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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-04-08 Daily Xml
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HEATED WATER SERVICES

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen) (11:02): I move:

That the regulations made under the Development Act 1993 entitled Heated Water Services, made on 26 June 2008 and laid on the table of this house on 22 July 2008, be disallowed.

I move this motion after a considerable period. On a number of occasions, I have moved the disallowance of these regulations in the hope that I might either be satisfied that they were not going to harm the constituents of Heysen or that we would come to some reasonable basis for altering the regulations slightly. I think that still may be a resolution to the difficulty.

I will just explain the difficulty to the house. These regulations provide, essentially, that when it is time for anyone to replace their hot water service—their hot water service blows up or stops working for whatever reason and they have to replace it—they must replace it with one of three options: a gas system, a solar system or an electric heat pump system.

Members who are familiar with the Hills—I know, Mr Speaker, that you have some familiarity with the Adelaide Hills—are aware that it has a relatively cooler climate than perhaps the rest of metropolitan Adelaide. Indeed, one of the other things about the Hills is that it does not have a natural gas supply. We do not have reticulated gas on tap, as is available in other places.

If we did not have reticulated natural gas but we still had the possibility of a solar and an electric heat pump system, that would not concern me, but, coincidentally, when the regulations were first promulgated, I became aware that there seemed to be a significant difficulty in my area with solar hot water systems. I, personally, was looking at installing a solar hot water system in my house, and I began to hear from a number of plumbers, as well as from a number of constituents who had problems, about the difficulties they were experiencing.

I am not suggesting that solar is not a viable option in some parts of the Hills, but the fact is that I came across quite a number of situations where people had bought solar hot water systems that were specifically warranted against failure due to frosts at up to an altitude of 800 metres. Where I live in the Stirling area, we are clearly well below that 800 metre altitude, but, notwithstanding that, people were reporting the failure of solar hot water systems.

I do not know the details of how these things work, but I have spoken to a number of plumbers in the area. I have spoken to a number of people who have experienced failure of their solar hot water system. Notwithstanding the warranty, it is clear that in some parts of the Hills, particularly where people might not necessarily have a very clear north facing roof and might have a lot of trees and shrubbery surrounding their property, they have had difficulties.

It also appears that there could be any number of bases for the failure of the hot water systems. For example, they might have failed because the pipes actually burst due to the expansion of frozen water in them—and there were various other things. Eventually, I found that three different things might occur and that all three things might occur for some hot water systems.

In addition, someone who bought a solar hot water service that started out with a five year warranty might find that their hot water service did survive for the first two or three years but that it then failed. They would then make a claim under the warranty, but the warranty would have only two years left—or whatever period was left to run—so it meant that there would be a significant cost imposition on people if they were forced to go to that method.

That situation caused me concern. I have had discussions with a number of plumbers and I have been told by more than one of them that, in the immediate area of Stirling, Aldgate and Bridgewater, where there is a keen interest in the environment, in the past 12 months some 75 solar hot water services have failed because of the cold climate and their inability to work in our climate, notwithstanding that they are supposedly guaranteed to work up to an altitude of 800 metres. This figure of 75, in terms of the number of solar hot water systems in that particular area, seems to be a very high number and seems to indicate an unreliability factor too high to be countenanced.

On the basis of the lack of natural gas and the problems that were apparent with solar hot water systems—and I am not saying that all solar hot water systems will not work in the Hills—that seemed to me to lead to the problem that these regulations would then have the effect that, in the Hills, we were left with no realistic option other than electric heat pump. That was the point at which I initially gave notice of my intention to move to disallow the regulations, because I thought that that would be an unfair imposition on the people in my electorate.

The minister then became aware of my intention to disallow the regulations and he arranged for me to meet with his advisers and departmental officers to discuss the situation. I thank the minister for arranging that meeting, and I thank his advisers and departmental officers for meeting with me to go through the whole issue. I put to those gentlemen the concerns that I have expressed here, and they then put to me some information about the electric heat pumps. Indeed, on the basis of the information that they put to me, I was satisfied that the electric heat pumps, although they were nominally more expensive, were, over the life of the heat pump, going to be roughly the same as replacing it with any other hot water system—that is, if you could just replace your ordinary hot water system with one like you already have. So, they were not going to cost any more over the life of the thing and they were going to be better for the environment.

