoria here. But as you start to see the potential to reduce water
quantity, that is conserve water, it is very significant. These are voluntary goals for their own councils,
but from that they can start to leverage out with their local businesses, and so on. I’ve got some case
studies – I actually won’t go through them – but they’re all here, so you can have these. In terms of
street trees – reuse of water around street trees; some of this might be familiar to you already. Again,
we talk about the benefits and the savings. This is Kwinana – in another state of course – but again
councils are trying to link garden practices with reduced water usage, backwash – the recycle and
backwash process is one that is starting to become fairly popular out there nowadays; reducing a lot of
energy use and so on, so there’s a twin advantage in reduced Co2 as well as in pools.
So very briefly then: the local Agenda 21, the third campaign I just want to mention briefly
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here. Our TBL tool kit, I recommend you look at. It’s something that our other councils around
Australia and New Zealand are now picking up. It’s a very practical way for council officers to work
through decisions, so if you have a decision, a council decision in a report – that is a council report –
there’s a tool that we’ve set up; it’s on their Intranet, so they can quickly check through that to work out
what are the environmental, economic and social implications of that decision. And that’s where we
work at. We work very much at that implementation stage. It’s no good saying to council officers, you
need to consider the TBL consequences; you need to give them something practical they can work
through. I’ve talked about the GRI work that we’re doing. It is very important, because that’s a global
initiative, and Melbourne is at the forefront of that work. We believe we have some real opportunities
to leverage internationally. We have a large conference coming up in about two months. We’ve also
done a lot of work in purchasing in this area. It’s again a practical implementation, and we have
worked with 10 councils in four states. Five of those in South Australia, where we’ve run some
workshops across the levels of government; again, trying to get some practical stuff happening. We’re
currently doing some work on the Melbourne principles. I’m not sure whether that’s come up in your
inquiry so far. The Melbourne principles were developed two years ago; an international effort based
here in Melbourne. Essentially it is a set of principles that lay out how a city can be treated as an
ecosystem. The important thing for us is this is a way for elected officials to start to grapple with
long-term planning; the sort of stuff we’ve got in 2030, because otherwise it tends to be done fairly
adhoc. So we’ve now got a project running with the Department of Sustainability and Environment to
put some flesh on the bones of that.
I’m just going to drop this stuff, but I’m happy for you to have that. That’s basically some
background on the way we’ve implemented things. I just want to talk very briefly about opportunities
that seem to us as a bit of a brainstorm that might be useful for you to pick up. Firstly, you obviously
already know about the tripartite relationships, and I think Victoria is leading Australia in this.
Practically the work through CCP is a very good example. I think the water campaign through policy,
through the local government accord – which I’m sure has been brought to your attention – that’s been
signed, and it’s now being pulled together. The five-star rating scheme is very interesting. We now
need to build the capacity of local governments to implement that. It is not solely about regulation; it is
now about getting local governments to really understand the value of that and to drive it themselves.
The Sustainability Energy Authority of Victoria and ICLEI street lighting work – which we’re doing
currently – we could give you a bit more information on if you’re interested. It really picks up one of
the really hard areas to tackle. When local governments do their inventories early in CCP, they
discover an average of about 27 per cent of their CO2 emissions are from streetlights – their own
corporate emissions. So there’s a significant cost and a significant CO2 expenditure. Street lights are a
safety issue, a community issue, and it’s very important that we understand the best way to achieve our
safety outcomes as well as minimise energy, and there are lots of ways we can do that and lots of
international models that we’re bringing to that street lighting work we’re doing in Victoria at the
moment.
Accelerating uptake of renewables. There are clearly some interesting financial approaches.
We would love the committee to be focusing on some of those systems and how state action, and indeed
cooperation across the public sector, can increase that, especially for uptake of renewables and
integrating that further with those councils in Victoria, of which there’s about. How many? Something
like 58 – or something – on CCP?
Ms SIMONELLI – Councils? There will be 58, yes.
Mr WESCOTT – So the vast bulk of councils focusing on greenhouse will be certainly working on CCP. To
integrate further greenhouse activity in the state we’ve got the Australian Greenhouse Office, SEAV,
DSE and ICLEI all working in various ways, and we think there’s probably even greater opportunities
to integrate greenhouse activities down the track with the greenhouse strategy. We’re looking currently
to expand the water campaign into rural areas. Rural areas have enormous levels to be able to take
action on water. One of our fundamental methodologies is that people in a democracy – do we have to
empower people to be able to do stuff? That’s what the greenhouse program is doing in our rural
communities. And if they see the value of this work, then we build a greater constituency to support
regulation, budget, and so on, down the track, so we’re keen to do that. We are currently scoping that
with DSE. We think Melbourne can be an international centre of reporting around triple bottom line.
Melbourne is very well known for this work at the moment. We want to take advantage of that. We
think Victoria is very well placed, and we think that down the track the rest of this decade is going to be
very much an area where Asia is going to be looking at this work, and there’s an opportunity to
position us. It may not be a particular focus here, but that’s obviously something we focus on strongly.
Lastly, we’re very keen to increase the practical implementation of green purchasing in the
public sector. There’s a lot of talk, there’s a lot of policy, but there’s not a lot of implementation. So
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our focus is really – well, let’s not reinvent policy, let’s not reinvent processes, let’s just get the
implementation. Thank you very much.
The CHAIR – Thank you. Damian?
Mr DRUM – how are you guys funded?
Mr WESCOTT – We’re funded with a mix. We’re funded with members obviously, members who directly
pay –
Mr DRUM — Council members?
Mr WESCOTT — Council members. We do direct projects with public sector agencies, federal and state
governments, and we do direct work with local governments. So totally public sector funded on a
project-by-project basis.
Mr DRUM – So no reoccurrent long-term –
Mr WESCOTT – Well, we have sustainable funding because we won’t do any adhoc projects. We do
long-term commitments, so our commitments tend to be four or five years. We’re very strong
financially on the basis of that, though.
Mr DRUM – Do you find in your work that similar problems or similar challenges and similar opportunities
are available on nearly all of the councils that you go to, or do you find that it’s quite a specificity
situation? Do you find that – yep, you’re going to go into this council like the last 10 and probably like
the next 10 and show them how to fix up their street lighting and make some significant savings? And
then you move on and say, “We’re also going to show you this trick about water”? Or do you find that
you’ve got to go in and you have to actually look at how this particular council operates and generate a
specific plan for this particular council?
Mr WESCOTT – Yes, that’s a good question. Local government is incredibly diverse, number one. And so
no, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, absolutely. The way our programs work – we basically have
containers that force councils to fit that up with a particular local data. Without that you can’t – what
works necessarily even within the inner city of Melbourne, won’t as we all know – the politics is
different, the communities are different, the council laws are different, the staff are different. So we are
wary of telling councils any of those sorts of outcomes. What we focus on is identifying the value for
that specific council. I would think now that we have councils’ general trust. Local governments are –
and I’m sure I’m not telling you anything new – local governments are also fairly insular in many
cases. They have a particular approach, and are pragmatic, so therefore if it works in one council they
will look more closely at it. In answer to your question: one, yes they do say, yes if it works in
Booroondara they’ll look at it; but then they’ll discount also the Boroondara type of council, a certain
type of community; you know, it may or may not work in quite the same way. Typically, as always in
our community, there are big divides between rural and the city. What we’ve discovered, though, is
that the benefit is in greenhouse action in particular, but would it be the same with water and
biodiversity? It needs to be very much made specific. So in our rural communities, the impacts of
greenhouse and climate change are already being felt. The impact on farmers and growers – you talk to
any of the farmers out there and they all say it’s happening. My family are farmers, and they know
their growing seasons are changing. But often they don’t feel they have any of the levers of power; that
all happens in the city. So one of the things we try to do is say, “No, you can do a lot here”, and I think
that’s an important part of what we try to do.
Mr DRUM – Thanks.
Mr HILTON – Wayne, as an international organisation, where should we go to see world’s best practice in
this sort of activity?
Mr WESCOTT – Good question. I think in some of the greenhouse work, we have it in our own backyard,
which is not normally the answer we get in Australia is it? But if you look around the world – I mean,
some of the interesting points would be now London, of course, regardless of your politics on this. Ken
Livingstone’s recent re-election as the mayor of London has revitalised their focus on greenhouse, on
climate change; they’re setting up a climate change office. They have their congestion tax, though
terribly controversial, and maybe we need to say the jury is still out a little bit, but certainly the sky
hasn’t fallen and it’s worked in many ways. I think it’s built a much broader constituency of support
that we ever thought possible. And the key person, there is the deputy lord mayor, and she’s the ideas
person, Nicky Gavron. She’s the one, not Ken Livingstone; he’s the mouthpiece. The ideas are being
36

driven by some very clever people; and London is a great test case. If they can do it in London, they
can do it pretty much everywhere.
We always talk about places like Portland, Oregon, where they’ve done some great
revitalisation. I’m sure these are places that are familiar to you. And we have a whole list of other
places from Vancouver, which I think would be fair to say regionally is doing some very interesting
work crossing multiple electorates. But you know, I’ve got to say that when you look around, Brisbane
and Melbourne are both doing some excellent work in key areas, depending on where you’re wanting to
talk about. Adelaide and so on – all doing good work – and I’m happy to supply you with a list. Our
website is full of good case studies. I think, interestingly enough, in local government, the Australian
local government sector has got a very strong international reputation as a leader in sustainable
development. And ICLEI here is the strongest ICLEI in the world, and the two probably go together. I
mean, it’s not because we’re great, it’s because actually we have a very strong sector that supports
strong institutions like ourselves.
Mr HILTON – At the household level, would you have any input to the committee’s consideration as to what
can be done at the individual household level, rather than the council?
Mr WESCOTT – Yes. We have a very specific approach to that which we’re working our way through. We
believe that the best way to impact on both households and smaller to medium enterprises – SMEs – is
via local governments. There’s a broad brush, media approach, I guess, if you call it that way, which is
useful for broadly changing community approaches. But we believe when it comes down to practical
approaches, household-by-household is very, very expensive for state governments and federally to be
able to manage. It’s a very high-input approach. We think local governments – and we advocate that
local governments are a much better principle of organising because of the level of where they’re up to,
not necessarily because they’re better or worse. So a key component of our work is that councils do
this greenhouse work in their own backyards and then they begin to develop partnerships with their
local communities. I will give you an example. The City of Melbourne has been working with good
and bad results with the Property Council of Australia on commercial buildings in Melbourne. Their
greenhouse profile is 65 per cent of their CO2 emissions in the CBD of Melbourne are from commercial
buildings, so therefore we’ve got to be working with the Property Council. In doing that, there’s a
whole lot of – well, that’s the whole program they’ve been running. So our approach would be that the
best way to reach the small retail shops, the little businesses and manufacturing industries within
Victoria, is via our local government; because these folks vote, they’re important local economic
interest is in local governments and local governments therefore attend to them. They’re often on the
council, they’re often councillors, so when we’re speaking to councillors these are often the people
we’re speaking to. So they’re easier to get via local governments. As long as the local government has
themselves done something and they’re not turning around and saying to local businesses, “You should
be saving energy”; but when the local business walks into the lobby, then they see all the lights are on,
you know that it looks ridiculous.
Mr. HILTON – But I’m specifically thinking of the household, rather than small business.
Mr WESCOTT – Oh, sorry. Yes, it’s the same principle, same principle. Householders – the same principle
that the householders are the local voters; and the best way to work with householders, in our view, is
via local government. We’ve got some practical programs, if that’s what you’re talking about, the sorts
of neighbourhood schemes that local governments run right around the country.
Mr HILTON – Yep, the NEIP schemes we were talking about this morning.
Mr WESCOTT – From the EPA? Yes, those kinds of approaches. So again, using local governments to do
your organising. Don’t try to do it at that macro level. It’s just too difficult. Even at the local
government level the approach then is obviously through local partnerships. And again, it’s just the
level of organising that’s easier, and you’ve got lower transaction costs; it’s just going to be a much
easier process to deal with.
Ms COOTE — That was extremely interesting. You spoke about tangible benefits and also quantification
and that type of thing, and you talked about local councils. In your program I didn’t see a lot of
strength, and maybe it’s because you had to do it with such a time constraint – and I’ll go and have a
look at the website. You didn’t speak about actually talking about that quantification, as in getting that
message out. You still see this as being the very key role for the local government; and going back to
again what has been said before, dealing with households, how do you say, “Yes you’ve done a great
job, this is actually happening”? I mean, you talked about greenhouse jobs, and there were hundreds of
them. Well, I didn’t know anything about greenhouse jobs, and also the purchase of greenpower,
which is something that people talk about all the time. But I’m actually not convinced that it actually
37

gets to greenpower. How is that actually happening, and is that part of your program when you’re
dealing with these local councils, to make certain that this is publicised?
Mr WESCOTT — Right. So the marketing side of it, rather than the implementation: a couple of different
ways. Yes, that is part of the program, although not heavily – no, it’s not our high priority area. For
those councils, effectively we ask councils, obviously, to take advantage of the story they have, to tell
their good story to their local residents. Generally, they’ll do that – although the truth is it’s one of
those kinds of lower priority things. Good news never sells as much as bad news locally; it’s just the
way life is. And it’s not to say we can show you a million – unfortunately, that’s the way life is, isn’t
it? But we can certainly show that local governments do try to promote their work. Our role is mainly
within the network – the peer group, if you like – so we’re well known for what we call recognition
events. At national functions around the country and at local council level, we have staff here
employed in ICLEI as some of my staff directly, whose sole role is to organise events, and so you stand
there and shake the hand, take the photo and get them to speak, and all that kind of stuff. Then they
take the photo, they try to get them in the local press, and so on. So there’s a lot of that kind of work.
How effective that is in getting back to residents? I think it’s hard to make it practical and pragmatic
for residents. But again from a million different things; from the demonstration energy efficiency
buildings that are dotted around the country now so that local residents can go and see them, through to
notices on their rates, and so on.
The job’s a never-ending one, to be really honest. I think the real answer to this is there’s a
genuine skepticism about how real or – you mentioned it yourself, greenpower – is it real? A bit like
we used to go with recycling 10 or 15 years ago; it all goes into the tip, doesn’t it? So that greenpower
is real. Certainly the greenpower that we deal with is real. And we’re very clear; we have a four-person
technical unit that verifies everything we do. The Australian Greenhouse Office is absolutely certain
about our numbers. So not only do we quantify, we quantify and make sure it’s bulletproof for us.
Once you have a bit of doubt in this area – spin and hype take off – and before you know it, you’re in
trouble. So we’re very clear; these are all very conservative numbers. Should there be more done on
marketing and publicising within their own municipalities and externally to other levels of government?
We probably do most of that. In terms of other levels of government, we talk to state governments. I
think we’ve done really well – perhaps not to this current committee, but that’s one of the reasons we’re
here, I guess – to tell you that story. But we work with ministers at state and federal levels right around
the country, and at interstate level. We talk a lot to state agencies. So we get that message out.
Internally there are more than 700 councils, so we’re probably not going to get to those. We try to build
the capacity of local governments to do that. Local governments – again, in responding to your earlier
question – local governments are very varied in this area. Some of them work well with their local
community, others don’t, and so we have to really run on the back of that. Newcastle may be telling
that message and marketing it relentlessly and so everyone knows about Newcastle’s work. Excellent
work done by other councils isn’t marketed as heavily, and Boroondara is a good example; they’ve
done some fantastic work on water. Maybe it hasn’t pushed it as hard as it could.
Ms COOTE — Thanks very much; thank you.
Ms LOVELL — I’d be interested in knowing how you developed your water program and campaign, and
how it is integrated in with other water conservation programs.
