Healthy Homes make for Healthy Kiwis
Making our homes warm and dry would:
- reduce by 50 people a day those going to hospital with respiratory illness (saving $54m every year);
- cut sick days off work by 180,000 every year (lifting productivity by $17m per year);
- cut your household power bill by hundreds of dollars each year;
- create much needed jobs.
What do healthy homes have to do with climate change?
Households use about a third of New Zealand’s electricity. Proper insulation can significantly reduce a household’s energy consumption.
Using less electricity in our homes means lower electricity bills for Kiwis, less coal and gas burned, and reduced demand for new power stations.
By making our homes healthier we’re reducing our carbon footprint at the same time.
Labour's position on home insulation
In 2008 Parliament passed Labour’s Climate Change Act, which put a price on emitting greenhouse gases and began to move the cost of those emissions off the taxpayer and onto the polluters themselves.
Labour, with the support of the Greens and other parties, put in place an assistance package which included a commitment to spend one billion dollars over 15 years on a programme to make New Zealand homes better insulated, much healthier and more energy efficient.
Since the election, the National Government has cancelled the programme. This reversal represents a massive missed opportunity for New Zealand. Instead of scaling back the scheme we should be looking at ways of expanding it, using innovative funding methods such as suspensory loans from power companies, standardised retrofits to reduce costs and a simple building star rating for energy efficiency.
It is important to act now for Kiwi jobs
New Zealand and the world are in the midst of a serious economic recession and hundreds of Kiwis are losing their jobs every week. This means that now is the time for practical ideas to create jobs and help people through these difficult times.
Take the building and construction industry. Building consents are forecast to drop by two thirds, from 26000 down to 8000, and jobs will be lost.
A comprehensive retrofitting programme rolled out around the country would help save many of these jobs and create new ones.
The benefits a retrofitting programme are significant. Healthy houses mean healthier Kiwis, better quality of life, lower power bills, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and real jobs just when new Zealand needs them.
A number of community, environmental groups and churches are supporting Labour in asking the National Government to act now to make our homes warm and dry.
What you can do
Please support the call for the Government to commit to invest in a job-rich scheme to provide insulation upgrades to households.
Tell us your stories. How cold is your home? How has living in a cold home affected your life? For those who have good insulation, what difference has it made to the quality of your life?
