Michael Green

Writer and producer

Coroner tells police to reinvestigate death

In Social justice, The Age on

THE State Coroner has adjourned a hearing into the death of a young man whose body was found in the Maribyrnong River, and requested that police reinvestigate the case on his behalf.

Michael Atakelt was 22 years old when he went missing on 26 June 2011. His body was retrieved from the Maribyrnong River in Ascot Vale eleven days later, on 7 July.

Julian Burnside, QC, appearing as an assistant to the Coroner, applied for the hearing to be halted in light of evidence given by Sergeant George Dixon, from the water police, about the likely location the body had entered the river.

Dixon had not been interviewed by Footscray police investigator, Detective Senior Constable Tim McKerracher, before the inquest began.

Burnside submitted that the investigation should be resumed with a senior officer. “It may be embarrassing for Mr McKerracher to be sent out to uncover things he has overlooked. It may be the evidence is no longer available. To avoid that embarrassment it is preferable that a senior officer be sent in.”

The State Coroner, Ian Gray, said it would be an independent investigation on his behalf and that new dates for the inquest would be set within two weeks. He said that the adjournment was not “intended to imply any criticism of Mr McKerracher”.

Atakelt’s father, Getachew Seyoum, said he did not believe the investigation into his son’s death had been “thorough and rigorous”.

“The whole Ethiopian community does not have trust in the Footscray police investigation,” he said.

Reem Yehdego, from Imara Advocacy, a youth group that formed after Atakelt’s death, said the community had been demanding an independent and comprehensive investigation from the moment his body was found.

“Despite assurances to the community from Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana of the quality of that investigation, this has not been the case. The Coroner’s decision today to suspend the inquest and order that a more senior investigator step in is of profound significance.

“The community is delighted that as result of the State Coroner’s intervention Michael’s death is finally getting the investigation it deserves,” she said.

In December 2011, Fontana, who was then assistant commissioner for the north-west metro area, told a public meeting in North Melbourne that the brief prepared for the Coroner was “a very thorough investigation”. He also said that he had “total confidence” in Detective Senior Constable Tim McKerracher.

At the same meeting, Detective Sol Solomon, from the homicide squad, said he had overseen the investigation and that it was “first class” and “all possible leads have been explored”.

The police brief to the Coroner said Atakelt may have entered the Maribyrnong River at the Smithfield bridge, approximately 4 kilometres downstream from where his body was recovered.

On Thursday, Sergeant Dixon said that it was “very unlikely” that Atakelt’s body had entered the river near the Smithfield Bridge. He said it could only have entered the river “a very short distance” downstream and it is more likely that the body entered the river upstream, possibly as far as two kilometres.

The Footscray police had not investigated the possibility that the body entered the river upstream of where it was found.

Earlier yesterday, Mourad Mohammed, 21, from Footscray, gave evidence that on the evening he went missing, Atakelt was upset about being held in police custody two nights earlier. He was also upset about a dispute with his girlfriend and the death of his grandfather in Ethiopia, of which he had been informed that morning. Atakelt told Mohammed he was going to take a long walk.

The hearing was scheduled to last for ten days and hear evidence from 34 witnesses.

A spokesperson for Victoria Police said it would be inappropriate to comment because the matter is currently before the court.

Read this article at The Age online

For more information, you can read previous articles I’ve written for Overland Journal about this matter: ‘Between two oceans’ and ‘Watching a hearing’.

Bursting the carbon bubble

In Environment, The Age on

Energy analysts and activists are warning that most of the world’s fossil fuels must remain in the ground, and that it can’t be business as usual for the industry.

LAST Tuesday, at 2 pm in San Francisco’s city hall, the regular council meeting was called to order, as usual. But that afternoon, councillor John Avalos proposed a decidedly irregular resolution: the city’s retirement fund should withdraw its money from fossil fuels.

“San Francisco has aggressive goals to address climate change,” he said. “It’s important that we apply these same values when we decide how to invest our funds.”

He isn’t the first to say so. In December, Seattle mayor Mike McGinn declared that the city’s cash balances – the US$1.4 billion it uses to manage its daily operations – would no longer be stashed in fossil fuel stocks. He also wrote to the city pension fund, which counts Exxon Mobil and Chevron among its major holdings, requesting it do the same.