Ms SIMONELLI — How it developed was that we had a successful model through CCP, so we knew that the
elements that we wanted to use were a tangible milestone framework, where councils would look at
their own operations and then look at the community. The new element is how they interacted the
catchment, because there’s clearly a push from federal and state to look regionally at our interactions
with water. So how was based on experience, I guess; and we knew in our hearts this thing was going
to work, so we tested it through a pilot phase for about nine to12 months with five councils across
Australia. We made sure the methodology was really sound before we went out there. Since then,
we’ve basically been quite targeted in our approaches; for example, Western Australia, South Australia,
Victoria and New South Wales are the states that we’ve been targeting first. The state government of
Western Australia wanted to use the program because they released a water conservation strategy and
they saw that this was the conduit to work with local government, and it was a good, sound
methodology – ready-made program, if you like – so that works for them. In Victoria’s case, we
started with the water retailers and we wanted to make sure that a very strong urban focus for the
Melbourne region was going to work. That’s meant that the water retailers and DSE are onside now,
and they’re using that model to expand out. We’re doing a pilot – hopefully to start very soon in the
western district. So we’re hoping the methodologies will work; it’s how we do it and have that fit for
rural communities that we’re really going to test out now. In South Australia’s case the NRM model –
the way that they’re approaching natural resource management is to actually imbed it into their
legislation, so they actually have governance bodies now that will work on NRM, and they’re wanting
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to use our model as a way of again working with local government. Because the catchment level is up
here – I mean, you’ve got federal up there, state and catchment, and they don’t know how to relate to
local government. They struggle with it, and they’d like to use our model as a way of doing it. So in
each state there’s a slight little twig, if you like, to make sure that it makes sense.
Mr WESCOTT — There’s also the integration with the energy work, too. One of the connections that needs
to be made is that climate change is impacting on water. We have huge community focus on water, so
getting householder change around water is pretty straightforward actually – an enormous support.
And when we began, all the councils were saying, “Just tell us what to do and we’ll do it”, because
there’s no issue about support. Climate change early on – it was more controversial in the ‘90s, but
now we almost never have that debate around greenhouse science anymore. What we tend to have now
are the costs and benefits, which is important. That’s a very important political debate, but now we’re
increasingly – and this is why we’ve done it – bringing those two together so that the councils that have
worked on greenhouse and understand climate change are now starting to link that to their water supply
issues – the two come together. And I think that’s the real integration down the track – how do we
make sure? And this is par for the course what sustainable development is all about – to get people
there. If we start just talking sustainable development, it gets really fuzzy and difficult to grab; whereas
if we talk climate change and water, people can really understand, and maybe biodiversity and waste
gives people something much more credible. But we’re still talking in the end about building capacity
of local governments to work with their communities to become more sustainable, and that will happen
on lots of different fronts.
The CHAIR — Can I just ask a question about the Moreland Energy Foundation. Did ICLEI have a role in
forming that foundation?
Ms SIMONELLI — The history is that Moreland has a history of being focused on energy; before they were
Moreland, when they were Brunswick, clearly there was a history there. What happened was that
Moreland was one of the first councils to join CCP, and they used our program to give it a framework
to work within. They were conscious that they were doing ad hoc projects, and if there ARE changes
in council, you know, you go with the flow. Sometimes there’s a focus and sometimes there isn’t. So
they joined CCP to give them that strength of the framework and to give them the quantification, to
give them the numbers behind it. What ended up happening was, through the community work that
they were doing, they were able to quarantine some funds that came through the selling of the –
Mr WESCOTT — ESD, the Electricity Supply Depot.
Ms SIMONELLI — Thank you. They were able to quarantine those funds and through CCP were able to
garner support through this planning process that they did. The community and the council decided
that that money should go towards community projects, shouldn’t just go into consolidated revenue,
and so it started from that. And we are very supportive of that as an approach, because what it’s
basically doing is making sure that there are projects for that community through CCP that have been
implemented for the benefit; and we’re quantifying some of those actions as well. But it didn’t start
with us. I mean, that was Brunswick’s baby.
The CHAIR — Do you have any ideas about how that approach could be fostered through other
communities?
Mr WESCOTT — Well, it’s a bit of a one-off with money. I guess there are lots of different models that
other local government will use. One of the issues about being an international organisation is that you
get pretty good at trying, and in local government sector in particular, where there’s really not the
one-size-fits-all approach – I think it’s no news to any of us that Moreland is a certain type of
constituency – the people’s republic, as it was, for many years. So it’s really one of those places that
works well; but you know, what works there isn’t going to work in Warrnambool or in other places. So
I think it’s very suitable, and MEFL will no doubt talk to them about how they intend to all look around
to do other things. We certainly are gearing up with our work now that we have 60 councils that have
gone through at milestone five and beyond, which is fantastic – so more than anywhere else in the
world. Those councils – we will be really focusing on community abatement, which is our language
for effectively working beyond the council directly and working in large-scale abatement, which is
where we are really starting to focus with SMEs and householders. And if that can work in partnership
with MEFL, that’s great; but there’ll be lots of places where MEFL won’t be, so we need to be able to
work in those places, both around the country and New Zealand, and indeed in Indonesia and other
places where those things don’t necessarily hold true. But I’m sure MEFL will be keen to develop their
own models and work in other ways, but it’s a –
Ms. SIMONELLI — The strength of it is that they have a focus, and it’s for that community and that
39

municipality and has dedicated funds to it. And those elements, where you can reduce the risk across
all municipalities by having a little bit of quarantined money – I mean, there are a whole lot of
examples of how councils in the corporate and community have set up revolving energy funds.
They’re called REFs, where they make sure that the money just doesn’t get lost and it’s quantified and
it’s acknowledged and it’s come from those savings and it can go back to doing more good energy
work, or waste work, and MEFL is an example of that.
The CHAIR — Thank you very much.
Ms COOTE — Thank you.
Witnesses withdrew
Committee adjourned
40

CORRECTED VERSION
ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE
Inquiry into Sustainable Communities
Melbourne – 5 July 2004
Members
Ms J. Lindell Ms A. Coote
Mr D. Drum Ms J. Duncan
Mr G. Hilton Ms W. Lovell
Mr G. Seitz
Chair: Ms J. Lindell
Deputy Chair: Ms A. Coote
Staff
Executive Officer: Ms Caroline Williams
Research Officers: Mr David Fairbridge
Witnesses
Mr D. Voronoff, Director Sustainable Living, and Ms J. Henty, Director
Sustainable Construction and Consumption, Environment Victoria
41

The CHAIR –Welcome, Mr Daniel Voronoff, director sustainable living, and Ms Jenny Henty, director
community networks, from Environment Victoria.
All evidence taken by the committee is taken under the provisions of the Parliamentary
Committees Act and is protected from judicial review. However, any comments made outside the
precincts of this hearing are not covered by parliamentary privilege. We will now ask you questions.
Ms HENTY – Can I just correct the record a little bit? I have been a director of community networks at
Environment Victoria, but currently I’m the director of sustainable production and consumption.
The CHAIR – Beautiful, I’m sure we’ll get that. Thanks, Jenny, for that. I might start off then with the first
question. We understand that at the moment you are conducting research into household sustainability
programs. Can you just outline that a little bit for us?
Mr VORONOFF – Yes, sure. I’ll elaborate a little bit about our interest in household sustainability probably
a little bit further on when we talk about Cool Communities and Green Home Action, and
what-have-you. But the research pretty much came out of our interest in this area and our growing
experience in the area of running programs around environmental behaviour change with a focus on the
residential household sector. As an advocacy on organisation and as the state’s peak environment
group, we see that moving to sustainability; and we believe firmly that that’s a goal that we really need
to achieve in Victoria nationally and globally, as this is essentially very much a social process. There
are technological and engineering fixes, but at the end of the day it’s about people and it’s about
engaging the community and involving them in a process of achieving sustainability – very grand aims,
but very prosaic in its focus. The need for research is pretty vast. It’s a very new area in the whole
area of environmental behaviour change, and so we kicked off with wanting to do a literature review of
what’s happening internationally in this field, what’s happening around the country and also what’s
happening in Victoria.
And as it happens, Victoria is quite blessed with a number of different residential and
environmental behaviour change programs. With a view to, I suppose, designing a program that would
have applicability across Victoria, access for all Victorians to be involved in. Yeah, so that’s our
specific aim out of the research, it’s very applied. It involves, as I said doing the literature review, but
also conducting the primary research will be conducting interviews with program managers in Victoria
and also program participants and also doing what’s called action research or participatory research
with program managers and participants. Involving them in the design of I suppose the ideal sort of
program that they would like to see. So that’s, I suppose, the board parameters of what we’re doing. At
this stage we’re well into the literature review. We’ve just put on a research assistant and they’ll also
assist with some of the interview and focus group work that we want to do. I have done some
interviews with program managers, it’s quite fascinating to gain those insights of direct experience of
how you actually broker and implement these sorts of programs and the sort of learnings that are
coming about. I’m trying to put some of those learnings, especially around the literature review, into
the submission to this inquiry. And it’s sort of like for me, a bit of an interim report, so hopefully you’ll
see some of the benefits – at least the interim benefits – of that.
I should also say we’ve been fortunate enough to raise some money from the Community
Action Fund, from the greenhouse policy unit and also City West Water to do an environmental
behaviour change program with the Vietnamese community and we’ll be conducting research with the
people who participate in that, especially around messaging, how best to communicate with particular
communities and what messages work, and also getting a better understanding of their experiences as
they move through the program.
Ms COOTE – Could I ask you just to elaborate, tell more about the residential environment behavioural
change. You said that Victoria is very good; could give me some examples about that and how it’s
come about and what they are?
Mr VORONOFF – Well there are examples of what we do. There are Cool Communities and the Green
Home Action Program.
Ms COOTE – So how many people have engaged in it? What’s the extent of it?
Mr VORONOFF – Okay, with Cool Communities, it’s a national program funded by the Australian
Greenhouse Office and implemented by the conservation councils in each state and territory. In the
first round there are about 2200 households across the country. In the second round – due to funding
restrictions – about half that; but there have also been other forms of engagement well beyond that.
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We’re talking around tens of thousands in terms of direct mail and awareness around and diffusion of
our information to other households and also involvement in different aspects of the program – for
example, demonstration homes that have been set up in different communities. With the Green Home
Action program that we run, it’s very small. The first round has a small group of 50 households in the
inner west of Melbourne, and as we mentioned, we also are just starting a program with the Vietnamese
community, also around the inner-west of Melbourne.
Ms COOTE – Have you had spin-off from the building you’re in? Have people been interested to see how
it’s operated and how they can use some of the green building aspects to their own situation?
Mr VORONOFF – Well, we work mainly with householders and this is a commercial building, but the
building itself is a really good example even for householders to see. I mean, some of the basis
principles are pretty much there, but certainly in the commercial sector it’s quite an icon really, and it’s
been just amazing to see the interest and the impact that it’s having.
Ms COOTE – With the display homes, are people then looking at the display homes and saying, “I’ll take the
whole home” of what you’re speaking about, or do they say, “Oh look, I’ll take that aspect” or “This
aspect”? What’s the reaction? Is it increasing for the people that are going to be building homes – the
awareness and how they can make changes themselves?
Mr VORONOFF – Display homes or demonstration homes are fantastic. And another example of them that
we make use of is one that’s based at Series Environment Park (verify), and they’re people who have a
huge role in environmental education, as well as the Moreland Energy Foundation and the Alternative
Technology Association.
Ms COOTE – Series as is Series out of Geelong Series (verify)?
Mr VORONOFF – Series as in Brunswick. So yes, demonstration homes are great because people actually
get to see things in situ. They get to see them working, and they get to feel and touch, and you know,
it’s not just an idea in their head, they can see the draft proofing, they can see the double glazing, the
extra insulation – you know, external blinds. It makes things real for them, and people can
immediately empathise and relate it to their own experience. And they immediately see that a lot of the
best options are really low-cost and quite easy to do, so you’re immediately bridging that gap between
general awareness and possibilities that are presented to people to actually take action. They see that
it’s an immediately possible thing to do.
Ms COOTE – And something that they can do.
Mr VORONOFF – Yes, and people love to see how other people live. They like to go in and see other
houses, and especially if people who live there – because that’s sometimes the case – they can actually
chat with them and talk about their experiences like, “Gee, it’s a lot cooler in summer” and –
Ms COOTE – These are not like one of those areas called Hoppers Crossing and Narree Warren; these are not
like you go in and you choose a display home that’s new? This is someone who is actually living in
this house. And what do they do? Open it up for the public?
Mr VORONOFF – Yes, they have demonstration days.
Ms COOTE – Oh, really?
Mr VORONOFF – Yes, so the householder’s been – they might have enrolled in, say, Cool Communities,
become part of that program and been really enthusiastic and retrofitted their whole home, and then as
part of, I suppose, the word of mouth process – because bridging the gap between knowledge and
awareness about these sorts of things it is really important to have face-to-face communication. This is
another important aspect of these sorts of programs altogether, and demonstration homes are a great
way of doing it, because people come and they chat with the people who live there and they can say,
“Look, it’s great, it’s more comfortable; I’m saving a bit on my energy bills”. But the great thing is
that, you know, I’m not using air-conditioning, but it’s still cool. So there’s a real-life experience there,
and that’s probably the single most important element of behaviour change program, the face-to-face
communication. I think that’s probably the most important thing I can tell you about these sorts of
programs.
Mr HILTON – I’d just like to take Andrea’s point a bit further. Are you saying, Daniel, that you would be
able to as of now to have, let’s say, 10 low-cost, high-impact strategies, which would have a very
43

positive effect on energy, water, waste management?
Mr VORONOFF – Yes, draft proofing.
Mr HILTON – Yes, but you would be able to do that and they would be relatively low-cost?
Mr VORONOFF – Yes, and that information is available through Sustainable Energy Authority, through us,
through the foundation – there are many channels around. The problem is not that there isn’t enough
information around, and quite good information, or even awareness. Many people are aware of our
environmental problems and they also express a high level of concern about it, but the issue is bridging
that gap of knowledge awareness and actual behaviour change.
Mr HILTON – Well okay, if we were to take that a bit further: you mentioned that the most effective way is
face-to-face communication. Just as a point of argument, I’d say that the most effective way would be
to mandate that every house has to be built in this way and every house that has any renovations has to
have renovations which incorporate at least 10 low-cost, high-impact initiatives. What’s your view on
that?
Mr VORONOFF – I would agree wholeheartedly. That’s one of the things that we argue consistently, that
you really do need the institutional level reforms and changes, not just to have the immediate
environmental and social and economic outcomes that we all sort of know about, but very importantly
to demonstrate leadership. And in I suppose providing resources and seeing the benefits of
environmental behaviour change programs, which are very much a social process, there’s some
research that shows that government leadership around those sorts of reforms has a very much positive
effect on how people are involved and how they commit to this sort of change. So again in the bigger
picture of moving towards sustainability, you very much need that whole approach. We need
government leadership to inspire and motivate people and bring them along.
Mr HILTON – If I could just ask one final question. We’ve had a number of submissions so far today, and I
think each group has a program, some objectives, approaches they’re trying to communicate to the
community. I’m beginning to get the impression that this is all rather piecemeal and that what is maybe
required is some sort of holistic view as to what should be done and how it should be done. So again
I’m interested in you view.
Mr VORONOFF – That’s the purpose of our research – to take that step back. Environment Victoria can run
these boutique programs, and we all have these fantastic programs around, but let’s learn from that,
let’s see how this fits in to where we want to get to, where we have to really get to by 2050, otherwise
we’ll be in real trouble. I think it would be extremely beneficial to look more strategically at the issue
of community engagement and not just advertising campaigns, which are really important, but that
face-to-face community level engagement and involvement so you cross that bridge into actual
behaviour change. I’ve heard the argument about piecemeal, and I can see the point stepping back that
that may be considered a problem, certainly from a strategic point of view. Conversely, I think it’s
really important to acknowledge the role of community groups and the initiatives that have been taken,
because even strategically thinking about community engagement, it’s really important to provide the
capacity and to harness and allow space for the creativity and the initiatives that come from the
community. Because once the community owns it, once the people own it, then they drive it, they own
it and it goes beyond – it becomes something that’s alive of itself and it doesn’t rely on government
and government funding even. You start to leverage all sorts of partnerships and capacity and
creativity, and I know that’s a very broad and general statement, but the research backs it up
thoroughly. I think even having people here, they probably would’ve described to you some of the
benefits of that community level activity.
