No one wants anyone to be living in substandard conditions, and we all want the disabled to live full lives, but how far can we go in making this possible?
It is socialistic bureaucratic overreach, robbing homeowners of individual choice and making it harder for first-home buyers to get into the market.
I grew up in a two-bedroom worker’s cottage on a 400 square metre allotment—10 metres (33 feet) by 40 metres. Raised on stumps, it had storage underneath and was built to one side of the allotment to allow a car to run down the other side.
Mum and Dad raised three children there. A third bedroom had been added to the rear of the house, and when my younger sister arrived, Dad enclosed the front veranda to make a bedroom for her.
Some of the rooms had a tongue and groove lining, and some had nothing. Nowhere in the house was there anything that you could call insulation.
Brisbane was full of houses like this. Stumped houses suit hilly terrain as they minimise the need for terracing and retaining. In flood areas, they also provide a buffer against rising water.
The construction was cheap but sturdy, and you didn’t have to be too handy to add an extension or modify something in line with need or increasing income.
Sure, it was a bit cold in winter and hot in summer, but this is Brisbane, where extremes are moderate. We coped using sweaters in winter and sweat in summer.
Most importantly, these houses were affordable for working-class people, like the children of labourers, tradesmen, and newly arrived immigrants I went to school with in East Brisbane.
First Issue With the New NCC
The new accessibility conditions present the biggest problem, and here you have to bear in mind that most of these requirements are specifically to allow for wheelchairs.But to accommodate these people we are being told we need to change how we build the other 98.22 percent of our housing.
This is nuts.
By making housing more expensive it will push more people into homelessness, and there is not a lot of accessibility in a tent, car or caravan.
At the same time, it makes life more difficult for all home buyers. And for what?
If you’re afflicted by misfortune, you can either modify an existing house or move to one that fits your changed circumstances.
We do all of these things now for work, lifestyle, children or old age, so why not for disability?
Amongst the changes that will need to be made are ramps to handle slope and lifts to handle height and slope. Bathrooms will need to be made larger and corridors wider.
This will multiply costs on small lot subdivisions—themselves a device for lower housing costs—and in places with steep terrain, like Brisbane and Sydney.
The house I live in now would be non-compliant—26 steps to the front door over 6 metres, and nowhere to site a ramp. But it suits our needs at the moment.
The two-story walk-up unit, which underpins Brisbane’s affordable housing market, would also appear to be at risk unless it incorporates a lift. But lifts add not just capital but maintenance costs, which is one of the reasons this style of unit is often favoured over higher-rise ones with lifts.
Then there are the larger bathrooms and wider corridors. Not only will these squeeze some other rooms out, but they will make it difficult to build a house on the 10-metre frontage common in old Brisbane and in small lot subdivisions.
What Else?
Then there is the requirement to raise energy efficiency to seven stars. Not only will this require a lot of insulation, but it will make it mandatory to have concrete slabs in the higher stories of any multi-level residence instead of more economical lightweight systems, like timber.Seven stars are also difficult to attain without good solar orientation, yet even the best-designed subdivision has a number of non-optimal blocks. Not everything can be north-south.
But what is the problem with a less energy-efficient house? We’re planning to be CO2 neutral in our electricity generation by 2032, so if a house uses slightly more power, it will all be renewable power. Why should a building authority care how much of it is used?
And why shouldn’t householders be able to trade off heating and cooling costs against capital costs and other forms of adaptation?
And this must surely be the greatest objection to these new building code rules—that they rub out innovation.
How can a national authority think it is so all-knowing that it can guess the needs, preferences, and budgets of builders and consumers, as well as the ability of the industry to adapt and innovate?
The housing industry is fearsomely innovative and competitive, with designers, builders and suppliers looking for edges to make their products better designed and better priced. An overly regulated market destroys this innovation by removing the ability to make trade-offs.
Queensland decided to adopt all of these changes before the other states. They’ve now pulled back and made some exemptions because of the uproar from the industry.
Let’s hope for the sake of future buyers and owners and for innovation and progress, that this moves from pullback to abandonment and that the other states pay attention. If Victoria can ditch the Commonwealth Games, Australia should easily be able to ditch the changes to its building code.
