Everyone has the right to a warm, dry home. Instead, housing in Aotearoa often makes us sick from damp and cold.
In Aotearoa, much of our housing stock just isn’t up to standard. Cold, draughty houses with high heating costs can and should be a thing of the past. The Green Party has been committed to warming up our homes for decades, working with both Labour and National governments to deliver subsidies for home insulation.
This term, with the Green Party in Government, we’ve introduced Healthy Home Standards for rental properties – requiring insulation and reliable heating. We’ve made sure all new Kāinga Ora public homes are energy efficient and we’ve launched the Building for Climate Change programme to improve how we build while reducing carbon emissions.
It’s now time to go further and create a green building revolution, for the health of people and planet.
The Green Party will:
- Overhaul the Building Code so all new homes are built to high standards of warmth, dryness, and energy and water efficiency, working towards net zero energy new builds by 2030. The new Code will require all new builds to use greywater recycling and be accessible to people with disabilities.
- Provide grants to insulate, heat, and ventilate older homes, targeted at those most in need.
- Introduce mandatory energy efficiency ratings for all commercial and residential buildings, both new and existing.
- Create a Rental Warrant of Fitness to complement the existing Healthy Home Standards, so all tenants can have confidence in the warmth of rental properties.
- Kick-start Aotearoa’s sustainable building materials industry, with a particular focus on scaling up sustainable timber processing and prefabricated buildings.
- Finance clean energy replacements of fossil fuel heating systems in commercial and industrial buildings.
- Support green roofs and other “soft” infrastructure.
- Ensure new government buildings are built to high environmental standards.
- Reduce emissions from buildings through the Building for Climate Change programme.