Ms LOVELL – Yes, I was just interested in when you have these open days at these homes; are the people
who are living in the homes given any training in how to communicate their experience, or more
probably, how to sell their experience?
Mr VORONOFF – Often – and this is an area that I think is really important – it is communicating
sustainability. Because if you’re going to do it to anyone, then you’re not going to say, “Hey, we need
to be sustainable” or “Gee, there’s this greenhouse effect”. You really need to lead people to that point
because they’re very big issues and very often they turn people away. So the point of connection is
about what people understand and what’s real to them and then making people aware that really it’s
very possible for them to take action and participate and take control of these broader issues, and that
together a community in a neighbourhood, in a street or an identified affiliation, those sorts of actions
do add up and can make a difference. So training is very important in that communication. The
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Moreland Energy Foundation has developed some really interesting stuff. Sustainability Street is doing
some good stuff with councils; Environment Victoria is exploring developing some training in that area
as well. It is a pretty critical aspect of it – how to communicate, how to elicit that empathy and relate at
the people’s level.
Ms LOVELL – And is the motivation for take-up, is it purely cost driven, or are people willing to take up
things maybe revenued or that may even cost them extra, but have environmental benefits?
Mr VORONOFF – Cost is very often cited as a reason for motivating people, but it often really isn’t. People
take action for a whole range of different reasons. People most often participate in these sorts of
programs because they want to meet other people and be with other people and participate in
neighbourliness; also they might be motivated by being a good citizen, doing the right thing. Or they
might be motivated by the status value of doing it. It might be considered something of high status to
be environmentally conscious and acting on it. Or it may be concern for a new family and the legacy
you leave. And this is part of the art of communicating about sustainability – tapping in to where
people are at and being able to relate to those motivations. Money can play a part, but it doesn’t
always. It’s a different type of person; you know, it takes so many different people.
Ms HENTY – Can I just mention a program the City of Stonnington ran. They invited people to come along
on a Where Does Your Waste Go tour, a recycling tour. And they had two different days – a weekday
and a weekend day, and advertised it broadly through their local paper, and so on. Both days were
oversubscribed; they had two buses and they couldn’t fit any more people in. There was a different sort
of person on both the days. They spent all day; it was early morning until evening going right out to
landfills and recycling depots, and all that sort of thing. The evaluation they did was very positive and
both trips were done free of charge, but in the evaluation they asked how much would people be
prepared to pay for such an experience, and I think most people said they’d be happy to pay, it was
really worthwhile. I think it was around about $20 – I might be wrong there. I’m just reporting on a
verbal account that I have. But they’re definitely thinking of running it continuously, but actually
charging a small amount to cover the cost of the bus, or something like that, because of the positive
response they got and because there was a waiting list of people who wanted to go.
Ms LOVELL – You’ve actually just reminded me of something that happened to me while I was at school.
When I was in Year 10 they sent home a form to suggest places that the school kids could go on
excursions, and my best friend’s father happened to be the mayor at the time – and my friend wouldn’t
take her form back to school, because he put down things like the Shepparton Sewerage Farm and
waste recycling, and she just wouldn’t take it back. Interesting to know the people in Stonnington are
now taking up the offer. I’ll tell her father that when I see him.
Mr DRUM – Thanks, Chair. As I understand at the moment with the ratings that are applicable to housing,
it’s currently been 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5; and then the new legislation, or the new regulations that went
through just recently, have mandated that it becomes 5. So I suppose, just picking up on Jenny’s point
earlier, the government is in fact mandating now that all houses built must reach a level of energy
rating 5. But as I understand it, to turn the same house from a level 1 to a level 5 – exactly the same
house – might mean repositioning it on the block so that it captures the northern winter suns, escapes –
possibly escapes some of the western summer. So, as I understand it, to turn the same house from a
level 1 into a rating 5, swing it around, get the best aspects of the sun, take away the glassed dining or
living area that might be getting all the summer sun, this type of thing – double glaze your window –
there is a whole range, maybe 10 or 15 or 20 different options you can grab. But the truth is if you did
them all, you’d end up with a house that may be well exceed star rating 5; you’d be up in the 6s and 7s,
but 6s and 7’s don’t exist. Do you think we need to now raise the bar? Effectively, what we’ve done is
we’ve set the bar; even though it’s quite good and a very positive thing that we’ve done, do we need to
now set the bar and create a rating level 6 and a rating level 7, giving people the incentive to keep going
after it, keep raising the bar?
Mr VORONOFF – I think so. By world standards, as I understand it, the five-star is actually quite low, so by
comparison to say North America and Europe – I think there is a strong case to get up to speed with
that. But I should make the point that, as you said, rating only applies to new dwellings, and we’ve got
150 years of old housing stock – or 50 years of old housing stock – that needs to be upgraded. So there
needs to be incentives and drivers for that. We advocate that there be mandatory energy ratings for
existing dwellings, and why not throw in mandatory water ratings as well? I know the water ratings
were canvassed in the recent Green and White Papers, but as I understand it, that hasn’t been advanced.
But there’s a strong case for having that, among a whole suite of other things that could –
Mr DRUM – Whose responsibility would it be to actually go into your house and my house and give that
45

house an energy rating, do you think?
Mr VORONOFF – There are qualified household auditors that are trained in the use of first-rate software,
and they typically do it. It’s usually done at a planning permit stage now for new dwellings, but if there
were mandatory ratings, then it would probably be done just before you sell a house, and probably form
part of the Section 32 agreement. And, of course, if you were doing water efficiency ratings as well,
then you’d have to reskill a lot of the auditors as well. But essentially, if you mandated it, you create a
whole new industry, and more employment for that area. Figures are pretty good on energy efficiency
in houses. There are some huge economic benefits there.
Mr DRUM – Could that be done reasonably cheaply?
Mr VORONOFF – The auditing?
Mr DRUM – Yes, so that if you’re going to put that end cost on to someone selling the house, you’re not
going to rake up a $200 or $300 additional cost. Could it be done for $60 or $70?
Mr VORONOFF – No, it’ll be about $200 or $300 – definitely less than $300. It’s usually around $200 now,
as I understand it. But all things considered, when you consider stamp duty and all the other costs
associated with the turnover of a house, it’s pretty minimal.
Ms LINDELL – Caroline? David? No. Wendy? No. Beautiful, right on time, so thank you very, very much
for your time today. We look forward to your written submission.
Ms LOVELL – I do have one more question. Because you’ll be better placed than we are. I mean, we’re
obviously talking to anybody we can get our hands on, but do you have people that we might not know
of who have good ideas, people who are doing good programs that you could let us know about?
Mr VORONOFF – Yes, sure. I can probably follow up with David. I’ll find out from him who you have
actually spoken to and then.
Ms LOVELL – To see if there are any extra items here. Thank you.
Mr VORONOFF – I’d be happy to.
Ms LOVELL – Thank you very much.
Witnesses withdrew
46

CORRECTED VERSION
ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE
Inquiry into Sustainable Communities
Melbourne – 5 July 2004
Members
Ms J. Lindell Ms A. Coote
Mr D. Drum Ms J. Duncan
Mr G. Hilton Ms W. Lovell
Mr G. Seitz
Chair: Ms J. Lindell
Deputy Chair: Ms A. Coote
Staff
Executive Officer: Ms Caroline Williams
Research Officers: Mr David Fairbridge
Witnesses
K. Woolfe, Functional Leader, Best Practice and Standards; and,
R. Bissett, Functional Leader Communities, Sustainable Energy Authority Victoria.
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The CHAIR – Thank you for coming and for your time today.
All evidence taken by the committee is taken under the provisions of the Parliamentary
Committees Act and is protected from judicial review. However, any comments made outside the
precincts of this hearing are not protected by parliamentary privilege. All evidence taken today is being
recorded, and you’ll receive proof transcript within a couple of weeks. Katrina, you’re going to do the
presentation? No, Rosemary, right. If you can leave us time to follow with questions, thank you.
Overheads shown
Ms BISSETT – We want to give you an overview of sustainable energy in Victoria. The Sustainable Energy
Authority’s focus is particularly on energy efficiency and renewable energy. And I’ll talk to you a little
bit about the transition that we hope to see towards the sustainable energy future; how we see that
operating. I will also give you an overview of the barriers that we see to community participation in
sustainable energy. Katrina is going to take you through a little bit more detail about the barriers, and
then go through some of the initiatives we have in place to help the community implement sustainable
energy initiatives, and some of the other opportunities we think are there.
The Sustainable Energy Authority is aiming to accelerate progress towards sustainable
energy. We want to do that by bringing together best available knowledge and expertise. That’s
particularly important, as good information to the right people at the right time and place allows people
to make decisions so that we can actually see sustained action and behaviours. We want to do that
through stimulating innovation as well – in particular to demonstrate new things, because we believe
you need more than business-as-usual to see these changes happen. Creating informed choice and
giving people good information is about creating lasting change.
Our strategy is underpinned by getting people to implement innovative or different things,
and that may be for the householder simply buying a different appliance – so changing their mind about
the type of appliance they would buy so they buy an innovation that’s more energy efficient, rather than
going for the same old thing. It might be a front-loading washing machine that’s more energy efficient,
rather than a top-loading one. Demonstration we believe is particularly important to making this
successful – so providing people with examples of what to do, that they can see, touch and feel, because
that reduces uncertainty and risk for people. And they’re more likely to follow others, and it will help
reduce risk and uncertainty if they’re going to take further steps in the future.
We also want to make sure we replicate change through demonstration, create examples that
others will follow so we can see change happen across the community. So we’re looking to get
examples that will allow us to replicate things through sectors, like the residential sector or different
industrial sectors. We believe learning is really important as well – so providing access to tailored
information to people where they need it to help their decisions. So innovation, demonstration,
replication and learning are key to the strategy that we’re implementing.
Some background on the reasons why we want to see energy efficiency and renewable
energy implemented: If you look at pollution – the Victorian greenhouse pollution by sector shows –
the breakdown here shows that stationary energy and transport are the two largest contributors to that,
and that’s where you see the residential energy consumption coming in; largely in stationary energy, in
houses and things that we do. SEAV has focused primarily on stationary energy in the strategies that
we’re implementing. And if we have a look at the breakdown of stationary energy –
Ms COOTE — What actually is stationary energy?
Ms BISSETT — Stationary energy is energy from things that don’t move, so it’s what you have in buildings,
what we’re using here on the pc, our lights – those sorts of things. Transport is a different sector.
Mr DRUM — Can I get back to that last point, just looking at the heading on it – Victorian Greenhouse
Pollution – I thought our biggest greenhouse polluters were the power stations.
Ms BISSETT — What we have from the power stations is included in the stationary energy sector.
Mr DRUM — Oh, electricity – so electricity gets – sorry I’m with you now.
Ms WOOLFE — It’s electricity and gas.
Mr DRUM — Thank you, and excuse my ignorance.
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Ms BISSETT — When you look at stationary energy use, you can break that down into industrial, residential
and commercial energy use. And as you can see, industrial is a huge segment of that and residential is
the next largest of the two. Commercial energy use is still significant, and we’re focusing on that
because things like commercial buildings are growing faster than the average rate for energy
consumption, which we’ll talk about in the next picture as well.
This slide actually builds a picture for you in terms of the transition we see to a more
sustainable energy future. This line is business-as-usual energy demand, and energy consumption is
actually growing at about 2 per cent per annum in Victoria, and if we have a look at clean energy
production – business-as-usual clean energy production is fairly static. This includes renewable energy
growth and things like clean coal use. So what we’ve got is a growing gap between our clean energy
production and our energy consumption. So we’re focusing on energy productivity to address the top
line, and if we have a look at the scenario we want to paint here, initially energy productivity and
energy efficiency can give us some easy gains in terms of addressing sustainable energy. There’s been
some really good work done looking at the opportunities for energy efficiency, and there’s huge
potential there across all sectors for that. In the previous gentleman’s discussion, his discussions of
what you can do just in looking at the residential housing sector, is an example of that.
As we move forward from decade one, if we work on energy efficiency and we move past
the low-hanging fruit, there’s still further gains to be had; and in decade three you’ll see the
opportunities from energy efficiency grow even further. Those opportunities in terms of what we can
get from energy efficiency and energy productivity we need to start working on now to see the benefits.
And there’s a range of technologies and processes that are available in the marketplace now. Even for
the domestic consumer you’ve got appliances, you’ve got things that you can do now with your house
to get it to five-star.
If we look at the base line and the clean energy supplies, this is a harder road in terms of the
change. We need to actually start working now to get the industry ready for later gains that we can
have in terms of production of renewable energy. We’ve got to build industry capacity, demonstrate the
renewable energy technologies work and make sure that they’re commercially viable. So slowly over
time we need to grow both our renewable energy generation capacity and our use of clean coal
technologies as well. So over time what we can do, if we work on both of those, is to close the gap and
have a much more sustainable energy future.
If you have a look at these – the energy efficiency things that we can do now are relatively
easy to do; and if you look into the future, you get an ever-decreasing ability to improve your energy
efficiency, so it becomes a lot harder. It’s the opposite for renewable and clean energy supplies. It’s
relatively difficult now because we’ve got innovation and technology barriers; we’ve got to make it
commercially viable. But in the future it’ll switch over and become easier. So we’ve got those two
things working together to take us towards a sustainable energy future.
Mr DRUM — And obviously, Rosemary, the top one there – which is our business-as-usual energy demand –
that’s obviously allowing for the increase in our population and all of our industry and so forth?
Ms BISSETT — Yes, that’s population and industrial development and growth. There are some scenarios
that have been created in the work that’s been done for the national framework for energy efficiency,
which has shown that we potentially could, if we worked really hard, drive some really strong
improvements in energy efficiency in the future. But that is where you’re sort of hitting really big
changes in the types of technologies and things that we apply.
In terms of energy productivity, to give you an example of the potential energy savings you
can have from these sectors, in petajoules, you can see here the industrial sector is going to give us the
largest returns, but the residential sector – and therefore the community – has still got significant energy
savings to be had. Some of the work that we’ve done looking at the barriers has lead to the creation of
this diagram. To get the step change in the way we use energy and the technologies we use to use
energy requires a step change in the way we go about things – so not our current business as usual. Any
change to existing practices creates uncertainty for people, and uncertainty increases risk; risk often
adds dollars. People might do something like design a house with natural ventilation, but they’re
worried about it providing cooling, so they’ll put in an air-conditioner anyway. That means you
increase the cost of what you’ve done. So providing really, really good information, providing
demonstration, helps reduce this risk and removes some of the barriers you get to realising
opportunities. I’m going to hand over to Katrina who will take you through some more specific
examples of this.
Ms WOOLFE — Okay. What I’ll do is first give you a little bit more information about barriers to
49

participation by the community. The first thing I want to focus on is looking at access to information.
In terms of information for consumers, information needs to be both accessible and credible and also
provided so it’s simple and transparent. But for those people who want further information, that
information is available for those who do want to go the extra step and understand the whys and
wherefores of particular technologies; looking at access to information in terms of accessibility, that it’s
accessible by all Victorians and provided through a range of channels, because not everyone will have
access to the Internet, not everyone is able to walk into a physical outlet and pick up information.
We’re looking at a range of different channels; so it could include Internet, printed information
distributed through community information outlets, displays at events, what householders are generally
looking for, information that will help them to make a decision about perhaps an appliance purchase, or
something like that. So that could be home shows, for example; telephone hotlines, face-to-face
communication.
