THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Why Qld construction code change will jack house prices up another $70k

Why Qld construction code change will jack house prices up another $70k

Cost of living concern? The Leftist government is much more interested in telling people what to do than they are in controlling the cost of living. They are authoritarians, not compassionate

Building industry leaders are fuming following the government’s announcement that Queensland’s adoption of the National Construction Code changes will only add 2 per cent onto the price of new home builds, saying their own calculations put prices up as far as $70,000.

The Courier-Mail on Monday revealed the price of building an average Queensland home would go up roughly $20,000, which Public Works Minister Mick de Brenni quickly refuted, claiming prices would only increase about 2 per cent.

But after speaking with various builders including Metricon, Brighton Homes and Plantation Homes, as well as Master Builders Australia and the Housing Industry Australia, The Courier-Mail can confirm house price will actually increase between $10,000 and $70,000.

Plans which show material changes to meet higher energy efficiency standards and spatial modifications to increase accessibility indicate costs to make homes more accessible will sit far higher than government estimates.

Builders say insulation alone would add thousands onto home designs, with further money spent on things like window glazing, window framing and fans to bring homes up to the seven star energy rating.

Industry stakeholders have argued accessibility and liveability measures should go ahead on October 1, but energy efficiency measures should be delayed until next year to give builders time to prepare, but also to allow energy efficient products to be manufactured in high volumes, allowing them to be purchased cheaply in bulk.

Here is a breakdown explanation of exactly how the two significant changes coming in on October 1 will affect both builders and future homeowner builders - including what exactly will cost more, and how long Queenslanders have to buy old home designs before prices skyrocket or they disappear altogether.

Examples of modifications made to Metricon’s single storey Freedom home include:

-Increase passage ways to accommodate wider doorways

-Raising floors for flush transition, levelling the home throughout

-Accessible bathrooms and toilets large enough for circulation space

-Hinged doors replaced by cavity sliding doors, including pockets and gliders

-Reducing window sizes, while also maintaining light efficiency and safety, for example, having four protection screens in second storey windows allowing them to be opened fully

-Using better performing glass

-Window frames with less aluminium

-Loose fill insulation

-Ventilation and air movement strategies like additional ceiling fans

Price breakdown:

Brighton Homes chief executive Brad Collins said high costs in Queensland were coming from insulation, tinted glazing and “fans in every room”.

“Some homes depending on block orientation will require further enhancements and, in some cases will not be able to be built, as the home will be unable to meet energy requirements,” he said.

“As a guide we would expect single storey to start around $20,000 and doubles up to $40,000 or more.

Mr Collins argued that energy efficiency measures alone would add a “minimum cost” of $20,000 onto a new home build

“The costs come from increased cost of glazing windows and increased use of insulation for walls and ceiling,” he said.

“(It) will far outweigh the claimed energy efficiency the home will produce. When you look at interest rates alone on extra borrowings to meet the requirements the customer is further behind.”

Metricon design director, Adrian Popple said the additional costs for Metricon were averaging $20,000 with their luxury homes expected to increase by $35-$40,000.

He said costings were due to the finer details, which all homes needed, but some more than others depending on size

“For us to redesign our homes to accommodate those larger areas takes a lot of time and cost to us,” Mr Popple said.

“It’s massive and they don’t talk about this but this is where the cost comes from.

“A 50mm difference between door sizes doesn’t sound like a lot but it means new doors will have to be manufactured, and they will add costs until they become the new standard.

“Giving the industry time to adapt and get their heads around it and procure these materials in a high volume will help reduce costs.”

Metricon has been busy redesigning their national portfolio for two years, splitting up which homes would remain available in each state and territory based on individual climate cost efficiency to keep them there.

“We build thousands of homes around Australia every year and are probably better positioned than most but the cost is the cost - it’s the same for any other builder,” Mr Popple said.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/qld-politics/why-qld-construction-code-change-will-jack-house-prices-up-another-70k/news-story/88ceac94f4a9a781f9106e8867c0bc78

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Why Qld construction code change will jack house prices up another $70k

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