Indeed, I was so satisfied about that that the very front page of a newsletter I put out for the summer of 2009 (a couple of months ago now) contained a letter from me to the constituents of Heysen telling them the history of this matter to that point and advising them of the following:

They were able to persuade me that, notwithstanding the potential lack of choice in the Hills, the move to an electric water pump heater from a conventional electric water heater was at least the same financially (better if purchasers were eligible for State and/or Federal rebates) and a significant improvement in terms of projected lifetime greenhouse gas emissions.

Knowing that the environment was the most important issue that always comes through on surveys which I do regularly in my electorate, I then included the graphs which showed that this was the case. I indicated that I was not at that time going to proceed with my disallowance motion.

However, with that newsletter going out to every household in my electorate, thereafter I began to get people contacting my office saying, 'Hang on a minute, there's a problem with electric heat pumps up here as well.' Indeed, I had people who contacted me to say that the electric heat pump that they had installed would only supply enough hot water for two people to have a shower in the morning and then insufficient water for the future. In some cases, it would only provide hot water on the basis that they had to pay enormous electricity costs to use boosters because of the need to heat these things. This was the same even for those who had electric heat pumps located inside their house—we are not talking about a heat pump sitting outside the house.

When I had the meeting with the advisers and the departmental officers and they had explained to me, as best they could—and I am not blaming them at all, I am blaming myself for my lack of ability to understand technology—basically my understanding was that these heat pumps take heat from the atmosphere and use that as part of the heating process, and then that can be boosted by electronically generated heat. I raised the issue that, in the Hills, it gets really cold and we have frosts and so on, but I was assured by the department's officers that, notwithstanding it gets very cold, nevertheless there is still heat in the atmosphere which will allow these things to work and to work appropriately.

The feedback I have from my constituents suggests the case to be otherwise. I am not suggesting that the departmental officers or the minister's advisers in any way tried to mislead me. However, the evidence on the ground from my constituents is strongly to the effect that heat pumps present a similar sort of disadvantage in operating in the Hills to the problems that I enumerated in relation to solar hot water systems. Thus these regulations, in my view, will serve to impose an unfair imposition on people in my electorate and, indeed, probably in other Hills electorates, because we do not have the benefit of having access to reticulated natural gas—and I would tell you that, in fact, in spite of being so close, even Crafers does not have natural reticulated water, let alone natural gas. We do not have reticulated water through most of my electorate, so natural gas, I would suggest, is some little time away.

Without having access to natural gas, without having a climate which is conducive to the installation of solar hot water systems and with the advised problems in relation to these electric heat pump systems—even when they are installed inside a house because it gets so cold up there—then it seems to me that the regulations will operate unfairly on the people who live in my particular area. As I understand it further, these regulations basically apply to metropolitan Adelaide and exemptions are already provided under the regulations for remote areas because they do not have access to a lot of things.

My argument put simply is that, in the case of people who are living in the Hills where solar, gas and electric heat pumps are not really viable, it would be appropriate to extend the exemptions from remote areas. That is, to reword them in some way so that the exemptions could be applied to those people who live in areas like the immediate Adelaide Hills area where there is no natural gas, an inability to apply solar successfully and an inability to get any decent amount of hot water without massive electrical boosting, which makes the imposition of this regulation unreasonable and unworkable for the people in the Hills.

That is the argument that I wanted to put to the house this morning. I think that there is probably a way to negotiate so that we can come to a sensible resolution because, as I said, my constituents overwhelmingly in my surveys put the environment as their No. 1 issue. So, there is no doubt in my mind that there is no reluctance on the part of my constituents to move to things which are more environmentally friendly. However, to do so in circumstances where they will be faced with having to make a choice from three options, none of which is viable, really, for normal household purposes, is in my view an unreasonable imposition particularly on the people of the Adelaide Hills.

Thus, I am moving this motion this morning to disallow the regulations, not because I am opposed to the regulations in total but because our system allows me only to move either to disallow or to do nothing—so, either accept or reject the regulations. I do not have the opportunity to change the regulations or to suggest the change. However, I think that, with a bit of goodwill on both sides (and, certainly, the minister has shown goodwill, as have his staff and ministerial advisers), I am hopeful that we can come to a sensible resolution which will not impose unrealistic expectations on those people living in the Hills, in those colder areas, but which will still allow the regulations to come into force to impose a situation which I think will probably be fairly reasonable in the rest of the area.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mrs Geraghty.

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