One of the other things that consumers are looking for is credible information. What we
mean by this is that it’s produced and distributed by credible sources. There are numerous sources of
information in today’s society. And I think householders get a bit jaded about the sheer volume of
information out there, but they are looking for information that is seen to have some credibility behind
it. I mentioned before information that is simple and transparent as well; that it’s not full of lots of
technical jargon. But for those who do want the technical jargon, that it is there if they wish to delve
deeper.
Affordability in housing tenure – I’ve put that up in terms of a barrier. Here I’m really
talking about people who are renting. For example, the Victorian Utility Consumption Survey
conducted by the Department of Human Services back in 2001 found that 49 per cent of private
tenants said that they experienced difficulties in heating their homes, for example; and that they’re
constrained in terms of what they can do in their home – yes, they can make behavioural changes, but
in terms of the actual structural changes, it is often difficult to actually do that because they don’t
necessarily have the incentive to put in a heating appliance if they don’t know how long they’re going
to be in that particular home. And it’s only really when they’re seeking new accommodation that they
can shop around. I’ve put market value up there in terms of the available technologies that are around,
because for some the paybacks aren’t that short-term for some new technologies; and that some
economic incentives and assistance programs and standards, and so on, can help drive the increase in
demand, leading to greater economies of scale and greater competition.
Just having a look at some of the initiatives that householders can take up – I’ve broken this
up into five areas: access to information and expertise, economic incentives, assistance, capacity,
building – and this is really aimed not so much at the householders but at service providers and product
providers and standards and regulations. With access to information; looking at information channels,
I talked a little bit about that before in terms of the variety of the channels and access. Some examples
are the Sustainable Energy Authority’s web site, which has detailed information for householders
about choosing heating appliances or cooling appliances, and designing energy efficient homes, and
that sort of thing. Also we have a partnership with three organisations that are working in regional
Victoria. What this means with these partnerships is that because they’re actually operating in those
particular regions, they’re able to provide access to people who can speak at community events,
provide information in community outlets; and there has been a number of different situations where
there has been information provided in towns such as Donald and St Arnaud – and Rosemary will
probably know a lot of these, because she’s been to a lot of these towns to have a look at the
information that’s provided there.
I have put up tailored information – and this is about tailoring information, so it’s very
meaningful for householders. The message is not restricted to, “Let’s do the right thing for the
environment”, but what does it mean for someone who’s looking to buy a new home or looking to buy
an appliance, and they’ll be looking at, “Will this save money off my energy bills? Will this new
appliance pay for itself quickly?” And the five-star standard for new houses is a case in point that yes,
there’s an environmental benefit in reducing the energy that’s consumed in homes by moving to a
higher standard, but the benefits for householders are clear as well: that there is a reduction in energy
bills as a result of moving to a higher efficiency home, but also that the homes are more comfortable to
live in; that they’re up to five degrees warmer in winter and 10 degrees cooler in summer. So there’s
an immediate benefit for householders.
Another point about information is that in terms of tailoring the information or providing
information that’s affecting key decision points, it’s not only about behavioural changes such as,
“Let’s switch off a light”, but also looking at long-term change, so actually structural change in terms
of building it into the home, so if it’s an appliance purchase or something like that.
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Consumer confidence in products as well is another important consideration. I mentioned
this before – for instance, the Green Power tick of approval is something that is available for Green
Power products so people can see this is something that has some standards and checks behind it to
ensure that this information is credible. Demonstration projects are also an important source of
information for the community as well – and that could be through governments, whether it’s state or
local, and leading by example or working in partnership with the private sector to establish
demonstration, which basically allays uncertainty and reduces the risk that Rosemary spoke of before.
For example, before the five-star standard came in, there were a whole lot of five-star display homes
out there constructed by volume builders, and also public housing reaching the five stars constructed
by the Office of Housing – so demonstrating that that was certainly possible to do that. The
installation of solar hot water units by the Office of Housing is another case in point where one
hundred units have been installed on what is low-cost housing.
One example of a project that is currently under way is the local energy efficiency
demonstration project the Sustainable Energy Authority is running. This is a project to showcase
leadership in sustainable energy in community facilities. There are 15 projects that have been
developed as part of that, and these are on a variety of different community facilities in regional and
rural Victoria, which will demonstrate sustainable energy best practice. There will be, as part of these
projects, demonstrations of how local residents and businesses can also achieve similar energy savings
in homes or businesses, so that’s actually built into the project.
Economic incentives include the provisions of rebates to overcome barriers of affordability,
and the incentives are generally used in two situations – either for new technologies, which is
increasing the uptake of relatively new technologies where the costs may be high and paybacks a little
longer and where perhaps the installation of technologies may be restricted to a few people within that
sector for that reason; and also looking at existing technologies which are out of the reach of some
people. Examples of that are the solar hot water rebate, where 8000 solar hot water units have been
installed, and the high-efficiency gas heater rebate, which has only just come in, which is aimed at the
people living in regional Victoria and outer metropolitan. The high efficiency gas heater rebate is
aimed at regional Victoria and people living in outer metropolitan Melbourne. The idea is that there is
a rebate provided to help switch heating from electricity, and firewood to more efficient heating
sources, which is a high-efficiency gas-based heater. To date over 320 applications have been put in
and over 130 rebates paid, and the majority of rebate recipients are concession cardholders.
Looking at assistance – here I’m just really focusing on home energy retrofits; and there’s
such a program that’s underway at the moment administered by the Sustainable Energy Authority –
known as the energy taskforce – and it’s aimed at low-income households. This is a project that has
multiple outcomes: not only reducing energy use by improving the energy efficiency of homes
occupied by low-income households, but also providing job opportunities for people who are longterm
unemployed, or people on a disability who are then trained in becoming energy assessors, and
actually do the work as well. So they basically go out to people’s homes, do an assessment, see what
the possibilities are and then make a time to come back and undertake some simple low-cost retrofits
that could include insulation, draught sealing – some very simple easy things. These audits are free
and they’re actually focused on what’s known as neighbourhood renewal areas. We’re working with
the Department of Human Services on the Neighbourhood Renewal project; it also links into our
community development project as well. Last year we retrofitted over 250 homes, and that was piloted
in three regions – two in regional Victoria. This year it’s being delivered in five different regions, four
of which are in regional Victoria. There will be around 1000 homes retrofitted this year, and there
have been over 40 job opportunities created as well. As part of this as well I should also point out that
the work team, when they go in to do the audit and retrofit, also provide some information to the
householder as well about some simple things they can do. So it does have a behavioural aspect to it
as well, but it is actually improving the efficiency of the home, so that if those people move on that
home is still improved. And it’s open to owner-occupiers, private renters and public housing tenants
as well.
Capacity building is looking at the product and service providers, the people who will be
providing those products and services to householders. These capacity building strategies can include
training and accreditation of the industry and the establishment of directories of products and services.
Capacity building aims to build the capacity of the market to provide those services and technologies,
and also has that quality assurance aspect to it as well. So it increases householder confidence in those
products and services. An example of this is the Green Plumbers Program the Master Plumbers and
Mechanical Services Association run, and that provides not only water efficiency information as part
of the Green Plumbers Program, but also we’ve worked with the association to introduce a solar hot
water green plumbers course. Over 500 plumbers have been trained so far in the installation and
application of solar hot water technologies.
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Another example I have here is accredited house energy raters. I heard Daniel talking about
energy ratings. We have about 700 energy raters in Victoria at the moment, and that’s growing. These
are people who can provide an energy rating using the First-Rate software program. To help deliver
that to industry, there are partnerships with 11 training providers – which are typically TAFEs and
universities to provide industry training. About 2000 industry professionals have been trained to date.
Capacity building in the community sector – the community sector does have a role in
providing information about energy efficiency as part of their best services, particularly perhaps those
aimed at assisting low-income households to manage their expenses; so financial councilors, for
example. Lastly, looking at standards and regulation and examples, I’ve put up here the five-star
energy and water standards and minimum energy performance standards for appliances, which is a
national scheme the Sustainable Energy Authority participates in in the development of energy ratings
for appliances and minimum performance standards. Other low-cost initiatives – here I’ve just put up
a few – and these are examples such as consumer information provided by industry associations, for
example – so those provided by building display centre where householders can attend seminars and
learn about different aspects of building or renovating their new home. Also there are good examples
of demonstration by industry in the community and the HIA’s Green Smart display village as an
example, with its 14 five-star houses in Point Cook. Any questions?
The CHAIR — Wendy, do you want to start this time?
Ms LOVELL — No, I’ll think I’ll pass actually.
Ms COOTE — Can I talk to you about green power? Before consumer confidence in information credibility
you spoke about green power. I have a problem with green power in that I don’t know that I believe
that it is credible. What’s the feeling out there, and do you feel confident, using your own terminology,
that it is credible; that that money is actually getting to green power, it is actually getting to green
research, et cetera? And how do you monitor that?
Ms BISSETT — The premium you pay for green power is going towards paying for renewable energy
generation; and we’re confident that that money is going towards renewable energy generation, because
it is paid to the generators by the retailers in return for buying the Green Power from them – and when
you go out and you do the market research, that’s not well understood by the community. So they
don’t have huge amount of confidence in what they see in terms of the products being marketed as
green power. However, it’s incredibly important that the government does have an accreditation
system. The market research has shown that that tick – the Green Power and government accredited
symbol – is really, really important to its credibility. So we’re planning to do a lot more work with the
retailers on that, and raising community awareness of that symbol and of the fact that that product
actually does have government accreditation, that the money does go to renewable energy generation.
Ms COOTE – For example, in what – windmills?
Ms BISSETT – So it’s renewable energy generation across a range of renewable energy sources, so that
includes wind –
Ms COOTE – Methane?
Ms BISSETT – Methane or biomass. It includes hydro, new hydro – so a range of those; and as renewable
energy sources grow, it would probably include other sources like solar, like geothermal.
Ms COOTE — Okay, so as a consumer, how would I hear about all of this? Because I would have to say that
I am very skeptical about it, so how do we find out? I mean, if you’re a consumer and you pay for your
green power, do you get additional information back every time you pay your bill; how are you giving
confidence to know that this is actually what’s happening?
Ms BISSETT – There’s a dedicated web site for people who want further information, which is I think
www.greenpower.com.au That web site provides information on the green power products of
all the retailers and on the system and how the accreditation works. So as a consumer you can actually
get information from that site, a shared site with the NSW Sustainable Energy Development Authority.
Ms COOTE – A lot of constituents are not on the computer, so how do they hear?
Ms BISSETT – We actually have printed brochures on green power that actually explain where it comes from
and what the product is. Then the retailers have information on their products as well.
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Ms COOTE – Okay, so you’ve listed a number of other things, too, in that area that gave consumer
confidence and information credibility. Do they need it strengthening in the marketing sense as well?
Does your market research tell you that people have not got confidence in this within the community to
be backing it with their own dollars?
Ms BISSETT – It tells us, and therefore our programs are working towards increasing information to give
people an awareness of what green power is. Some people still don’t understand green power as well.
So there’s been, I guess, an information barrier to people understanding what they’re purchasing when
they’re purchasing green power.
Ms COOTE — I didn’t mean just green power. I understood your response to that. I meant in other areas as
well. There’s green power as one of the products. In other products, are people feeling more
comfortable with knowing that they are making a difference? Is this what you’re getting in your
market research? They buy the implements, et cetera; they’re happy that they’re doing the right thing?
Ms BISSETT– There’s a growing awareness and our market research is showing that there’s a slow shift in
awareness and understanding, but it’s something we need to continue to do over time. People have a
better understanding of what they can do and how they can help in terms of their energy usage, in terms
of greenhouse pollution, but there’s still a large number of people in the community that don’t have that
awareness, so it’s a gradual process over time. I guess it’s getting information to people when they’re
at decision points, like buying a new appliance or renovating their house –
Ms COOTE – Okay, so we’re talking about behavioural changes. Who’s responsibility do you see that as
being? Is it yours or is it the EPA or is it EcoRecycle? Whose job is it to actually make people aware,
do you think?
Ms BISSETT - I think it’s a number of organisations and people working together. Each of the agencies has a
role to play, and that gives an authoritative government brand to the information, information that you
can trust. But then community organisation and industry sector organisations also have a role to play,
because we each come into contact with the consumer at different stages of sort of their decision cycle,
I guess. So we all have a key role to play together.
Ms COOTE – And do you personally feel that that’s been coordinated well enough at the moment, or can we
be making recommendations perhaps that it could strengthen that? That cooperation, that united
approach, that selling the same story? Do you think it’s been done well enough or –
Ms BISSETT — I think there’s been change over time, that we’ve started that journey, and it’s a matter of
working together and progressing it further. The five-star standard, which Katrina can talk about, is a
great example of where you’ve got government, industry and everybody working together to provide
that information for the community.
Ms COOTE – Thanks.
Mr HILTON — I’d like to talk a little bit about the retrofit program. I think you mentioned that was only for
low-income households.
Ms BISSETT — That’s right.
Mr HILTON — Being brutal, probably a low-income household is probably more sensitive to the needs of
energy and the way they use it than a middle class household that probably just pays the bills and
doesn’t think too much about it. I was wondering if there were any plans to extend that program to
anybody who wants an audit done for their house. If it were extended and there needed to be a price,
what sort of price would that be? And finally, another question: would part of that audit be able to
indicate the amount of capital investment the household would need to make to raise the energy
efficiency of the house, and over what period would they expect to get a return on money?
Ms WOOLFE – There’s no plan to extend the energy taskforce beyond low-income households. However,
there are people in the businesses out there in the private sector that are looking to introduce energy
auditing and energy advisory services, which are actually broader than energy efficiency – I should say
– to people who can pay. So that’s certainly under way; and they’re looking at projects such as the
energy taskforce as a stepping stone to learning from what we’re doing and developing that to a greater
extent, and including looking at providing householders with information about paybacks on greater
capital expenditure.
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Mr HILTON — And how far is this process got to? You said people are thinking about it.
Ms WOOLFE – It’s pretty well advanced; and this is an enterprise that’s been developed, as I said, out there
in the private sector at the moment.
Mr HILTON — So could you give us details of what this organisation is?
Ms WOOLFE– It is an organisation called Easy Being Green.
Mr DRUM – My only question was touched on earlier this morning in some of the presentations we heard
today – they are all very very similar, similar groups working in a similar field. Obviously it is
sustainable, I suppose. Are you quite comfortable with the way your area is set up? Do we come
across a crossing-over of responsibilities? For instance, I was mentioning the five-star rating issue with
our last presenters, but it’s probably more in line talking to you people about that, because you have
probably got more to do with it than our people from Environment Victoria. Do you see where I’m
coming from? Some of the presenters we’ve had have been very very aligned – whose responsibility is
it to look at water; who’s responsibility is it to look at reducing our energy outputs; whose
responsibility is it to find new ways of creating other sources of energy?
Mr BISSETT — I think you need somebody to act as a lead agency. That’s very important, but I think the
evidence is really clearly there, that you need to actually work in a partnership approach to make it
happen. So I think the initiatives where you see industry, government and community all working
together; it’s stronger and you get more lasting change and you get easier acceptance of change as
people participate in making those decisions, and help those initiatives happen together. I think there
are some really good models of how change has been happening through partnerships. I think, too, that
in terms of who takes a lead role, it’s important to know who’s responsible for being a lead agency.
But the integration across those issues is such that you need to have some overlap. For example, we’re
talking with the water industry in regard to energy and water demand management, because if
somebody makes a decision about a washing machine, they could make one that’s going to help water
efficiency, but not help energy efficiency. So we need to be working together across those integrated
issues to maximise and optimise the outcomes. So it’s about knowing where you do intersect to
maximise that rather than trade off one against the other.
The CHAIR — Can you give me a rough handle of where Australia sits internationally as far as renewable
energy, and the uptake of renewable energy, and then in what context you’d then find Victoria? Are we
– I think we’re the largest waste producers in the world. How do we go with energy consumption?
