Thank you for giving the opportunity to the Housing Industry Association (HIA) to provide a submission to this inquiry and appear today at this hearing.

HIA is Australia’s only national industry association exclusively representing the interests of the residential building industry.

HIA represents a membership of 60,000 across Australia. Our members are involved in delivering more than 170,000 new homes each year through the development of new housing estates, construction of detached homes, low & medium-density housing developments, apartment buildings and completing renovations on Australia’s 9 million existing homes.

HIA exists to service the businesses it represents and advocates policies on behalf of members to further advance new home building and renovating, enabling members to provide affordable and appropriate housing to the growing Australian population.

HIA’s submission primarily focussed on the issue of climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience broadly - particularly with respect to built environment and housing. 

Australia has a diverse climate, and our buildings can be potentially subjected to a range of different natural hazards such as cyclones, bushfires, flooding, earthquakes, hailstorms, and the like.

Ensuring that residential and commercial buildings are resilient to natural hazards is not a new concern and the planning and construction of safe and resilient housing in all forms across our cities requires an effective relationship between governments and the residential development and building industry.

This Inquiry presents an important opportunity to further consider what role, and opportunities, there are for the Australian Government and organisations such as HIA, to work together to help prepare for, respond to, and assist efforts in ongoing and predicted future natural disasters.

In our submission we have identified several practical recommendations government and industry can take to improve Australia’s resilience, mitigate against future natural disasters, and coordinate activities on recovery and clean up.

Central to many of our recommendations, governments should take a national approach, through leadership and consistent policies and actions at all levels.

The current National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework advocates for a comprehensive strategy on climate risk management, encompassing not only corrective risk management - like retrofitting, reinforcing, remedial measures - but initiatives of equal importance such as compensatory risk management, supporting financing and transfer, reactive risk management early warning systems, and effective response and recovery.

HIA is supportive of this type of framework to guide policy settings.

We have also advocated for Australia adopting an approach to mitigation, adaptation and resilience that focusses on applying a ‘Hierarchy of Control’ style model to this issue, similar to WHS legislation that looks at a tiered and multi-faceted approach. 

This should apply the principles of ranking hazard control measures from most to least effective, prioritising elimination, followed by substitution, engineering controls through planning and urban infrastructure provisions and followed by building codes and administrative controls, and finally, on site management and homeowner education.

This would be underpinned by a central repository of adaptation guidelines and a single national risk rating tool to inform government and industry decision making and identifying measures homeowners and insurers can utilise to improve our built environment’s resilience.

The benchmarking and validation of the inputs into the risk rating tool is critical in this regard and must be based on agreed scientific principles and independently verified and administered.     

Lastly, mitigating the impacts of climate change on our built environment and infrastructure should have a primary focus on upgrading performance of our 8-10 million existing homes to improve their resilience against hazards.

Past natural disasters have shown our newly built stock performs adequately and there is a system in place for ongoing improvements to new codes and standards.

Whereas our existing building stock is most vulnerable and where targeted action is needed.     

Thank you for giving HIA the chance to contribute to this important conversation and welcome the opportunity to discuss these matters further as part of this Inquiry.

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