ADVOCACY: ABC Health Report – Housing and health: it’s about maintenance… and climate change
Healthabitat Director David Donald recently spoke with Norman Swan and
The key points Healthabitat made were;
- Preserve and build on the quality gains that have been made…otherwise it’s easy for people to come along and repeat the mistakes of the past
- Improve and adapt for a warming climate – not just for new houses, but for all existing ones – we know what to do – it’s now time to scale up or this massive investment will be for nothing
- Cyclical maintenance: A house is not a house unless it works, unless you can have a shower it’s just a pile of bricks and steel. It’s time to focus our attention and our investment on making existing houses work — and keeping them working — if we can do this it has the potential to lead to a dramatic shift in the health of people throughout remote Australia.
Some key quotes from David Donald during the interview;
“…if the house can’t provide those amenities for someone to stay healthy it’s not really a house it’s a pile pf bricks and steel.”
“maintenace is fundamental”
“What’s needed is houses that work, new houses but importantly old houses…we need to lift up ALL the amenity of every house in a community in order to have that true (health) impact”
“What needs to happen, to shift away from reactive maintenance. 1-3% of faults get reported by tenants from our data. It’s an incredibly expensive way to run a housing organisation. Travel costs takes up to 96% of the cost of that (maintenace) item, it makes no economic or health sense
there needs to be ashift towards a cyclical sheduled maintenace program”
“Over 40 years, Healthabitat has fixed over 11,000 houses with more than 353,000 items fixed…when we walk into a house about 8% of houses have a safe electrical system, it’s a shocking number, with a small amount of money we can shift that number up closer to 90%.”
“Trades tell us, in their professional opion what is the cause of that failure, and what they have come back with over the years is that 7% , the smallest number is tenant damage, the next number 18% is poor hardware or poor construction and by far the biggest number 75% is standard wear and tear or lack of maintenance…We have done a lot of work over the last 20-30 years on the middle number and the data is starting to show , the northern terriotry where we have been running projects for the last 6 years, that 18% is down towards 10%. that tells us that the health hardware going into houses and communities is far superior than it was when we began this work…”
“whats becoming crystal clear is that houses being built today throughout much of remote australia will be unihabitable within their 30 year lifespan…we need to get serious about making houses cooler in summer and warmer in winter.”
