The Productivity Commission has released its latest report, recommending more investment into cheaper, cleaner energy.
One recommendation in the report is for every house in the country to receive a star rating based on how well it would cope with storms, cyclones, floods, heat and bushfires.
This would help people understand how safe the homes are – especially as future major climate events are becoming more intense and, in some cases, more frequent.
🗣️ “The Australian Government should lead development of a nationally consistent climate resilience star rating system for housing.”
💰 House hunting?
Currently, if you’re buying a house… Well, lucky you.
But secondly: you may find it’s quite difficult to figure out how a property copes during one of these major events, like a cyclone or bushfire.
One big reason for that difficulty is that the publicly available information can be hard to understand.
According to Domain, only 29% of Australians know about their property’s risk of being impacted by a natural disaster.
🇳🇿 The Kiwis did something similar
To give a real-world example: after the 2010 and 2011 Christchurch Earthquakes, the land in the city was graded between 1 and 3 to determine what kind of foundations were needed to build.
This affected the value of the land, because if you were to build a house on grade 3, the foundation costs would be more expensive than on grade 1 land. Due to the need for more ground stability work.
🧱 What could it mean here?
Having a resilience rating in Australia would help buyers better understand how well a property copes during a disaster.
It would also incentivise sellers and homeowners to make their properties more resilient.
Making a grading system shouldn’t be too difficult; Australia already has a Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme, on which, according to the report, this new resilience rating could be based.
⭐️ Everything else has a star rating
If we’re going to keep living in a country that swings from fires to floods and back again, with more frequency and severity, we probably need more than just a “she’ll be right.”
There’s a chance this recommendation will come up for discussion at the federal government’s productivity round table in Canberra in a couple of weeks.
A resilience star rating wouldn’t stop disasters — but it would at least help people figure out whether their home can survive one.
It means buyers can make smarter decisions, and owners might actually be pushed to make their houses safer.
Because at the moment, we’ve got five-star kitchens and five-star locations — but not a clue how a place will hold up in a cyclone.