The deliberations in the two west coast cities made a media splash, adding momentum to America’s fastest growing social movement: ‘Go Fossil Free’, a nation-wide blitz calling for universities, governments and churches to freeze new investments in fossil fuel assets, and to sell what they’ve already got.

The impetus for the campaign is a set of simple numbers – a global carbon budget.

It is a way of framing the climate crisis that is uniting student activists and market analysts. The former use the numbers to prosecute a moral case that the fossil fuel industry has gone rogue; the later, for a cold-blooded calculation that trading away from carbon-heavy assets is in the self-interest of investors.

The numbers were set out in a report called ‘Unburnable Carbon’, released last year by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a group of analysts and environmentalists in the UK. It highlighted the work of the Potsdam Climate Institute, which in 2009 produced a set of emissions scenarios together with their likely influence on global temperatures.

These are the numbers: for a low chance – one-in-five – of exceeding 2-degrees warming, we can only emit another 565 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide by mid-century.

But proven fossil fuel reserves (held by listed corporations, private companies and nation-states) equate to 2795 gigatonnes; five times the carbon budget.

In Copenhagen in 2009, the world’s governments agreed to limit warming to 2 degrees. To do so, four-fifths of our fuel must stay in the ground.

James Leaton, Carbon Tracker’s research director, says this “huge overshoot” of reserves represents a “carbon bubble” in financial markets. We’re on track to exceed the budget by 2028. “Investors need to start questioning the wisdom of companies pouring more capital into developing even more reserves,” he says.

The International Energy Agency, in its World Energy Outlook for 2012, presented a similar case. Using the same research, but choosing a higher, 50-50 threshold for exceeding 2-degrees warming, it stated that two-thirds of proven reserves must stay in the ground, unless carbon capture and storage is widely deployed. (It observed that the pace of deployment of the technology “remains highly uncertain”.)

Bill McKibben, the author and activist who inspired Go Fossil Free in the US, explains that despite decades of advocacy, “the penny dropped” when he saw those numbers.

“I’ve followed this all pretty closely – I wrote the first book about climate change – but I’d never really understood in my gut that the end of this story was written. It’s utterly clear. There is no room for wishful thinking,” he says, on the phone from his home in Ripton, Vermont.

“These guys have five times as much carbon in their reserves as the most conservative government on Earth says would be safe to burn. Once you understand that, then you understand that this has become a rogue industry. This formerly socially useful thing is now the greatest threat the planet has ever faced.”

Last August, he published an article in Rolling Stone, called ‘Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math’. Teen heartthrob Justin Bieber was on the cover, but it was McKibben’s essay that went viral.

Spurred by its unexpected popularity, McKibben hit the road the day after the US election, on his ‘Do the Math’ tour. With support from Desmond Tutu, author Naomi Klein and others, he spoke to sold-out concert halls “in 24 cities in 26 nights”.

Just two months on, students on over 250 campuses have started campaigns for their universities to divest from fossil fuel companies. (Together, US colleges command over US$400 billion in endowments.) Already, three have agreed.

“It’s actually happening faster than we thought,” McKibben says. “These are hard fights. All these kids know that, but they also know that this is their future.”

The campaign is modelled on the anti-apartheid divestment movement. In the 1980s, 155 colleges sold their South African assets, and scores of cities, states and counties joined in economic action against companies connected to the apartheid regime.

This time – and with the blessing of Tutu – the call for divestment is about undermining the fossil fuel industry’s legitimacy. “We’re not trying to bankrupt Exxon; colleges selling their stock is probably not going to do that,” McKibben says. “We’re trying to take away their social licence.”

The writer is scheduled to visit Australia in June, before his organisation, 350.org, holds its ‘Global Power Shift’ conference in Istanbul. But local activists aren’t waiting until then.

In January, Friends of the Earth began to promote Market Forces, a new campaign “to stop our money going into projects that would harm the environment and drive global warming”, according to its founder, Julien Vincent.

