Should demolition be taxed, asks National Trust

The National Trust of South Australia would like debate on whether to put a tax on the energy wasted when a building is knocked down

“If you want to knock a building down, if you want to waste that energy then you (should) make a payment for it,” CEO Ian Stephenson told the ABC's Stateline program in late August.

He said research by the National Trust in the US had shown that pre-1920 buildings, which had thick wall masses, were basically energy stable. The cost of demolishing them, sacrificing the embedded energy and building something new, even if state-of-the-art, would take 60 years to get the energy equation back to zero.

“We should really be building for a 100- to 200-year-long future, not 25 years, knock down and start again. We cannot afford that.” He was discussing Adelaide's building boom, described as its biggest in decades, with Property Council of SA executive director Nathan Paine and local eco-architect Paul Downton.

Stephenson made these other points:

DEVELOPMENT was being pursued at any price and Adelaide was becoming “an homogenised place that could be anywhere else in the world”.

DEVELOPERS had the capacity to do great developments, but unless required to found it much easier to deliver “in an ordinary and banal way”.

HE was horrified at the number of heritage buildings being lost in the present boom and the aesthetics of the replacements.

Paine said a tax was unacceptable and the Property Council was also opposed to a national mandatory green building code.

“Adelaide is already leading the nation in terms of five-star green floor space,” he said. “We also have the greenest building in Australia currently under construction in Victoria Square.

“If we suddenly introduce significant increased costs on new homes that will drive houses to an unaffordable level and lock another generation out.”

The Property Council believed the green star system worked. The building industry should be part of the new national carbon trading system whereby it would get credits for energy efficient buildings.

“We have to accept not all old buildings are suitable for modern contemporary uses,” Paine added.

Downton said so-called environmentally friendly buildings were more about marketing than saving the planet. There were no agreed definitions “so you can call literally anything you want green, eco, environmental, whatever”.

The building industry was a major contributor of greenhouse gases both from the manufacture of materials to make new buildings and from the energy expended in demolishing their predecessors. A new mandatory national building code should include all those factors.

Downton said good, strong, intelligent building regulation was delivering the goods in Europe and the UK where they were now aiming for zero carbon housing by 2014. “We have no regulation that comes anywhere near delivering that,” he added.

“We should only knock down older buildings as an absolute last resort whether they are heritage or not.”

Footnote: Downton's practice, Ecopolis Architects p/l, is converting the Ape House built at the Adelaide Zoo in the 1960s into an education centre. The occupants have been relocated.