Ms BISSETT — I actually don’t know exactly where we sit in terms of renewables. That might be
information that we could get back to you on, but in terms of greenhouse pollution production per
capita, I can’t pull the number off the top of my head. We’re one of the largest in the world. That’s
looking at Australia. In Victoria, because of our manufacturing sector and our reliance on brown coal,
we’re also very high as well.
The CHAIR — What do you see are the key barriers to the switch to renewable energy?
Ms BISSETT — At the moment some of the technologies need to be demonstrated so people can see the
commercial viability of them. If you look at how cheap our brown coal is, it’s difficult for some of
those technologies – because they’re new – to compete at the moment. They don’t have the scale, so
they tend to be very small-scale projects. But particularly in rural and regional Victoria where their
access to traditional energy suppliers is not as easy, in some of those places where you maybe have the
waste to energy project, where they’re using methane from, say, waste in a piggery or something, then
they actually can compete, and they’re quite commercially viable. So it’s making sure you have the
renewable energy technologies applied in the right situations and they can actually demonstrate quite
good commercial viability. But a lot of that’s new, so over time we have to build our expertise and our
understanding and get demonstration projects up to show how it works. The solar hot water industry’s
been a good example. The government’s rebates have actually provided an incentive to help people
afford to take up the technology, and that’s meant the manufacturing industry here has grown; and so
we’ve now seen Victorian manufacturers established. We’ve seen service industry grow, so we’ve got
a number of retail outlets across the state. We’ve got plumbers who can fit the appliances. So it takes
time to actually build that up, and solar hot water is a good example of the lifecycle and how that
changes over time, but it does take time.
Ms LOVELL — How reliable is it, solar hot water, though? I live in Shepparton, which is known as the solar
city. We’ve had the benefit of one of the neighbourhood renewal programs, but I recently heard a
plumber in Shepparton say that he actually removes more solar hot water systems than he installs
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nowadays. And if that’s happening in the town – that gets the most solar days, or most sunshine, in
Victoria?
Ms WOOLFE — Yes. Back in the ‘80s I understand that there were some systems that weren’t as reliable
but these days the systems are reliable and will work south of the border as well. So they will work in
places like Melbourne. So it may have been that he was removing much older systems – it would be,
because there were certainly some technical or installation problems in the early days.
Ms LOVELL — Our pool is solar heated, and that was done probably in the ‘80s, and you wouldn’t rely on it
any time now. It’s like sort of those three and a half months of the peak of summer.
Mr HILTON — I’ve just got one very quick question. We had a gentleman in before lunch talk about a new
design of house, which wasn’t a brick veneer, which was an earth-soil manufacturer, but not brick. He
actually cited your organisation as giving this sort of construction the tick of approval. Could you
comment on that, or is that something you –
Ms WOOLFE — I’m not sure what particular situation he might have been referring to. Certainly with
something like the energy rating software, it can be used on houses of all different construction types,
including whether it’s a mud brick house, or house of just straw bail even, or a more traditional brick
veneer house. And because it’s a performance-based system, it looks at the house as a total –
Mr HILTON — But he was very much waxing lyrical about the energy efficiency of this sort of construction.
I suppose what I was asking is, would you be able to make some comment from your organisation as to
how valid his claims were?
Ms WOOLFE — His claims are – it would be something about which we would need to have a look at the
data, the figures on that, and we could then compare it against the other current information that we
have. But without having more information about that –
Ms COOTE — How many people in your organisation now?
Ms WOOLFE — About 75.
The CHAIR — Thank you for your time.
Witnesses withdrew
55

CORRECTED VERSION
ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE
Inquiry into Sustainable Communities
Melbourne – 5 July 2004
Members
Ms J. Lindell Ms A. Coote
Mr D. Drum Ms J. Duncan
Mr G. Hilton Ms W. Lovell
Mr G. Seitz
Chair: Ms J. Lindell
Deputy Chair: Ms A. Coote
Staff
Executive Officer: Ms Caroline Williams
Research Officers: Mr David Fairbridge
Witnesses
P. Lyon, Senior Policy Advisor, Environment, and N. Rogers, Local Government NRM Facilitator,
Municipal Association of Victoria.
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The CHAIR – All evidence taken by the committee is taken under the provisions of the Parliamentary
Committees Act and is protected from judicial review. However, any comments made outside the
precincts of the hearing are not protected by parliamentary privilege.
I will hand over to you, and if you could leave us some time for some questions at the end.
Mr LYON – For sure. We didn’t think we’d present for very long. We want to give you a snapshot of what
we have prepared in our submission, and then let you ask the questions. Essentially, as you know, the
MAV is the peak body representing the 79 municipal councils in Victoria. We are set up through a
statutory act, and have a representative body of councilors who elect a president. We represent both
rural and city councils, and it’s important to point that out because with a lot of what we say today, you
need to consider both the rural and the metro picture. There are a lot of differences between those
communities, and a lot of differences– in particular, the capacity of councils to act in some of the ways
that we might describe today.
Local government is assuming a much greater role in environmental management overall,
and you might have heard today some really good examples of local government programs in the
environment area. Traditionally, local government has a core role in environmental services, such as
recycling and waste management and stormwater, but increasingly their role is moving into the broader
area of community education, community development. There is an intersection between the role of
councils and the environment area and their role in, say, township planning, municipal public health
planning and place management, and different councils would have developed their programs across
those areas in fairly diverse ways. The interesting thing about environmental management in Victorian
councils is that there are very few explicit statutory requirements on councils on how they develop their
programs. So there is a great diversity of environment programs.
We would argue, though– and it’s traditionally been seen – that as councils are the closest
level of government elected by the community, they have a key role to play. Their credibility in their
communities is strong. They have well-developed links to their community, and the messages about
environmental sustainability placed through local government is a really good way to go – and we’ve
got some good examples in our submission that point the way in terms of how councils are already
working with their communities. What we have tried to do in our submission is to actually provide you
with a starting point in terms of your inquiry of where you might go in local government. We spent a
month collecting about 30 case studies of the leading examples in local government. And we suggest
that as much as we can represent councils structurally at the top end, it would be really good to talk to
some councils about their direct experiences and their constraints.
Some of the drivers that are working with local government to get them involved in
community sustainability are –
Mr DRUM – Excuse me, Peter, is now the time for you to maybe list some of the certain councils?
Mr LYON – I could. We were going to pick out a few leading examples for you.
Mr DRUM – Do you want to do that now or do that later on, Peter?
Mr LYON – I’ll just finish what I’m saying. I won’t be long, and then we might go to some of those
examples for you. I want to talk about some of the drivers, because I think they’re quite important.
Obviously, legislative reform coming down from state government is an important driver for local
government. We act within the framework of state government. Obviously, drivers in, say,
biodiversity and water and energy are going to change the way local government does business. We’ve
seen with the recent water White Paper and Green Paper that it’s changing the way government does
business on these important resources. It reframes the way councils are looking at doing their business.
The important thing with local government is we do act in a sense as the partner to other
levels of government with the core responsibility. So with energy efficiency and with water, it’s other
levels of government that set the standards. They set the appliance labeling and the water pricing. But
councils often act as the first point of call for residents who come in and say, “Well, what can I do?” So
it’s important for government to work in partnership with the local government so that the messages
coming down a community are the same, that they’re not at cross-purposes – and we’ll see in some
examples that that doesn’t always happen.
The other driver is community. There is a very big bottom-up driver from the community to
be more sustainable, and often the first point of contact is their council driving their councils to be
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green. A lot of councils are very proud of their green credentials. The other driver is a sense that
councils are planning strategically for environmental management. You might have heard this morning
about programs like Cities for Climate Protection, and programs run though ecorecycling are requiring
councils to be strategic. Agenda 21 is about councils tackling economic development and environment.
So councils are in themselves being much more strategic. We’d say that councils are really well placed.
I was at a forum at Darebin City Council talking about water conservation planning.
Darebin City Council pointed out some really straightforward things about why councils are important
in community sustainability. Councils know, and already have strong ties with their communities, and
it might be through their environment programs, but it might also be through business or welfare
programs. They are often leading by example. The Darebin City Council new Reservoir Civic Centre
is a good one – so totally renovated with sustainability practices built in.
Councils are often partnering with other state agencies – be it water authorities or state
recycling authorities – to channel the message down to the local community, modelling and translating
that message for their local community. We’d argue that strong partnerships are essential. The councils
can’t do it alone; if they do, things start going a bit awry. State government conversely needs to partner
more strongly with state government to ensure consistency and lack of duplication. Some of the
barriers for councils in working with their communities – and this is particularly for rurals – is limited
funds and resources to fund large-scale long-term projects. If you’re thinking about communities and
householders, even as something as basic as littler, it’s the consistency of the message over a long
period of time repeated that gets the behaviour change. So short-term limited funding is quite a barrier
for a lot of councils, and they’re quite reluctant to say, “Yep, we’ll do that if it’s only for one year in
terms of funding”.
For rural councils particularly their rate bases are limited, and they’ve got a major task of
infrastructure and asset management alongside welfare; aged-care services is still a bit of the new kid
on the block. As an example of that, in the survey we did two years ago – the survey of environment
programs in local government – about 63 per cent of metropolitan councils have an overarching
environment strategy. That usually translates to having a full-time employee or crew of staff dealing
with environment or strategic programs. In rural councils that number is 15 per cent, so we see there
are some major funding and resource barriers for rural councils.
A challenge for councils is that their communities are often very diverse. Take a city like
Darebin, with a very diverse multicultural, multi-linguistic inner-city community – the challenge for
that council is trying to tailor its programs to a fairly diverse community. They would also say that
programs targeted at households and businesses are very different, and there’s a very strong push
through state government to look at the small to medium enterprise end of town to see if councils can
work with that part of town, with the retail and small business sector. It’s a challenge for EPA; they’re
working well with the majority of licensed companies, but when it comes down to those dispersed and
small businesses, they’re seeing if there’s a role for local government.
Another barrier is that a lot of the community will come to its council with a question – for
example, maybe about five-star rating, about energy appliances, and the council is really the referral
agency to then pass them on to another state agency with that in-house and technical expertise. We’ve
identified in our submission the examples that we might finish on, but we’ve also identified some
avenues for improving the way councils work with community through the range of programs.
Obviously in any sector – be it waste, water, energy or biodiversity – we’d call for strong recognition
that local government is a player. Quite a lot of the time state legislation might be developed without
local government in mind, and we would argue that the implementation on the ground has to involve
councils as key partners and look at practical realities of how councils can actually do their business and
the resourcing of that business.
As well as recognising councils, we’ve got to recognise that local government is not a
bottomless pit of resources. Any structural reform or movement in this area requires resources and
capacity. A lot of our work at MAV is about raising the capacity of local governments and what they
do. At the end of the day, resource is the major message we get from councils about their business.
We’ve put some suggestion in there that we’re developing up through a discussion with state
government – it’s a state local government sustainability accord on the table. Some of our suggestions
there are not all about cap-in-hand solutions. Some of them are about solutions that might involve
legislative reform to local government’s own capacity. So in New South Wales, for example, councils
can raise an environment levy after discussion with their local community to fund the local projects.
The minister approves it and the council can raise the funds. But that’s just one idea where it’s not then
beholden on state government to give handouts all the time to local governments. We’d like to see a
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good discussion about councils’ capacity and resources in this sort of debate.
Looking at the household level, there’s a very strong tendency to look at the sectoral issues
quite separately. So we look at water, energy and waste quite differently. I’ll be in my office, and state
agencies – each individually responsible for those sectors – will come to me and say, “We want to work
with your local councils with households”. And the councils generally don’t look at their households
that way. They’ll look at their households, go out to them and want to talk about energy, wastewater
and biodiversity, integrated. We see that there are business efficiencies and efficiencies in actually
looking at households and communities not through that separated approach. Because at the end of the
day a council can’t have an officer responsible for each sector, but will have an officer responsible for
environmental sustainability, trying to tackle it in an integrated way. In fact, there are some examples
that I will point to in a minute that have started to do just that – look at the household in an integrated
way and work with them not just with water but on the whole sustainability question.
There’s a strong trend in not just providing information, but about behaviour change, that
you will have heard about today. We’d underline that as being really important – that we can’t move
communities ahead just by providing information; we have to be a bit more innovative in the way we
approach them and provide a suite of tools. It might be regulation at the top end – incentives sitting
somewhere in that, information – and then using all those together to create change, not just one or the
other. At the very end of our sort of suite of things, we think improving community sustainability
consists of some basic things like evaluation and monitoring. We think there are a lot of programs
going on out there. We’ve got a lot to show you, but we can’t sit here and say which ones are effective
particularly well. I think that’s a drawback of local and state government programs. I think there needs
to be much more monitoring of cost benefit in terms of change, volume of water, kilojoules of energy,
what are you saving for your dollar. We do know that a lot of household-based programs are quite
expensive for governments to run. You might have a whole program funded to get to 90 households,
but is that getting to the broader community? But then you might contrast that with, say, a state
advertising program of many millions that gets to the whole community. I think what we argue is better
evaluation and monitoring of outcomes is really vital and, developing good cost benefit indicators per
household would be essential.
I will turn to some examples now – and again, I really urge you to talk to the councils
directly, because I think you’d get the richness of what they do from them. I will pull out a couple to
start with. Moreland City Council has been involved in the Sustainability Streets Program with
Environs Australia. That’s about working at a street and neighbourhood level – the council in partner
with their community – and that talks about sustainability overall. It’s a community development
model where the council gets the street together, they’ll set about looking at what goals that community
wants to achieve in terms of sustainability, and then try to facilitate that essentially giving you an
opportunity for that change to go back to the community. So it’s a fairly long-term cultural community
development model.
Another example that’s fairly similar but a little bit different is City of Port Phillip, with its
Sustainable Living at Home Program. That’s a bit like Neighbourhood Watch on a neighbourhood
basis, where the council trains a group of facilitators in the neighbourhood to then go out themselves
and train community in sustainability. They get a diary, and they have to look at their own use in their
households. So: are they using less energy; water; what transport modes they are using? The
interesting thing about that is that the program tries to monitor and collect data form each household
and pull that up to a whole-of-council in part, so to say – “Well, for the cost of that program are we
actually saving any dollars?”
Another example that’s slightly different – and it’s on a more structural basis – is the City of
Port Phillip (verify) Oasis. This is one where council has used its position as a leading council, a
leadership role, and is working with private developers –
Ms COOTE — Is there ever a problem with the developer?
Mr LYON — It’s had some problems in getting it off the ground.
Ms COOTE — I think it is Garry Kapp (verify), yes.
Mr LYON — In terms of its intent, though –
Ms COOTE — It’s stopped.
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Mr LYON — I think part of it is still going and part of it is not.
Ms COOTE — Yes, it’s a fabulous concept; it’s just that unfortunately that’s who the developer was.
Mr LYON — I think the interesting thing about it, though, was it was an attempt to combine council and
private sector together.
Ms COOTE — Oh, it’s fabulous. No, it’s fantastic; it’s great. It’s great.
Mr LYON — And I suppose use council’s planning regulations. Councils do have a range of regulatory tools
– the planning scheme is an essential one. The planning scheme, though, has limitations in that it is
permit-driven. So for a lot of renovations, or a lot of existing building stock, the planning system is
probably fairly irrelevant. For new subdivision and new infill developments it’s very important, but
60 per cent of our stock is there already and it’s not permit-driven, so the permit system has its
limitations. Structurally, another key mechanism that councils are being urged to use is the local laws
or bylaws system. An example is a pilot program with EcoRecycle to develop a local law for builders
so that every building site down to the littlest housing site has waste-management plans so that all
waste produced on site is recycled or sent to the right place. They’re seeking to do that through local
laws. Now there are benefits there in that councils can control that. They can create their own
approaches; it’s one-on-one between small developers and councils. The problem that industry has sort
of brought up is that you then get 80 different local laws, and they depend on council actually
producing it and taking it up. So the problem there will be a diversity of regulation when a lot of
industry wants consistency. Nina, did you want to talk about a couple of other examples?