Likewise, the Australian Students Environment Network has started Lock the Campus, which targets universities’ investments, research and partnerships with the fossil fuel industry. They have a precedent: following a brief student campaign in 2011, ANU agreed to sell its million-dollar stake in coal seam gas company Metgasco.

As it turns out, the students have an unlikely ally – albeit one with a slightly different goal in mind.

John Hewson, the former leader of the Liberal Party, now fronts the Asset Owners Disclosure Project (AODP) and its accompanying social media campaign, The Vital Few, which is aimed squarely at superannuation funds.

The Vital Few website is set up for battle, rallying the public to “storm the castle” and “rewrite the future”. In practice, that means emailing your fund, requesting transparency about its interests in fossil fuels and calling for a bigger stake in renewables.

Hewson says the average pension fund invests about 55 per cent of its portfolio in “high-carbon intensive industries” and only 2 per cent in their low carbon counterparts.

“These asset owners have a long-term, not a short-term, horizon,” he says. “Their fiduciary responsibility is to maximise the returns to superannuates over time. How are they going to manage the risk of catastrophic climate change going forward? The best way is to put a higher percentage of their funds in low carbon intensive industries.”

In the finance world, “climate risk” translates as the prospect of reduced earnings or devalued assets, caused by climate change. That could come by way of physical impacts – say, a flood that destroys infrastructure – or cheap clean technology, or tough policy measures, such as robust carbon pricing and regulations.

Alongside Hewson on the AODP board is Bob Litterman, the former head of risk management for Goldman Sachs in New York. He sees an analogy between the carbon bubble and the sub-prime crisis, in which financial institutions “piled up mortgages on their balance sheet, assuming they were safe”.

“Similarly, today, we’re piling up carbon emissions in the atmosphere. When there’s a recognition that it cannot absorb an unlimited amount of carbon, there’s risk that people will very quickly revalue all the assets producing those emissions,” he says.

Last year, the AODP – which has connections with the Climate Institute – launched an index of the world’s pension funds, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds. It ranked them on their management and disclosure of climate risk.

The highest rating fund was Local Government Super, based in New South Wales. It estimates that low-carbon assets comprise more than 10 per cent of its total holdings. Members can choose a coal-free shares alternative, which screens out BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Wesfarmers and Whitehaven Coal, among others.

CEO Peter Lambert insists this attitude to climate risk is pragmatic, not political. “Increasingly the blowtorch is going to be turned towards these issues and there will be a time when they’re priced into assets.

“You can say you’ll sit back and wait until that occurs and then start to adjust your portfolio. Our position is that we should be ready for it now, because by then it’s too late and it will cost our members money,” he says.

That view is not yet widely shared in the industry. Nathan Fabian is the CEO of the Investor Group on Climate Change, which covers more than sixty institutional investors. “I’m confident we’re heading in the right direction,” he says. “But the truth is that the process is going slower than what is necessary to address climate risk.”

For funds and analysts, the risk boils down to the likelihood of widespread carbon pricing. Most are betting against it – that is, they’re tipping we’ll exceed the budget and press on to a hotter world.

Even for the most concerned among them, it is difficult to translate knowledge into action.

Typically, super funds invest heavily in “passive funds” that track the market – deviating from that benchmark entails a risk of doing worse than everyone else.

The very nature of financial modelling is a barrier, Fabian says: a dollar today is worth considerably more than a dollar in a decade. When you factor in deep uncertainty about carbon policy, along with fund managers who are rewarded for meeting short-term targets, a systemic, long-term risk such as climate change slips off the computer screen.

“The risk is there,” he says. “It’s just hard for us to measure it.”

Nick Robins is the head of the climate change centre at HSBC Bank, in London. Over the past year, his team has tried to measure the risk by estimating the impact in Europe of a deflating carbon bubble. In their scenarios, it could nearly halve the value of coal assets on the London exchange, and knock three-fifths from the value of oil and gas companies. And yet, he says, “at the moment this risk is not being priced at all”.

While the San Francisco and Seattle divestment proposals received a lot of press, the funds in question haven’t yet adopted them. In Seattle, a consultant’s report advised the board that doing so would be “costly”.

