Many rental homes in Australia have the energy efficiency of a tent. This leads to higher energy costs, which add to cost-of-living pressures for renters. We don’t want to see an energy transition where only owner-occupiers can benefit. We need to have nationally consistent minimum energy efficiency standards, as well as a well communicated timeline for action that makes it clear to landlords that they will not be able to rent out poorly performing homes.

Consumers aren’t getting crucial information about the ongoing energy costs of the properties we want to buy or rent. We need better energy efficiency information about our single biggest purchase. Mandating disclosure provides vital information about how large the energy bills could be for someone thinking about renting it. It also provides critical information about the work required to bring that property up to a healthy and affordable standard for people thinking about buying it.

To ensure our homes and business premises are affordable, energy efficient and climate resilient, we’ll need to upgrade their energy efficiency. So we need a thorough understanding of what work needs to be undertaken to bring them up to scratch. However, most of us do not know which measures are the most impactful, or where to start. Small businesses, in particular, need a longer lead time to plan changes – and incentives that last longer than a year to enable them to act. We may not need to do everything all at once, but we do need to start doing something as soon as we can. 

The homes with the poorest levels of energy efficiency in Australia are also where those of us with the lowest incomes live. When these disadvantages intersect, they lead to large bills for those of us who can least afford to pay them. Given the harm caused to people’s health and financial wellbeing by energy inefficient homes, we should aim to fix the worst ones first. To make sure the energy transition leaves no one behind, we need to provide people with the help they need – including innovative support and financial incentives – to retrofit these homes. 

To minimise our bills, households and small businesses are being asked to improve the energy efficiency of our homes and premises, including investing in consumer energy resources and electrifying. However, the laws and rules ensuring we can seek remediation and redress when things go wrong sit with multiple entities, and often outside the scope of energy-specific rules and regulations, making it hard to get problems fixed. Why should we take action and adopt new technologies, even if they could benefit us, if we might suffer harm with no clear path for easy and free recourse?

There is a clear advantage for everyone if we reduce unnecessary energy consumption and, for those who can, shift usage to cheaper times of the day. All of this presupposes that we have access to real-time data that allows us to see the connection between our energy consumption and our bills. Currently access to this varies depending on our retailer, the state we live in, and the appliances we have. To our knowledge there has never been a landscape review of what tools and information are out there for consumers and who has access to them – and there’s no benchmark of what ‘good’ looks like. We plan to investigate.

Nine out of ten Australian households own a car, making electric vehicles likely the best opportunity most of us will have to participate in – and benefit from – the energy transition. Our research has shown that, even accounting for higher upfront costs for electric cars, we can expect to save more than $1,000 a year by 2030 from driving one. But we need to make sure that the infrastructure required to charge the millions of electric cars we’ll soon be driving will be available for those of us who live in apartments or don’t have off-street parking.