Ms ROGERS – Yes. I think some of the one’s Peter referred to were the leading edge, quite metropolitan in
their focus. It’s important also to highlight some of the really solid work that’s happening in the rural
sector between councils and range of partnerships agencies. One partnership that I guess you could
look at is the Surf Coast Shire Council and the Neighbourhood Environment Improvement Plan that’s
occurred in Anglesea. That’s a partnership arrangement between the shire, the EPA and a range of
other authorities. The objectives there are looking at building the capacity of that community to
respond to environmental sustainability, to protect Anglesea’s natural assets, identifying and
developing strategies that will reduce Anglesea’s ecological footprint, and picking up on that term.
The NEIP was a pilot NEIP, and there’s been a lot of learnings that have then occurred and
being taken forward in working with new neighbourhood environment improvement plans that have
then since developed, such as that in Donald in the Bullock Shire.
Another example worth mentioning is one that occurred in the City of Greater Shepparton,
and that was their Cycle Instead program. That came about in late 2000 when the shire developed an
integrated bicycle strategy and was looking at the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by using
alternative modes of transport to vehicles. They looked at this program over a two-month trial period,
and they had an initial aim of reducing vehicle trips by 50 000 trips. That was well exceeded with the
reduction of over 170 000 car trips just in two months and an increase in 95,000 bicycle trips alone, and
pedestrian trips and the like. So in that regard, council working with Bicycle Victoria demonstrated that
there was sufficient community interest to look at how, in very practical terms, the community could be
reducing the greenhouse emissions they create through their day-to-day activities.
Mr DRUM – What period of time was that Nina, that you had the 95 000?
Ms ROGERS — Over two months.
Mr DRUM — Two months?
Ms LOVELL — How did they quantify that?
Ms ROGERS — Oh look, I don’t have that information in front of me, but we can certainly find out.
Ms LOVELL — Because I come from Shepparton and nobody’s ever asked me if I’d ridden my bike. That
program got very little public motion, so I think those figures would be astronomically overrated.
Ms ROGERS — We can certainly follow up on that.
Mr LYON — All these examples are from the councils.
The CHAIR — Although Bicycle Victoria triumph it, so I think there are probably a couple of sources.
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Ms LOVELL — Everyone we’ve heard a presentation from today virtually deals with local government, and
it must be taking someone in local government – it must be almost a full-time job just to meet with all
these different environmental groups coming around with their projects. Is the MAV playing any role
in facilitating between all the different groups and local government to prevent that sort of overlap of
different programs being offered to them and prevent the council being swamped with environmental
issues where the peak body could maybe intervene and sort of suggest better programs? Also, you
talked about rural Victoria and the limited funds that councils have for implementing their programs
and you don’t have the economy of scale that they have in Melbourne. Is the MAV doing anything to
assist rural councils to better focus their programs so that they can use those limited resources in a more
effective way?
Mr LYON — With the wealth-of-programs question, you are right, there are a lot of programs out there
where a range of providers – if you can call them that – is coming to local government. There are two
ways of seeing that: in some senses councils have said, “Look, there’s too much out there. Which one
should we do?” What we’ve done with a range of areas is partner with key agencies to streamline that
bit – state or private providers – and streamline that a little bit so councils start working through one
particular program. The other way of seeing it, though, is there is a diversity of choice and there’s a
diversity of trials, and in fact some solutions in western Melbourne might work really well in western
Melbourne but if a council works with another provider here in eastern Melbourne to develop their own
program, that’s quite good. So there’s a diversity of innovation happening. We sit a little bit on the
fence on that, because it’s not up to us to tell councils what they do. We’ve seen a lot of really good
innovation coming out of councils developing up partnerships with key agencies.
In the small business area, for example, it’s a really new focus for councils, and there are a
couple of different programs happening, and they’re using slightly different approaches. There’s the
Green Streets, a private consultancy working with Yarra Council; there’s another program working at
Moreland; and Sustainability Streets at Nillumbik. Now if we came in as a peak body and said, “Well
no, this is the way to go”, I think we stifle innovation, so in a sense the bottom-up driver of community
is really important.
When there is a range of councils involved in a program we try to start working to help get
simplified and straightforward information about the programs. In the rural councils area it is a really
vexed problem, because at the end of the day the rate base is limited. What we do is try to lobby the
state government fairly solidly on key areas to intervene at the starting point and say, “Look, you can’t
roll out those programs through local government without thinking about resourcing”. An example
might be one we’re going to run over the next few months on native vegetations controls – and I know
it’s not part of this forum, but we’re in there lobbying government to say, “To make that work, you’ve
got to resource that statutory responsibility”. For rural councils, though, the answer is often that they
can do a lot without a lot. So we’re there working in partnership with a catchment authority or a water
authority. In fact, their role as a partner doesn’t cost them a huge amount. A really good example of
where small rural communities have got together is where the council plays a facilitation role in
bringing a community together and acting as a leader. So it might be the mayor actually says, “Well, I
think this is great, let’s get together”, but the other authorities drive that with council. So we encourage
partnerships as a core push in the bush, so they work with other agencies rather than try to do it all
themselves.
Ms LOVELL – We’ve just gone through the debate about the hike in rates. And the majority of our councils
will have a significant rate increase and are projecting increases over the next few years. With some of
them it’s because they have infrastructure problems, but the key theme that is running right through all
of them seems to be waste management – the increases, the end costs that will cost them over the next
few years.
Mr LYON — And there are some drivers in waste management that are not in control of local government.
Increase in landfill levy costs is a state issue, and we certainly make a strong argument about that.
There are also some strong drivers in terms of occupational health and safety that are again about
worker safety that are driving up costs. So yes, there are some increasing costs for local government.
Ms COOTE — Having spoken to all of the groups today – and I must say they’ve been very praiseworthy of
local government and the work that local governments do – they’ve pretty much all said the same, but
there doesn’t seem to be anyone who is prepared to take responsibility for any of this; and it would
seem that you are well placed – or councils are well placed at literally the coalface to be able to be
dealing with the local communities. And you talk about partnerships and dealing with them. You
spoke before about community education and an integrated approach, and the better monitoring of
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outcomes. Are these responsibilities that you believe that councils should take on as a united approach
for all of these agencies, or do you just think that it’s up to individual councils – and you named a
couple there – that still leads on to an ongoing adhoc approach rather than being something that’s more
consolidated? What is your opinion of that?
Mr LYON — Taking a few examples – say water as an example – it’s fairly clear that the government has
given responsibility for water conservation to the water authorities in Melbourne, to the Melbourne
water retailers. Above that they’ve given responsibility to DSE for the overarching charter, but
underneath that there’s a sense of community responsibility for local government to play its role in
water conservation. What we’re doing is arguing, firstly, that councils need to take responsibility for
their assets.
Ms COOTE — Yes.
Mr LYON — That’s a given, and a lot of our councils are doing that. At the community level, though, you
couldn’t reverse that pattern. You couldn’t say that councils are responsible for the message coming
out of government about water conservation, because you’ll get completely different messages. What
we’re seeing is where there’s a healthy partnership between the retailer and their council that works at
getting those messages, they have been worked through at state level in a sense, so that they’re
consistent, they’re straightforward, they’re simple; they can work through local government to get those
out to the community and then look at working at not just the messages, but working with individual
rate payers on particular issues and not their household audit or energy audit, going into that household
level to effect more immediate change. I think councils are taking that responsibility. The Local
Government Act is a non-directive act, though. It allows councils to take on a range of things that it
sees fit in its community. Most of our 39 metros have a good team of environment people, and most of
them are working on a range of these programs. So even though it’s been voluntary, I would say that
there’s been a really solid uptake.
There are examples where councils are not engaged by state agencies. An example might be
grey water, where we feel there’s been poor engagement of councils, the messages get confused and
rate payers come to the council and say, “Well no, you shouldn’t be putting grey water on your garden,
it’s a health risk”. The other side is that DSE is giving a rebate for grey water. Now we would argue in
that case that DSE hasn’t actually engaged with councils, and they haven’t. So that’s an example of
where government needs to integrate better with local government, so that we’re the local regulator, we
hand out the permit, we’re going to get the rate payer coming to the front desk and asking, “What
should I do?” But unless there’s that dialogue in partnership, you’re going to get mixed messages and
the householder gets really frustrated.
Ms COOTE — Okay, so presumably you see some room for improvement in that sort of interface, and with
the other agencies as well, or any specific agencies that you have.
Mr LYON — That’s one specific example. I think what we do in our organisation as a leadership body
representing the councils is to look at the issue of are councils being represented on most of these issues
– so recycling, water, energy – and it is a fairly complex picture. We try to make sure that councils
feel they’re getting their voice there.
Ms COOTE — So councils wouldn’t see themselves as having a marketing role – more a service provision
role?
Mr LYON — I think councils would see themselves as innovators; that they are actually coming up with
some good community based programs.
Ms COOTE — City of Port Phillip is a very good example of that.
Mr LYON — That’s right.
Ms COOTE — Yes, but you see therefore the City of Port Phillip has gone to market to its community, rather
than the broader community, or working in with another agency, for example, on the Oasis. Because of
all the waste management it is one of those sectors that you’re speaking about that actually goes over a
number of agencies, so who has responsibility?
Mr LYON — It’s quite trite to say it’s everyone’s responsibility, but it’s about looking at the different level of
messaging. So state government is in a sense responsible for that broader message. Councils are about
working with their community or their local developers, and some are actually pushing ahead of state
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government. So a range of councils now look at sustainability in the planning system and have point
systems for any new development; that’s not in the state planning system – some councils are leaders
and are pushing ahead of state government. Now at MAV we think that’s great. The councils are the
actual innovators and the leaders, but on a statewide level if you’re looking at that, that can lead to
confusing messages. So the builder industry might come to you and say, “Well look, it’s all very well
for this council to push ahead of the planning system, but how does that help us with industry
development?” So there are pros and cons, and I think it depends on the scale of the messaging. So
councils work great on lead demonstration projects, community level projects, but then need that
partnership with state government to ensure that they integrate with state.
Ms COOTE — Okay, so we’re giving recommendations in this report. Without putting words in your mouth,
you’d say that we should be recommending better integration between various agencies for clarity of
message in a marketing sense?
Mr LYON — Yes.
Ms COOTE — Okay, thank you.
Mr HILTON — Thanks, Peter. I can understand your reluctance – if that’s the right word – to say to
councils, “This is what you should be doing”, because each council’s problems or issues are different.
But I would have thought that as the peak body you are in the driver’s seat of many initiatives that cross
your desk, and maybe you’re also monitoring initiatives that are happening interstate. I suppose I
would query whether you could be maybe more directive, because we don’t want all councils to
reinvent the wheel; that’s just wasted resources.
Mr LYON – You might have misunderstood me. We do run about five or six capacity building programs in
environmental sustainability through our organisation that does just that. They say don’t reinvent the
wheel. We run a major stormwater capacity building program called Clear Water, which services both
the stormwater industry and councils, to say, “Look, you’ve all been funded by the EPA to do your
stormwater plans, how can you do them well? How can you implement them? How can you use local
laws, planning, regulation?” We run a similar program on water conservation. We run a major
program on green purchasing which is recognised nationally and just won a United Nations award. So
we are taking some leadership. We are working with our councils. We have 76 councils, or regional
waste authorities, signed up to green purchasing.
This year we spent $33 million on green purchasing on Victorian councils, and we’ve just
had the New Zealand Environment Ministry sign up to our program, recognising that it’s pretty good.
So yes, we are showing some leadership through our organisation. Councils are seeing us as providing
that capacity building role. I think where I was coming from in terms of statutory function, obviously
that’s not our role; we’re an advocacy body, but state government needs to, I suppose, coordinate better
in terms of statutory processes through to local government. And we play a representational role in
doing that.
Mr HILTON — Would you be in a position, Peter, to indicate world’s best practice in New Zealand?
Mr LYON — I don’t think MAV would.
Mr HILTON — Sorry, what was that?
Mr LYON — I don’t think the MAV could. I don’t know if you can measure that. I think we’ve got some
fantastic examples happening in Victoria, but how do you compare that to other countries?
Mr HILTON — So you don’t monitor what other countries are doing in terms of these issues, because
obviously it is a universal issue. The entire developed world is trying to deal with waste and energy
and water management.
Mr LYON — For our Green Purchasing Program, for example, as a way of looking at whether that was
world’s best practice or not, we had an international visitor come over. We hosted a national
conference on green purchasing to share examples from around the country on how our councils are
doing green purchasing, so in that area we’ve done a lot of comparison about what’s happening
nationally and overseas. In the stormwater area we’re working closely with the Stormwater Trust in
New South Wales, with South Australian models in stormwater management; so yes, we do use the
gamut of resources there. I think what I mean, though, is that what we need to build up good Victorian
models that work well within our legislative structures and for our councils. Where we do a lot is work
on focus groups with our members to see what they need, where their problem areas are, and try to
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work with state government to improve the processes.
Mr HILTON — You mentioned a thing in New South Wales – a community that had an environmental levy;
was that approved by the committee?
Mr LYON – The New South Wales councils, through their act, have the capacity to raise an environment
levy. That first needs to go through a community consultation process of setting community priorities.
Then it has to go to the Minister for Local Government for approval; then they can strike that level.
Now there’s an example – and these figures are fairly old – but Eurobodalla Shire (verify), which is a
small south coast shire in New South Wales, has an environment levy. It was able to raise $500 000 in
funds through that levy after a community consultation process. It has a pool of $500 000 to spend on a
range of coastal parks, stormwater processes – now that’s a luxury for a lot of Victorian councils, to
have that sort of capacity.
Mr HILTON — And this consultation process, does that have to go through referendum?
Mr LYON – I’m not sure of the New South Wales process. We could find out more about it for you. But I
think under their act they must consult with their community. I’m not sure but –
Mr HILTON — What form that consultation takes –
Mr DRUM — I just want to make sure that I heard right. You said that the MAV would rather treat the four
of the issues a bit more separately, not just all bundled in together, so you –
Mr LYON — The other way around.
Mr DRUM – You’d like them all bundled in?
Mr LYON – It often makes much more sense for small business or for households if you’re not going in with
one officer saying, “Look, I can do an energy audit for you”. Two days later they get someone coming
in saying, “I can do a water audit for you”. It makes much more sense to have someone who can come
in and say, “Look, I’ll do an energy, water and waste audit for you; make your small business more
efficient”. And some of the good programs are going that way. So it is working with households and
small business in an integrated way. And households think about their environment impact in that way,
and they often want to do everything at once.
Mr DRUM – That’s fine. And Nina, could you explain – you mentioned the Donald project up at Bullock
Shire; what exactly are they doing over there?
Ms ROGERS — Yes, Donald is facing some serious salinity issues across the shire. They’re at the
intersection of two river systems there, and the cost to the community, at an environmental, social and
economic scale from the salinity has caused concern. Through the Neighbourhood Environment
Improvement Plan they’re looking at identifying some solutions to address salinity and the implications
for the community.
Mr DRUM — Okay, yes; that’s good.
Mr LYON – And I think the response to councils to the NEIP program has been really positive. I sit on the
NEIP committee with the EPA, and we’ve got some really exciting examples of where there’s been an
intractable local environment problem, and the EPA can now work with communities. Often the
council is the core sponsor of that project to sort out some of those local problems. The Donald
example is one where that’s been an ongoing water quality problem for the creek through the town, and
getting all the players together has been fantastic.
Mr DRUM — Thanks, Peter.
Ms LINDELL — Peter, we had the EPA in earlier today, and they were saying that they thought the
legislation that underpinned the NEIPs has made them as strong as they are and able to deliver. Do you
have a view on that?