But just as the current patterns of world finance continue to reinforce the fossil fuel economy, so the movements for change – laid out by Carbon Tracker, McKibben and the Vital Few – weaken the walls of the carbon bubble. The more noise they make, the more exposed fossil fuel investments appear.

Robins says divestment is “not on the cards” for large institutional investors. “But people are recognising that over the next two years, they will need to come up with investment plans about how they’re going to be part of a 2-degree world, rather than the 4- to 6-degree world which they’re on at the moment.”

For his part, McKibben expects Go Fossil Free will spread rapidly and internationally, precipitated by citizens’ experiences of weather extremes.

“If anybody has a good sense of how important this is, it’s Australians right now. You guys broke every temperature record you had, day after day in January,” he says.

“Either we pay attention, or we engage in the most incredible collective denial that human beings have ever engaged in.”

Read this article at The Age online

Other people’s cars

In Community development, Culture, The Age on

I’D been invited to a wedding in Darwin in July. Somehow, August arrived. I was still in Melbourne, mired in the worst of winter, those bitter weeks when the calendar says it is nearly spring. A friend said a knot had formed in my forehead.

“Bugger it, I’m going north,” I decided. “Who knows what’ll happen?”

I cadged a lift with two bushwalkers on their way to the Grampians. There, I waited by the highway, smiling and waving at cars. Within minutes a taciturn Brazilian named Carlos, who delivers phone books for a living, stopped his small truck and drove me all the way to Adelaide’s central market. Whoosh! But it wasn’t until the next day that my brow really began to lift.

I’d been dropped at the turn-off to Port Pirie and I was standing in the dirt, head down, scribbling in my notebook: “Bobbi and Tim, maroon Mazda 323, nurse and plasterer, adult kids, Coca-Cola beanie, booze and bipolar, the golden rule tattooed on Tim’s left forearm…”, when a white van pulled up ahead.

It was Harm, a wiry fellow with a thin grey ponytail and great joy in his face. The joy is always there – I knew that straight away – but he was particularly elated right then, thrilled by my means of travel.

We enthused together. He reminisced about his wandering days after migrating from Holland, and showed me his gallery and home in the old shipwrights’ workshop in Port Germein. He made coffee and explained how, for more than two decades, he’d been growing tree seedlings and giving them to locals.

Later, I walked the town’s long jetty, one-and-a-half kilometres over the shallow Spencer Gulf, while the sun set on the Flinders Ranges behind me. I looked back and saw the once-barren port nestled in green.

From there I went north through the desert, gathering momentum, standing by the road and sitting in other people’s cars: Squizzy the resentful, racist roofer; Robbie and Jimmy Barnes, Arabunna mob on their way to a mine; Speeding Amy, the Vietnamese woman too tired to sleep; and Dave, who’d crashed into a tree and broken all his body, but found his backbone – he was moving north to make a better life.

Before long I was in the Alice, both attracted and repelled. Attracted by the rocky MacDonnell ranges and the sharp, generous people I met; repelled by welfare dependency and idyllic ex-pat cafes. Attracted by a football final with its mixed, lively crowd. Repelled by a day watching court. I was shocked by the nihilism of the drunks and the recklessness of a new government removing controls on alcohol supply. I was confused and spellbound by it all.

In Yuendumu, about 300 kilometres north-west, I volunteered at the community arts centre. I filled paint pots and took the artists cups of tea, listening all the while to the sounds of Warlpiri: the fast, rolling combinations of the consonants j, n, p and r, and the vowels a and u. I read a book by an anthropologist who’d lived in a women’s camp there. She learnt to abandon planning her days, to submit to the collective will instead. She gave up control, but gained a profound curiosity upon waking each morning.

Back in Alice, I tried my own brand of recklessness. Four days I hid at the freight terminal, ready to hop a cargo train. Four nights I trudged home, nine-parts despondent and one-part relieved – the trains either hadn’t come or lacked a place to stow away. I’d have kept trying, and might have fried like an egg on a hotplate, but for Macarena, a sparky Chilean traveller who offered to hitch with me the next morning instead. I went with Macarena.

