The full text of the Letter to the Editor of the Comment News, sent on 15 June 2005, is below.
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The photo shows what is mentioned in the text below - the city council deliberately inhibiting energy conservation. The photo was taken at 1242 on Tuesday, 14 June, 2005 - in the middle of the day, when the solar water heater, and that end of the house, should have been absorbing light and heat at the highest levels during this time of the year, instead of us having to use electric lighting, room heating, and fossil-fuelled water heating, in the middle of the day.
I refer to the article published in the Armadale Comment News on 7 June 2005, relating to the Armadale Redevelopment Authority (ARA) "testing a planning technique to ensure all new buildings reach satisfactory levels of sustainability", in which the minister responsible is reported to have said "Homes will be designed to use land efficiently and have minimal impact on the environment" and "Businesses will adopt industrial ecology principles...reducing transport, storage and pollution".
What a lot of political rubbish!
This is from the minister responsible for the pending Mandurah rail line, and, given that her government is apparently breeding coal fired power stations, the new slogan for the metropolitan rail system, should appropriately be "Travel the filthy way - coal-powered trains".
How do coal-fired power stations, as "new buildings", mentioned above, "reach satisfactory levels of sustainability", when we have things like "WA's top environmental watchdog has approved three new coal-fired power stations in the South-West despite admitting they would each produce twice the greenhouse emissions of a gas-fired plant", and that is apart from all of the other nasty pollutants produced by burning coal, apart from carbon dioxide.
Whilst elsewhere in Australia and the rest of the world, governments are getting electricity generated from clean sources such as wind farms and tidal electricity generation, WA is going backwards to the times of the Industrial Revolution, and increasing burning of coal, to increase smog and other pollution.
We do not have mandatory roadworthiness testing, or even pollution testing, which should be part of roadworthiness testing, for all motor vehicles, so we have no way of regulating the pollution (or safety) of motor vehicles, most of which should probably not be on the road, from the environmental, apart from the safety, aspect.
When house owners try to make their houses more environmentally friendly, and keep them environmentally friendly, they have no protection against local governments whose policies include inhibiting use of solar water heaters, as is shown in the attached photograph. I have been trying for years to get the Armadale City Council to remove the tree, so that we can more effectively use our solar water heater, and to reduce the threat to public safety, and to minimise disruption to the electricity supply, but it is against the policy of the council, to encourage solar water heater use, and to make the area reasonably safe, and to minimise disruption to the electricity supply. But there is no law that protects householders from local governments that deliberately make houses energy inefficient so as to increase pollution, or from councils that deliberately jeopardise the electricity supply.
We have the part of the government that goes out and lights fires and starts bush fires for the fun of it, causing massive pollution, and we have the wood fires and oil fires for heating houses, which create the smog in winter, without any government action to stop any of this pollution and environmental damage.
And, the allowed burning off, of rubbish in open fires, apart from the smoke and ash in the air, has been found by the USA EPA, to be the way of creating the most dioxins in the air, from the rubbish.
It is no wonder that we get the blue-green algae outbreaks in the waterways, with all of the pollution caused by the government.
No, the action by the minister in this case, is just another action to make the anti-democratic, autocratic and unaccountable ARA even more powerful, and to give a warm, fuzzy feeling about the environment, without taking any real substantial action to protect the environment.
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