Mr LYON — I’d probably have a bet each way. During the drafting of that legislation we said to government
that we felt councils already had strong powers to do community planning. Councils already do that;
that’s their core business. Why do you need another statutory process managed through the EPA?
That was one sentence we had. I think in hindsight, though, that what it has given is a way to get
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commitment from people who might not have given commitment in the past. So the example at
Darebin – they’ve got a lake there, and there have been industries polluting that lake for many years;
and the EPA and the council and the communities had trouble getting everyone together to sort that out.
With the statutory functions under the NEIP act it is a statutory plan once it’s signed and it gives some
weight to it. The added capacity of the EPA to direct fines into that plan has been really strong. I think
it’s still developing, but my reading of it is that councils are seeing it as potentially another strong tool
in the range of tools they can use. They don’t have to use a NEIP plan to solve community
environment problems; they might use the municipal public health plan or a place-based strategy that
they do under the Local Government Act. There’s no right way to do it, but the NEIPs that are coming
up are, I think, fairly innovative and looking quite strong.
The CHAIR — Excellent. Thanks. Any more questions? I have one. Can you talk to me about the
sustainability accord that’s being developed?
Mr LYON – Sure. The sustainability accord is essentially about to start. A group of local government peak
bodies came together about a year ago and said, “Look, it would be great if we could have a better
understanding between state and local government of sustainability in the bigger picture”. We had a
sense through the accord that we wanted a good recognition of local government about our
sustainability role. But the groups involved are the MAV, the BLGA, the International Council for
Local Environment Initiatives, Byrons Australia (verify)– which is the networking group of local
environment professionals – and the Metropolitan Environment Forum – so essentially a lot of the
players doing environmental work with local government.
We took that proposal to Minister Thwaites and said, “Look, we would like an accord that
deals with some of the issues between the two sectors, but that looks at perhaps the recognition and
celebration of local governments – a very positive thing –but that also maybe looks at some of the
more tricky issues of duplication and resourcing”. The Minister was very positive. I understand he’s
appointed a committee representatives – or is about to appoint a committee, or announce a committee
with representatives from each of those organisations to pursue an accord over the next six months to a
year, with a consultation process back to local government. The end of that process will have a
statement that sets out an understanding between state and local government about some sustainability
issues. I think it is a really positive approach, and I hope some of the harder issues can be dealt with.
But if it comes out with a good celebration about what local government is about, a good recognition of
our role in environmental sustainability in community, I think it would be really strong.
The CHAIR — Excellent. Thank you both very much for your time.
Mr LYON – Thank you. If you need any more contacts with local governments, we’ve got a lot in our
submission.
The CHAIR — Thanks very much.
Witnesses withdrew
Committee adjourned
65

CORRECTED VERSION
ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE
Inquiry into Sustainable Communities
Melbourne – 5 July 2004
Members
Ms J. Lindell Ms A. Coote
Mr D. Drum Ms J. Duncan
Mr G. Hilton Ms W. Lovell
Mr G. Seitz
Chair: Ms J. Lindell
Deputy Chair: Ms A. Coote
Staff
Executive Officer: Ms Caroline Williams
Research Officers: Mr David Fairbridge
Witnesses
Mr A. Rowe, CEO, and Mr J. Osborne, Policy and Adminstration Officer,
Victorian Local Governance Association
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The CHAIR – Thank you for your time, and welcome.
All evidence taken by the committee is taken under the provisions of the Parliamentary
Committees Act and is protected from judicial review. However, any comments made outside the
precincts of this hearing are not protected by parliamentary privilege.
If you would like to make your presentation, we will then ask questions; that is how we have
usually proceeded.
Mr ROWE – Thank you for the opportunity to present to you today. We have not put in a formal written
submission. Although we are signatories to a submission that comes under the banner of VECOSS,
Environment Victoria – which probably does not target your terms of reference very well – we are
delighted with the opportunity to present to you. Jared Osborne is with me today. He has been
appointed at the VLGA in the role of Policy Officer Sustainable Communities – so the whole issue of
sustainable communities is important to us.
I would like to outline briefly what the VLGA is, talk a little bit about the partnerships and how
we operate, and make some general comments about sustainable communities, then close with
examples of community innovation and local government innovation so that you understand a little bit
about the partnerships, who we work with and how we operate. I will then make some general
comments about sustainable community, and then close with examples of community and local
government innovation with partnerships, which might be helpful.
The VLGA is unique in Australia. While there are local government associations and
community associations, we are the only one that is both a local government and a community peak
body. We operate at that level of interface between local governments and community, which is
largely through councillors who are elected representatives as part of that community interface. We
have 42 local governments in Victoria members of our association, and around 120 community groups
and organisations who are members. Those community groups range from ratepayer associations to
VECOSS and Environment Australia and Victoria. Those sorts of associations are members of the
VLGA – so small community associations and large associations that have their own membership
bases. We are not the representative peak body; that is clearly the role of the MAV that you have just
spoken to. We work very much as an agent of change rather than as an agent of representation. Our
real work is about broadening local government's capacity, and particularly about strengthening that
interface between councils and communities, largely through support and training. We are also
extremely concerned about the practice of good governance and enhancing the deepening democratic
practice. Largely, one of our aims is about increasing community confidence in or rebuilding
community confidence in local governments and institutions.
In Western society there has been a drop-off of confidence in all types by communities, and part
of rebuilding that confidence and strength can be a relationship between communities and local
governments. So that is part of who we are. We work with government in this state with the
Department of Victorian Communities on projects of community planning, on consultation
engagement; we work with the Department of Sustainability and Environment on a whole range of
issues – Melbourne 2030 is one; training of councils is another. We work with DOI on transport work
and integrated transport, and with Human Services on things like gambling and other sorts of work.
So we work on a range of issues, but particularly around the local government community interface.
We work with both local government members – those 42 councils – and we work with all those
community associations – ratepayer groups, progress associations, environment groups – particularly
on our relationship with the Planning Institute of Australia – VECOSS, Vichealth and VicFit. We work
across all these agencies and groups – EcoRecycle, Environs Australia, Environment Victoria – and we
have a strong relationship with tertiary institutions in Victoria, where in a number of partnerships we
work on planning issues around community planning, which is a strong focus of our work, on
community wellbeing indicators, and or gambling research.
I would like to make some general comments regarding sustainable communities. The woman
who presented before us spoke about the sustainability accord. In the documentation between the local
government peaks and the Deputy Premier at the moment there has been some strong language in
documents that have changed hands already. I would like to read briefly a paragraph in one of the
documents. It talks about: “In recognition of Victorian local governments’ key local governance role
and ongoing commitment to progress local sustainability initiatives through engagement of community,
and a recognition of innovation of local government”, et cetera.
A couple of these here – one is about the innovation of local government, but the other is about
the key role in governance and the strong role of engagement of community, that being clearly
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identified here as one of the key parts of local governments’ work in strengthening communities. We
were a little concerned about what we thought was a very narrow terms of reference for a hearing about
sustainable communities, because it appeared to be narrowly focused on a whole range of
environmental and energy initiatives that are important on their own; it seems to fail to put them in the
broader context of what we understand as sustainable community.
When the VG LA works with local government and communities we quite easily fall into the
triple-bottom-line language that we are about environments that are healthy, strongly protected and that
nurture our communities. We are about economies that are robust and economies that are prosperous,
but we are also about communities that are engaged, that are consulted, that in fact own the processes
where they live, and communities fully engaged; so we are talking about strong communities and
strongly inclusive communities. We think that is a key part of the question of sustainability: that the
best programs in the world, whether delivered by local governments or by other agencies, are only
programs unless they have actually created a huge engagement with community and so are in their own
way sustainable. If you look at some of the really exciting projects in Victoria at the moment –
neighbourhood renewal and community capacity building initiatives is another set of examples – the
key issue in all of that work at the moment is how to make them sustainable and ongoing, how to make
the learnings, the engagement, the participation, something that people learn from that is embedded –
the learnings are embedded in community practice and in community behaviour – not just that the
projects are really good while they exist, but they do change the way people act and the way they work
together to create other projects. That for us as the VLGA is the core to sustainability; it is about
building project that are resilient over time and that continue to have learnings in them that are
embedded.
One of the things that we do a particular amount of work on and that we are tending to see more
of in partnership with the state and a number of tertiary institutions is the notion of community
planning. Communities do have a large amount of understanding of where they want to go and the
threats and the challenges that face them and the opportunities they have – the opportunity to debate
openly about what would enable them to have strong communities. If you look at the good community
planning examples, they embrace discussions of land use, environment, energy, water conservation,
and are then fed into part of a more holistic response to councils, local and state governments and
agencies. Local governments have a number of fairly key strategic documents. One is the council’s
plan, one is the municipal strategic statement, and one is the municipal health plan. There are many
others, but they are three I have singled out. Each of them has important things to say about
sustainable community, about the engagement of community, the health of communities and the
environment of communities. All these strategic documents can be built from strong engagements with
community and community planning agencies – processes that we tend to work closely with local
governments on that continue to build.
The simple notion of community planning is working with communities to build the framework
that community documents have been underpinned so councils do still develop their own strategic
documents but do so from a deep and longstanding discussion with communities about their needs and
aspirations, rather than going out to consult with communities 30 times on 30 matters over 30 months.
I will now ask Jarrad to give some examples of what we have considered to be more the
interesting innovations about community partnerships. He will talk about sustainability and CERES
and I will talk a little bit about not an environmental issue, but a thing we think on sustainability
underpins what makes for the partnerships that make these things successful.
Mr OSBORNE – We are not directly involved in the delivery of sustainability. We have a strategic alliance
with Environment Australia, one of the main deliverers of the Sustainability Streets project Vox
Bandicoot. One of the really remarkable things about Sustainability Streets project is the trust they
give to the communities on the ground. It is not about delivering a program saying, “This is how we do
things, these are the issue we want you to address”. It is very much about teaching communities about
a process, how to work together, how to actually get key operation across their neighbourhood and how
to get people interested in sustainability issues. It is a lot about getting neighbours to talk to each other
as much as about getting neighbours to know each other, as it is about achieving environmental
outcomes. Their approach is very much if you don't have that community adhesiveness, that
sustainability of a community in terms of people just knowing each other and talking to each other,
then your environmental outcomes are potentially likely to be very limited in scope and short-lived.
The actual communities themselves determine what the important issues for their area are,
which can be influenced around all sorts of stuff – like how near they are to a highway, a river system
or grasslands, and that kind of thing – and that will determine the kinds of projects they pick up. There
might be a few people in the community who have a real interest in gardening, and they may push that
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forward.
A number of Sustainability Streets communities have been incorporated associations taking on a
lot more of a facilitation role and trying to get other communities on board. It very much has a whole
momentum of its own running now. Environment Australia and Vox Bandicoot are able to step back
slightly and allow this process to take place, where people are identifying the issues in their own areas.
The feedback you get from a lot of the people involved is remarkable. People may have lived
somewhere for 10 years and never spoken to their neighbours, and suddenly within the last year or two
they are actually talking to people and have found they actually like them, that they are nice people, and
they are working together on a whole range of environmental issues within their community. As I said,
that process has really taken on its own strength beyond the involvement of the Australia business
groups, even beyond the towns. It has been a really good involvement in getting the councils to
develop the trust of people, and it has been a good learning process and partnership that has involved a
lot of trust in delivering a program which has a large amount of its own momentum in underpinning
social sustainability as well as environmental sustainability.
The other thing I want to talk about is the CERES project happening there. Are people familiar
with the CERES project?
Ms COOTE – I am not. I thought it was as in Geelong, but obviously not. Everybody else seems to know.
Mr ROWE – It is the Centre for Education and Research in Environmental Strategies.
Mr OSBORNE – CERES has been around for 20 years. It was a partnership between the community and the
former City of Brunswick at another time and place. It was old landfill next to the creek, and it is now
a centre for excellence in programs on water, energy conservation – all sorts of sustainable
developments. It is a showcase for sewage systems in terms of using worm farms and other sorts of
sewage; it is a showcase for almost any of the sorts of examples the breadth of this inquiry might be
interested in. It is run by the community, by a community elected board on land that the council is still
the owner of. The council facilitates the activity on the land by providing occasional funding for
projects, occasional support for infrastructure, but CERES now on communities is funded with a
substantially large budget through the money it gets from state and commonwealth funding, and grants
and delivery of services. It works very much on education with students and young people. It has
several dozens of busloads a week through the centre – not just to walk around and have a stickybeak,
but it is involved in learning and education. As a centre in a city itself, it is a place where people
congregate on Saturday mornings because of the coffee shop and the plant nursery and all the other
activity that makes it a community space. Why it works – local government more recently in that area
considered actually giving the land freehold to the board, and the board said that no, this partnership
works really well as an example of us working with the community in developing innovations and the
projects and using the government's role, which is legitimate, here as a facilitator. I think the lesson is
that that is largely the message we want to leave you with: that whether it is local or state governments,
the role is largely to facilitate. Our belief is that the community facility will grow itself around these
sorts of issues and that if activity is to be robust and sustainable over time, it needs to be embedded in
communities. It is about the projects that are really good for them – whether they are about
environment, landscaping, trees – and that those projects will come and go unless there is an
embedding in the community.
I want to talk to you about a project that has little to do with sustainability, again, but one we
think underlines the partnership possibilities. It is the way 17 Victorian local governments and
communities have developed partnerships with townships, support projects – part of Australians
wanting to have a relationship with Timor Leste, support a country while it is growing, know that there
are needs there that can't be met – and there is something uniquely Australian about our connection
with Timor Leste, because of our history. Some 17 local Victorian governments have developed
relationships with townships that are about support, developments. Yes, it is about shipping goods –
still money – yes, it is about all sorts of good deeds, but largely the ones that are working are where the
local government and the community have developed a partnership to have the relationship, and it is
where things can work at a local level that governments find hard. Local governments find it a little
easier than the state, but community partnerships find it even easier. “We have got the stuff. Who can
find a truck? We have got the stuff in the truck. Who can get a container? We have got the container.
Who can get it through the unions? Who can get it onto the waterfront? Who can get it over there?”
This stuff doesn't happen when governments try to do this stuff; it happens when community players
start to work where the connections are – at the point of opportunity – and communities can make that
happen. We are all of us, obviously, in local government and find those things somewhat harder with
the legitimate accountabilities and all the sorts of things you do in government. So that is a real
example of how embedded community projects are working where the government plays a facilitating
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ole, the community does the innovation and the leadership. I think that is the lesson we want to leave
you with today – that sustainable communities are about communities that are environmentally sound
with good programs on water and good programs on energy, but they are also communities that are
economically robust and prosperous, and they are also communities that are engaged in the
decision-making that affects their own lives. For us, that almost makes the other things possible – the
greatest environmental outcomes and the greatest economic possibilities. Communities that are not
engaged, that are not owning those projects and aren't part of the development and innovation of them,
are in the long run not sustainable in themselves.
The CHAIR – Thank you very much.
Mr DRUM – Andrew, I think you answered my question in your last couple of sentences there. We have
talked all day about sustainable community. I was going to ask you to give us the characteristics of a
sustainable community, but can you give us an idea of how communities can measure their
sustainability?
Mr ROWE – We are interested in the notion of community planning. We think one of the tools is the use of
indicators. We are anxious that indicators are not just developed by the professionals and the social
planners but that communities work in partnership to work out what their own indicators of
sustainability are. Is it as simple as something like fish back in the river, or, “Are there other sorts of
indicators? Can we now put the washing out on a Thursday?” What are the sorts of indicators
communities in their own language can use about what is success? Sometimes the deliverers of
indicators become servants of their own expertise, and they are not grounded in community experience.
So part of it is that dialogue about what communities want through community planning, and part of
that example with them is, “How will we know when we have got it? What will it look like” in
common language and in comment answers.
Mr OSBORNE – Also that real ownership of the community and the indicators is a really important aspect of
that, in keeping all the players accountable. If communities develop those indicators in their own
language and their own theme, then their enthusiasm for them to be fulfilled across the whole spectrum
of the municipality program, or municipality or state, is going to be so much more engaged, and they
will be so much more likely to pick up programs that aim towards delivering that outcome.