On and on I went, north through hot springs and waterfalls, high-school visits and football games, canoeing days and speedway nights. Until, after two weekends of laksas and mangoes at Darwin’s markets, I turned around and came south.

John McDouall Stuart took five years and six attempts to cross the centre on horseback. He searched for waterholes and ached with scurvy. I hitched the Stuart Highway home from Darwin in just four days. I slaked my thirst at roadhouses and scanned the narrow ribbon of asphalt through seven different windscreens.

For Stuart, the desert brought purpose and quietude, an escape from the awkwardness and alcoholism that dogged him in colonial society. For me, it brought conversation and gratitude, and insight into the lives of people I’d never otherwise meet. Exactly 150 years apart, both of us yearned for salad.

After breakfast on a Friday, I walked to the highway near Coober Pedy. At lunchtime, a fitter-and-turner named Greg stopped for me in Port Augusta. He’d wrecked his fender – hit a dingo on the left side and a roo on the right. I said I was headed for Melbourne.

“You’re in luck,” he replied. He was from Cranbourne. He’d drop me to my door.

At 3 am we crested a hill on the Western Freeway and the big city’s lights sent shocks of surprise through my fingertips. I’d gotten into other people’s cars and put myself in Harm’s way: I was joyful. It was late, but my eyes were bright and my forehead clear.

“Who knows,” I wondered, “what will happen tomorrow?”

Read this article at The Age online, with three other great road trip yarns, from Cate Kennedy, Simon Castles and Fran Cusworth.

Farming on the fringe

In Architecture and building, Environment, The Age on

What will we reap when agriculture moves away from town?

IF you drive through Clyde, on the south-eastern outskirts of Melbourne, you’ll see the old farms where a new, very different, crop is being sown.

Next to the market gardens and green paddocks still lined with windbreaks are expanses of soil dotted with earthmovers and giant concrete pipes. On these properties, houses will become the next harvest of the land.

Melbourne’s urban growth boundary was extended last year and is under review yet again. In May, the state government appointed an advisory committee to recommend “logical inclusions” to the boundary in seven municipalities on the city’s fringe.

In Clyde, the City of Casey opposes any further extension (pdf), and argues instead for “logical exclusions” from last year’s ruling. In its submission to the committee, it stated that the boundary has already exceeded a sustainable limit.

Kathryn Seirlis, the council’s manager of strategic development, says the current and former governments haven’t given enough weight to the role of agriculture in the region, especially in creating employment and improving health and wellbeing.

“We think it’s critically important to protect viable, high value agricultural land for the future communities of Casey and beyond,” she says.

The controversy over Clyde fits within a larger debate about farming on the city’s fringes. The issue was the subject of a recent forum on “peri-urban agriculture”, coordinated by placemaking consultancy Village Well.

Trevor Budge, associate professor of planning at Latrobe University, argues good soil should be managed like any other resource. “If you found a supply of building sand or gravel, you wouldn’t just build over the top of it, you’d treat it as a finite resource,” he says.

“From everything we know – whether it’s climate change, peak oil, energy costs or transport costs – having productive agricultural land close to the city makes us more resilient for the future.”

Mr Budge says constant shifts and reviews have turned the urban growth boundary into a “zone of impermanence”. Many farmers and landowners outside expect to be re-zoned inside, and don’t keep investing in their land.

It’s a problem acknowledged by the Growth Areas Authority, the statutory body charged with coordinating the development of new suburbs.

“One of the problems in the past has been short term, knee-jerk reactions, with huge numbers of people all expecting make a lot of money by being [re-zoned] in the next new residential area,” says Peter Seamer, CEO of the authority.

He says the latest round of reviews is different, and will set aside enough residential land for decades to come. “The processes we’re going through will be sorted out by government in the next few months and they’ll set a very clear direction for the next 25 years,” he says.

Mr Seamer says that although “no one likes to see a reduction in farming land”, urban growth comprises a very small proportion of Victoria’s total farmland.

“The growth has got to go somewhere,” he says. “There was a crisis in the middle of last year, when prices for land went up very steeply because there was a shortage of supply, particularly in the Casey area.”

The state government has not yet released the findings of the logical inclusions process.

