Rainwater tanks are a terrific idea as are solar panels, particularly here in the ACT where your excess solar paower can enter the electricity grid. In order to get more people interested in solar panels on their home, it would be a good idea to provide more people with rebates and financial incentives to do this. However, other alternative energy sources- wind, geothermal and wave power- could also provide energy sources, if adequate distribution systems were developed in Australia. Whether or not the Federal government supports this is open to debate…

Agree with Claire. But not only should there be incentives to retrofit or build with energy efficient devices, there should be significant disincentives to fit inefficient and energy hungry devices. For example, households should somehow be discouraged to fit air conditioning until houses have been made to reach minimum levels of energy efficiency through other means. There are far too many houses with poor orientation, little or no insulation and poor glazing that run air conditioning.

The easy way for a government to disincentivise airconditioning, if I can use that word, is to make it cost more. Specifically, you could heavily tax aircon units as one does, say, alcopops or cigarettes. This would bring the other, more benign approaches into play. At the moment, it’s cheaper to get a split-unit aircon unit installed than to put in double glazing - even if the costs for the aircon are higher longterm, it’s the up-front cost that hurts.

I completely agree the government should install solar panels in all houses, yes it will cost them a lot of money but people will be able to keep their houses, and that money will come back to the government in shopping for food and clothes.