Shadow housing minister Andrew Bragg’s pledge that a Coalition government would scrap mandatory home energy-efficiency standards is the wrong solution to the housing affordability crisis.

In a recent speech at the National Press Club, Bragg declared “it is now illegal to build a cheap house in Australia”, promising to slash the bloated 2000-page National Construction Code to 80 pages and abolish all mandatory building standards beyond those required for basic safety and structural integrity.

Bragg confirmed new homes built under his proposed Basic Australian Standard would not have mandatory energy-efficiency standards.

Asked the following morning whether “lower-income Australians would have to accept substandard housing”, he replied in the affirmative.

“We’ve got to be clear there are trade-offs here,” he said.

Bragg is certainly right that there are trade-offs. This is why his prescription – scrapping mandatory energy standards – is wrong.

An energy-inefficient home is not just hotter during summer and colder during winter – it is more expensive to run.

Putting families into homes that are hypothetically cheaper to build but definitively more expensive to run is a false economy, especially when retrofitting a poorly built home is more costly than just building it right the first time.

Bragg is not proposing to cut costs for low-income homeowners. He is proposing to load them up with larger, long-term costs tomorrow for the sake of a short-lived, hypothetical sugar........

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