But the Casey council has foreshadowed using its planning tools to support farming within the growth boundary, even if its submission is rejected. Together with the Cardinia and Mornington Peninsula councils, Casey has been working on a plan to establish the Bunyip Food Belt, a zone of intensive agriculture that would draw on recycled water from the Eastern Treatment Plant.

Mr Budge accepts that Australia isn’t running short on agricultural land, but says proximity to the population makes all the difference.

“Growing food is part and parcel of the way cities operate. The better metropolitan strategies around the world make agriculture one of the core social and economic components of their plans – not something that sits off the edge and can be pushed further out,” he says.

As well as the added security afforded by a short food-supply chain, he says peri-urban farming also improves wellbeing. “Having contact with nature and an understanding of where food comes from is good for us socially and psychologically. It maintains the contact with the real world that we’ve had for 10,000 years of human history.”

Trading herbs for suburbs

IT’S the end of a normal day on the farm at Australian Fresh Leaf Herbs, in Clyde, just beyond Cranbourne.

While the packing workers tidy the cool room before heading home, banker-turned-farmer William Pham gestures at the rows of hydroponic basil in front of him. “We recycle our water, so we need one-sixteenth of the water for conventionally grown basil,” he explains.

Together with his business partner Jan Vydra and their 60 casual and full-time staff, Mr Pham produces and packages 70,000 bunches of herbs each week.

They began operations here in 2008, but their farm was included in the revised urban growth boundary in 2010. They’re looking for land elsewhere. “When we bought here, this road was empty,” Mr Pham says. “Now you can’t recognise it. The development has happened much faster than I expected.”

Mr Vydra, who was recently named the 2011 Young Australian Farmer of the Year, says he wants to stay within 40 minutes of the city. That kind of proximity is better for business: it’s easier to find workers, supplies are cheaper and more accessible, and the cost of transporting the produce is lower.

But once the boundary expands, property values rise and rates increase. “That’s what happens – you have to sell up. It’s beautiful soil around the whole area at Clyde. People have been farming it for 100 years and they have to move,” he says.

“There’s an economic benefit – we get much more money for our property – but as a community, we lose some really fertile soil and they’re going to put slabs on top of it.”

Although he can see the dilemma for planners, who want to provide affordable housing, he’s worried about food security as older farmers retire. “We need to figure out what’s being produced here and how we’re going to shift it elsewhere to make sure we keep producing food for our people.”

Mr Pham is ambivalent about the change: he says small-time farmers will disappear, but doesn’t think there’ll be any impact on shoppers. “A lot of the smaller growers will sell up, make their money and have an easier lifestyle.

“We spent a lot of money on this place, so what the heck – we may as well do it again. We’re too young to retire. We just have to move further out.”

Read this article at The Age online and watch Trevor Budge’s talk on the importance of peri-urban agriculture in Australia, at the On The Edge Forum.

Overshadowing

In Architecture and building, Environment, The Age on

Solar initiatives in built-up areas may be left struggling to see the light of day

THE eco-friendly Australian cities of the future will combine dense housing with savvy, energy-smart design. Or will they? Is there a conflict looming between the twin green goals of urban densification and widespread harvesting of the sun’s rays?

More and more people are installing solar panels and solar hot water systems, growing their own vegies and adapting their houses for passive solar gain. But as they do so, they may find their desire for direct sunlight overshadowed by bigger buildings next door.

Professor Kim Dovey, chair of architecture and urban design at the University of Melbourne, says the right to sunlight is a growing issue.

“Since the 1990s, there’s been a strong push for higher densities, often based on green arguments, such as getting more people living closer to train stations and so on. But at the same time, the solar access issue has been forgotten,” he says.

He says planning rules treat sunlight as a matter of amenity, not sustainability.

“To me, the deeper issue is that the ownership of a block of land seems to imply some kind of right to access the solar energy that comes with it,” Professor Dovey says. “And we also have a public imperative for distributed energy systems – the idea that we should generate electricity everywhere, not only in one place.”

Currently, although every level of government offers subsidies or incentives for solar panels and hot water units, there’s been no equivalent attempt to safeguard those investments against overshadowing.