Mr ROWE – VicHealth is doing a whole lot of work now with indicators and investing a whole lot of money
in it; and we are one of the partners working alongside them developing community indicators. But
particularly the way or the direction we want to travel along is that our communities will have a role in
this themselves, then the indicators being thrust upon them by government, you know –
Ms COOTE – My question is to Jared. As a policy development officer, what do you see as the greatest
challenge for your organisation for sustainability into, say, the next decade? You might like to both
comment on this, but from a positive perspective particularly.
Mr OSBORNE – The greatest challenge, positive element for the next decade?
Ms COOTE – In sustainability.
Mr OSBORNE – In sustainability, I think in a lot of ways it really is that redevelopment of trust between
people, between communities, between local, state and federal governments, and actually really
rebuilding a lot of the relationships. And that takes policy, which really involves policy, which
however well-meaning and based on whatever good evidence and intellectual capacity and if it is not
delivered to the community as this is what should happen, it involves policy that actually involves
people and the community in that process, and it is equally shared just as much by the professionals and
academics and the governments and the communities, which is by no means and easy task. I don't
mean to underestimate it by putting it into a few sentences, but to me that is where that challenge is for
so many people. And I would include business in that as well, as that is a big player in terms of
developing policy – business is an increasingly big player in terms of what happens to increasingly
develop policy that gets people in, gets people to do things that takes the ownership. It does take trust
in operating both ways.
Mr ROWE – I would agree with that.
Mr DRUM – I think what you are saying is noble as a way of involving the community, but how do you
define the community? You may call a public meeting; you may get 20 people, you may get less, but
they are not really representative of the community. I am just wondering how you know what the
community is wanting, is interested in, when public participation in community events is pretty low.
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Mr ROWE – You are absolutely right. I think that is part of the question of trust, and it is part of
communities probably not believing governments at any level – local and state – sometimes when they
are consulted, and also not being confident the process is legitimate. Local governments sometimes
lack information, where they hold a public meeting on Tuesday night and two people come, so they
assume nobody is interested.
There are other ways to talk to communities, and that is part of what we do with local
government; we talk to them, and we also sometimes talk to communities who come to us and ask,
“How do we get our local government to talk to us?” Sometimes we provide them with strategies to get
their stuff to the council table. When we talk about community planning, we talk about there are many
communities that make up a local government area, of all types. There are the communities that will
regularly come out when you ask; there are communities that you can't find and you've actually got to
make an effort to go and talk to groups.
Mr DRUM – Not wishing to interrupt, though: you are defining a community as being made up of subsets that
are also communities. I mean, I would put it to you that there are many, many people in a community
or an electorate, or whatever we call it, that do not belong to any formal group at all because they are
too busy or they are apathetic.
Mr ROWE – But I don't think that lets us off the hook. We firstly have to assume that there are many
communities and many individuals who are not part of groups. It is important in terms of some sort of
community planning work to engage with as many people as possible, which means going out and
talking to yes, your senior citizen groups, the University of the Third Age groups; in rural communities,
yes, your CFAs and CWAs. It is not about running a meeting on Tuesday night and seeing who comes.
It is about going out at having conversations with communities in all sorts of ways.
One example was the way that Maribyrnong, under their former CEO, started to develop their
council plan. They thought they might not get a lot of deep information, but they would get a lot of
information, so they thought with every contact the council has they will ask a couple of key questions.
So yes, there are many – “I will have a look at your parking issue in a minute, but before that, can I ask
you two questions? What do you really value about life in this community; and what do you find the
biggest challenge living in this community? Then we will have a look at your parking fine”. They got
20 000 hits over a period of time. Now they were not only people who had a contact with the council.
but they were contacts on a whole range of issues. That is just one example of how councils can talk to
communities to build a profile. We are absolutely convinced, from Australian and overseas knowledge,
that when local governments talk to communities about values and about a preferred future, you will
find there is more agreement in the community than there is across the council table, or across a state
legislature; that in fact communities can agree on far more things than elected reps, and it will give
elected reps far greater confidence on issues of sustainability and land use.
One fantastic example is Portland Oregon. We have done a fair bit of work with Steven Aimes
(verify) from Portland Oregon, where a community planning exercise actually saw a community turn
around and have a freeway torn up to create a new bicycle front along the beachfront and the
waterways. This was done because communities said, “We don't want that vision. We want this
vision”. And they gave the strength to the legislative representatives from all parties and the
confidence that this was the community's vision. So it takes work to find that community vision, and
when councils and other levels of government do it the cheap way of who came on a Tuesday night as a
way to test whether there is any support, and put something out for two weeks to see who responded,
that is not good enough.
Mr OSBORNE – I think part of it is about seeing any consultation activity in the context of a broader process
as well, rather than as an isolated incident. It is that thing – you are so right – where there are people
who don't pick up no matter what form of consultation you are going to take, but part of the process
you are going to have around this is how can you cultivate more people over time? It might take a 10,
20-year strategy, and you might never pick up anybody, but it is a matter of thinking, “How can we do
consultation on this piece of work and try to cultivate more trust and interest in this process?”
Mr ROWE – A local government, which will remain nameless, but one which was considered in this state as
one of the best local governments in terms of consultation and engagement with its community, and
one which every state government copied their policy from, did a bit of deeper research.
Ms COOTE – Give us a hint.
Mr ROWE – I used to be a councillor there; you can work it out yourself! We did a bit research and found
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that although we had a extraordinary good reputation on consultation, it was a stronger representation
of those who had only heard about us and bought the spin rather than those who participated in it. This
was a worry, because we were one of the good ones. So that if a council was working really hard to
engage and consult and was actually finding the more people – it consulted with the more people – it
was actually dislocating from the community confidence in government; what does this tell us about
how important the processes are to do well and to do better? What was wrong with the processes we
were going through with people? Was it about people being more concerned with the outcome and the
process? Was it about people feeling that whatever they said was somehow listened to and reflected
back to them in the outcomes, even though it was not the way the council went at the time? There was
an extraordinary amount of, “How does something like a consultation process build trust, strengthen
communities?” which is what we would argue is one of the underpinning factors of sustainable
communities.
Mr DRUM – I think you are spot-on in relation to building community and sustainability. When we talk
about sustainable community, you are right, we need to have engaged communities that need to have a
strength of power within themselves, and once they have that sort of strength of engagement –
including economical viability, too – then they are in a position to actually go out and act, whether it be
to act in an environmentally sustainable manner or to find renewable energy sources, or to build
community facilities, irrespective; but certainly trying to generate ways we can give communities that
engagement is a large part of what we need to do.
The CHAIR – I have a question about how mainstream you actually believe sustainability is. It has been put
to us that it is still a bit of a niche market for inner-city trendies. That is certainly not my immediate
thoughts on the matter.
Mr ROWE – I wouldn't have thought so. For communities and local governments, there may be different
manifestations of it in rural and urban communities, but it is still the same issues – whether it is water,
environmental degradation, how we plan for development and future growth. All these issues butt into
each other and are all part of same process. I would have thought that communities and local
governments are finding this increasingly the main game. We have been fascinated, though, by local
governments who are saying to us – and we will take a little bit of pride in helping generate the
debate – that one of the main core businesses of local government is now the question of how to engage
community, and the services-added programs you provide are a subset of your engagement process, so
it is again about engaging communities.
We think if there is this core about engaging communities, that sustainability is a key to that. In
terms of mainstream, although we still now talk – and there is a lot of talk about the business case for
sustainability – I think you don't always need the talk about the business case. I think there is a case for
sustainability, regardless of having to generate whether or not it can pay for itself, and it is becoming
increasingly mainstream. I think that is because communities will engage with good projects;
communities will get excited about good projects, especially when they can take some ownership of
them.
Mr OSBORNE – Sustainability, I think, also means in terms of that – it means different things for different
people. Depending on where people are coming from and their local terms and sustainability, they will
start talking to you about something different. Some might start talking about salinity or water or air
pollution, or whatever, and it can very much generate that impression of a very fractured thing, but it is
very easy to talk to people from that point. A lot of people are aware of links to other things in other
areas, but I think that is part of this idea that it is still a very fringe thing – particularly the idea of
sustainability as a whole system, a whole thing – because the stuff that is at the top of people's minds
when you talk to them, that is what will come out; but a lot of people make the links to a lot of other
areas and concerns.
The CHAIR – Thank you both very much for your time.
Witnesses withdrew
Committee adjourned
72

CORRECTED VERSION
ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE
Inquiry into Sustainable Communities
Melbourne – 5 July 2004
Members
Ms J. Lindell Ms A. Coote
Mr D. Drum Ms J. Duncan
Mr G. Hilton Ms W. Lovell
Mr G. Seitz
Chair: Ms J. Lindell
Deputy Chair: Ms A. Coote
Staff
Executive Officer: Ms Caroline Williams
Research Officers: Mr David Fairbridge
Witness
Mr Novotny, Private Citizen
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The CHAIR – You can talk to us for 10 minutes, and then if we have questions, we’ll ask them. Thank you.
Mr NOVOTNY – I really wasn’t prepared to make any submission today, because the area that I am involved
in is a grey area. I realise that you are not taking into consideration any industrial matters today.
However, as I say, the area I am involved in is a grey area and as far as residential matters are
concerned it is part of it, because the sustainable residential is part of a residence, isn’t it? Now what I
want to mainly say – and I haven’t got much time – I have come to the knowledge that the construction
industry is the biggest polluter of the greenhouse, is the biggest user of energy, and it does not have to
be so. However, it is not easy to change our habits in constructing our houses. I have a letter from
Sustainable Energy Victoria that says the type of a house we have built experimentally is one of the
best ever built in Victoria from the energy point of view. It is one of the cheapest types of houses and
addresses well the problems of housing. However, we are talking only about energy. The fact is that
the embodied energy of building materials – and I give ordinary brick as an example – to make one
brick requires 24 megajoules of energy, which is energy that could drive a car 10 kilometres. The
manufacture of every single brick is producing 1.5kg of CO2. And I feel the experiment that we have
in using our system for buildings – specifically housing – makes the conventional building completely
irrational.
In Victoria we are building brick veneer – 95 per cent of houses are brick veneer. To do that we
destroy forests, we destroy biodiversity, then fires come, the houses burn, people get burned in them.
The energy required to heat one of the experimental houses is $80 per year, and the size of the house is
320 square metres. The house hasn’t got any air-conditioning, saving energy on air-conditioning,
saving energy on heating; however, with the further experiments we have made, we can build a house
anywhere in Victoria, anywhere in Australia, that would not require any heat or air-conditioning.
Unfortunately, the type of the construction is so embedded in people’s minds; we’ve been building the
same types of houses for hundreds of years, and we are not willing to make a change. Unfortunately,
the type of building material that we have used – and please don’t get shocked now – is earth. When I
mention earth, it comes to people’s minds, “Oh, mud brick”. This is not a mud brick; mud brick used
in earth buildings has got a very bad name right around the world, because mud brick houses are built
in a primitive way, and with a bit of a tremor or a cyclone, or whatever – or rain – the houses collapse
and kill people. That creates very bad propaganda for earth housing. Just before Christmas in Iran 50
000 people were killed, and most of them lived in mud brick houses. Those mud brick houses were
primitively built in a primitive way.
The earth that we have learned to use as a building material is used with engineering principles.
The house or a building – any building built like that can resist cyclones, earthquakes, typhoons; it does
not burn, does not rot and does not require energy for heating or cooling. There are other benefits
within this construction. The UK Department of Environment and Australian Greenhouse Office say
that the buildings account for 50 per cent of energy consumed; therefore, for 50 per cent of CO2
emissions. The way we build now is the single largest contributor to global warming, is the main
reason for the existence of nuclear power stations and the awesome danger they pose – for example,
Chernobyl. It consumes 40 per cent of world resources. The Royal Australian Institute of Architects
use huge amounts of timber, and it is the prime cause of deforestation and the many ills that flow on
from it, including the loss of biodiversity.
Chemicals used in building products, for example: formaldehyde in plywood and chipboard
emit toxic fumes, which if inhaled give rise to the slogan “sick building syndrome”. The CSIRO says
that Dr Brown, principal research scientist of CSIRO, air-quality control section, estimates the air
quality inside Australia’s buildings, homes, classrooms, offices, was so pathologically bad that it was
heading up to $11 billion per annum to the national health bill. The type of house that uses earth as a
main building material is very modern and looks no different to conventional buildings; it’s affordably
accessible to all, is high-quality, built on engineering principles, is simple to construct, suitable for the
unskilled. It is fireproof, termite-proof, soundproof, resistant to cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes,
earthquakes, and is free of sick building syndrome. They are capable of heating and cooling
themselves, which is ideal for the passives of a design. It is totally sustainable, requires no structural
timber, saving the forests. Now I don’t know if the 10 minutes is gone.
The CHAIR – Yes, I think that’s just about our 10 minutes.
Mr NOVOTNY – I would love to invite you ladies and gentlemen to come to have a look at one of the
houses. It is most important that you see it and kick it, and you will form your own opinion. The
biggest problem in propagating this is the word ‘earth’. Earth-building material, which is immediately
a no-no to most people, because of the connotation of primitively built, made out of mud –
Ms COOTE – Could I ask how many buildings are there and whereabouts are they?
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Mr NOVOTNY – Well look, they are very close in Cockatoo. The first experimental building that we made –
floor, including all walls, internal and external, already painted for less than $2000. And when I say
that, people think, “That old man is crazy”, but it is a fact, and those buildings are built on engineering
principles. A permit cannot be refused, because it is based on engineering principles. I would like no
more than please, if somebody would come to –
Mr DRUM – Chair, I’d be quite happy to go. I’m a builder by trade, and have built a few mud brick houses,
so I would be happy to go if you wanted me to –
Ms LINDELL – We can take it on board and have a discussion about it. Mr Novotny, have you made a
written submission as well?
Mr NOVOTNY – I have not. I have not, because I was not sure.
Ms LINDELL – If you could give us a written submission as well to build on.
Ms WILLIAMS – Would you like to table these documents?
Mr NOVOTNY – I got plenty of that, so if you would like to keep it, please keep it.
Ms COOTE – Is there a photo?
Mr NOVOTNY – Photo of houses? Yeah, there’s a photo of houses that were built. I think I will leave you
this book, too; it was built by owner-builders –
Ms COOTE – Right. [indistinct] model. So how are the walls formed?
Mr NOVOTNY – On page 8 there is a cross-section of the wall.
Ms LINDELL – You’ll leave us with this document?
Mr NOVOTNY – Yeah, sure. I will give you another one. That’s a different one; this is cut. This is an
article about this type of construction on page 8.
Ms LINDELL – Thank you, Mr Novotny. If you can leave it with us, we’ll follow up on it. We’ve got a little
way to go before we start going out and visiting and things like that. But thank you for coming in.
Mr NOVOTNY – I probably will be traveling in the next three weeks. I just wonder whether perhaps you
will be able to come in the next three weeks to have a look at a house.
Mr DRUM – We would probably struggle. It would depend on the committee. We’ll get Caroline to talk to
you about what our plans will be.
Ms LINDELL – It’s probably more likely to be towards the end of the year, I would think, because we have a
process that will take some months to go through.
Mr NOVOTNY – Now the written submission, what is needed?
Ms LINDELL – We can accept all of the material you’ve given us today as your written submission.
Mr NOVOTNY – Fine. So I don’t have to contact you?
Ms LINDELL – No, and we’ll be in contact with you. Thank you very much.
Ms COOTE – Certainly looks very interesting; that $2000 sounds attractive.
Mr NOVOTNY – Please, after you read these don’t close your minds, because all those things are facts, but
to most people it is unbelievable; it is a ranting old man. Thanks very much for having me.
Witness withdrew
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