Healthy and Affordable Homes
Everyone deserves a safe home
No matter our background or income, everyone deserves to live in a house that keeps us safe from extreme heat and cold, without stressing about incurring massive energy bills and while doing their part to protect our communities for extreme heat.
Through grants and rebates, the NSW government can support the delivery of energy audits, investment in energy efficiency upgrades and installation of solar on low-income rented and owner-occupied homes. These shovel-ready solutions are not only our best chance to reduce pollution and protect our climate, it’s also a great way to save on our power bills and create local jobs as we rebuild following coronavirus pandemic lockdowns.
How can we win?
Our ultimate goal is to pressure the NSW government to legislate and fund a series of policies that make our homes safe for people and the planet. Our strategy has two main elements, building people power across Sydney and pressuring our political representatives.
Through building a strong powerful movement in Western Sydney that brings together people disproportionately impacted by extreme weather and civil society organisations across diverse sectors, we can build people power that politicians cannot ignore.
The power of unusual suspects coming together to urgently call for climate action, will pressure Western Sydney MPs as well as Energy Minister Matt Kean to see it as their responsibility to make healthy, affordable homes a reality across our city.
What would this mean for our communities?
The crises we face – from the coronavirus pandemic, to job losses, to warming global temperatures – demand that we work together to protect the health and wellbeing of everyone in our community.
Many houses in Australia are too cold in winter and too hot in summer. Combined with significant increases in household bills, successive lockdowns putting financial pressures on families, and extreme weather fueled by climate change, many people are pushed to live in homes that are becoming more and more unaffordable to run and compromise the health and wellbeing of the household. This is particularly the case for homes in Western Sydney, where temperatures are approximately ten degrees warmer than the CBD.
We are calling on the NSW Government commit to providing a roadmap by the next budget outlining how we can make homes across NSW healthy and affordable by 2025. This includes instituting minimum energy standards for rental properties and providing grants for low-income households to conduct an energy audit and install energy productivity measures.