Similarly, the Victorian planning controls don’t shield householders’ access to direct sunlight in the winter, the time of year when it’s needed most for passive heating.

Despite this criticism, the Victorian Department of Planning and Community Development maintains that its regulations adequately protect existing north-facing windows and backyards.

Under the rules, shadow diagrams are drawn at the spring equinox, not the winter solstice – which means they don’t take account of the six months when the sun is lowest in the sky.

Seamus Haugh, a spokesperson for the department, says the current practice represents “a sensible balance”.

“In Melbourne, [using] the winter solstice would unreasonably restrict redevelopment opportunities and would significantly impact on homeowner rights to modernise existing housing,” he says.

A review of the state planning scheme is underway, and is scheduled to report its preliminary findings to the minister at the end of November.

Angela Meinke, manager of planning and building at the City of Melbourne, acknowledges that sustainability isn’t a key consideration under the rules, as they stand. “The planning scheme doesn’t address the impact you could have on green initiatives on neighbouring properties,” she says.

“The challenge we have in planning is to weigh up the rights of property owners to develop and the rights of neighbours not to be affected by development. We try to strike a balance.”

But as the risks of climate change and energy scarcity grow more pressing, it is becoming increasingly apparent that householders everywhere must adopt low-consumption, low-impact lifestyles. The notion of “balance” may need to favour sunlight over development – especially where the plans in question are only for larger houses, not more dwellings.

Professor Dovey contends that the government must “take some responsibility for a sustainable future” by planning actively, rather than prolonging the market-led approach of recent decades.

“In the middle of winter it’s very hard to avoid the blocking of sun, so there have to be compromises. I think that will mean that in any given area, the height limits ought to be reasonably flat,” he says.

“You could have a law that says properties cannot differ by more than a couple of storeys from one property to another. And that would improve the city, because it won’t be pockmarked with large towers.”

In the case of solar photovoltaic panels, Stephen Ingrouille, from Going Solar, believes overshadowing concerns can usually be solved by careful planning or by negotiation between landowners.

“You could get people to set back a little, or bevel the corners of buildings,” he suggests. “Potentially you can move solar panels to another spot, but who pays for that? What is reasonable?”

He notes that in the UK, residents have defended their solar access under the common law doctrine of Ancient lights, which gives owners of long-standing buildings a right to maintain their established level of illumination. In Australia, the courts have heard very few cases about solar access for sustainability.

As a general rule, Mr Ingrouille advises would-be customers to consider the likelihood of “overdevelopment” on the property immediately to their north. “Be mindful that might happen and try to plan for it,” he says.

There goes the sun

IN the mid-1990s, the Walsh family extended their Kensington home. With the help of their next door neighbour at the time – an architect – they designed a living area with glass doors and high windows to capture the sun.

“In winter time, it’s like a sun room in here,” says Wally Walsh. “We’ve got a grape vine to provide shade in summer, but in winter it loses all its leaves, the sun streams in and you don’t need to heat the room.”

The architect has since moved on, and the family’s new neighbours have extended twice. The most recent addition was a second storey, erected earlier this year.

The length of the block runs east to west, so the home’s northern windows look out onto the house next door. But where once they saw sky, the family now see rows of cream weatherboards.

“I came home one evening and the frame was up and I thought: ‘My God’,” Mr Walsh says. “I contacted the Melbourne City Council immediately, who told me that we had no grounds to appeal other than on the basis of heritage.”

Angela Meinke, the council’s planning and building manager, confirmed that in this case, heritage concerns were the only matter the council could consider in determining its planning permit.

The building surveyor, however, was required to assess the shadows cast on their existing north-facing windows. Unfortunately for the Walsh family, the demands of the regulations aren’t stringent enough to safeguard their winter sun.

By Mr Walsh’s reckoning, the rules favour development over energy-efficient design. “It’s going to be colder and darker in here. We’ll need to have the heating and lights on more often,” he says.

“They’re doing what they’re entitled to do, apparently. But it’s sad. You’re supposed to design your house so you get sunshine in winter and shade in the summer, aren’t you? For us, ultimately, it was a waste of time.”

Read this article at The Age online