Inspector's Blog

Sustainable house day allows you to explore eco-friendly homes to help gain tips on creating your own sustainable home.

On sustainable house day, learn from people who know how to minimise their footprint.

In the past three years, Alan Cuthbertson has halved his family’s consumption of electricity, water and gas. Next Sunday he will open his doors to the public and reveal the tips and tactics that have made all the difference.

The family’s Lower Plenty home will be part of Sustainable House Day.

It will be one of about 180 houses on show throughout Australia for the free event, including 50 in Victoria and 12 in Melbourne. The homes will be open from 10am to 4pm.

The event’s co-ordinator, Judy Celmins, says the residences range from those with simple, low-cost alterations to new dwellings complete with every innovation imaginable. Details of the homes are available on both the Sustainable House Day and “shmeco” websites.

Ms Celmins says visitors find it invaluable to see first hand the way people have altered their homes, and ask them how they did it. “Whatever stage you’re at, you can learn something,” she says. “It’s our ninth year and even the people who come every year say they always learn something new.”

Mr Cuthbertson and his family have been living in the same house for two decades, but only began retrofitting in the past few years — prompted by their daughter, who was completing an engineering degree.

“We had lots of discussions about climate change and it convinced me that we should be doing something,” he says.

His message for visitors is that it’s not difficult to make improvements. “It’s not something you do overnight, but you just keep working on it.”

The Cuthbertsons have made all the usual retrofitting measures, such as thorough ceiling insulation and draught sealing around windows and doors. They have also stopped the gaps left inside the kitchen cabinets (Kitchen cabinets are the built-in furniture installed in many kitchens for storage of food, cooking equipment, and often silverware and dishes for table service. Appliances such as refrigerators, dishwashers, and ovens are often integra and around skylights.

By way of big-ticket technology, they have installed solar photovoltaic panels, a solar hot water system and a large water tank that fills from a collection point in the stormwater drain.

When their old central heating system needed to be replaced, they paid an extra $2000 for an efficient model that could heat in zones. “We only heat the core of the house and turn on the other rooms as we need them. That’s made a big difference,” he says.

Mr Cuthbertson is a computer programmer and a tinkerer, so visitors will also be privy to a number of his nifty innovations, including a mirror that reflects sunlight inside during winter and a retractable blind over the clothesline that lets the washing dry on rainy days.

He has also done his own double-glazing, and fitted cardboard pelmets that rest between the curtain rail and the architrave. “It’s a nice solution – they’re effective and a lot cheaper than putting on proper pelmets,” he says. “I’ve been concentrating on things that don’t cost a lot but give a reasonable return.”

Eight temperature sensors around the home feed data into Mr Cuthbertson’s computer, informing him about the efficacy of the changes he has made.

“I’ve put in a bit of effort and achieved a 50 per cent reduction in energy and water use, so I feel the politicians are selling us short on climate change,” he says. “There’s nothing special about what we’ve done. It’s all applicable to other homes.”

michaelbgreen.com.au

Links

sustainablehouseday.com

shmeco.com

Profile: Leader of the fledgling People’s Alliance Party sees his move into politics as a natural extension of his faith.

MINTO – A message to all bellyachers, barkers and whiners: don’t bother knocking at Kris Austin’s door unless you’re prepared to put your money where your mouth is.

“For a wrong to perpetuate, the rights just have to do nothing,” Austin says, paraphrasing the Irish statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke.

“Before we started this, we did a lot of complaining about how bad things are. And you hear a whole lot of people talk about how bad things are. It got to the point where we can continue to complain about it, or we can try to do something about it. Well this is us, trying to do something about it.”

In this election that is too close to call, one thing can be said with certainty: the personable and determined 31-year-old Austin, the face of the new People’s Alliance Party, is the most naturally articulate leader in this election campaign.

The day before the campaign officially begins, he’s wearing an open neck shirt, dress pants, and a fresh short back and sides haircut. He’s leaning back in a chair behind a big wooden desk in his storefront headquarters on Main Street in Minto, trying to ignore his hand written to-do lists as he carries on a conversation and answers the phones.

The office is filled with the usual paraphernalia of a campaign headquarters: flag on the wall, photocopier, coffee pot, laptop and maps of New Brunswick electoral districts pinned to the walls, in particular, close ups of the sprawling Grand Lake-Gagetown riding where Austin will be making his political stand,

His main opponents here, Tory Ross Wetmore, the owner of the general store in Gagetown, and Liberal Barry Armstrong, a popular and charismatic businessman from Chipman, both have headquarters a stone’s throw up the street.

However, only Austin can claim home court advantage in Minto, which is the largest population base in the riding.

“I actually lived in that yellow house right there,” he says, gesturing across the street. “This is my town.

“It’s a community that’s had the snot beat out of it in the last couple of decades, and it’s not alone. I did a tour of the north and it’s the same all over. The target is rural New Brunswick. The people of rural New Brunswick deserve better. They don’t want to live in the cities. They want to live here. And they aren’t asking for much. The people in these areas don’t need a lavish lifestyle. They need the dignity of going to work.”

For Austin, doing something about it by creating the People’s Alliance, instead of sitting around a table in a coffee shop complaining about it, comes with a significant personal sacrifice. This spring, the married father of a five-year-old son, left his job as the pastor of a local church to become a full-time politician and launch the new political party.

It’s hard to imagine a more high-risk venture, and it would be hard to find a young man who has gone into it with more wide-eyed optimism. In the first place, in the last place, the move into politics is a natural extension of his faith.

“I do believe in simple things like integrity and service,” he says. “When you look at the Christian faith, as hammered as it has been, and as poorly as some people have represented the meaning of the Gospels, the crux of it is helping others, putting others first before yourself, building up the lives of others.

“The whole concept of Christianity is denying yourself to help others, and there’s fulfillment in that. In that sense, a lot of what I do, whether it’s in the pulpit or in politics, is really to keep that message true, that this is really about making people’s lives better in one form or another.”

Austin was born in Hamilton, Ont., and moved to Minto when he was a toddler. He is the middle child of three, with an older brother who is a pastor in Florenceville and a younger sister who is a nurse in Saint John.

When he was a boy, his father worked for the Department of Transportation and at the provincial fish hatchery. His mother worked at Eastland Industries, a manufacturer of kitchen cabinets (Kitchen cabinets are the built-in furniture installed in many kitchens for storage of food, cooking equipment, and often silverware and dishes for table service. Appliances such as refrigerators, dishwashers, and ovens are often integra in Minto.

“She worked hard,” he says. “People here work hard, they do, when the opportunity is there to work.”

When Austin graduated from Minto High School in 1997, he worked as a labourer at the Grand Lake timber mill, was a window washer, and then enrolled in the Faith School of Theology in Charleston, Maine, near Bangor.

He was a youth pastor in Nackawick, N.B., before moving to Niagara Falls where he worked for a wedding company that performed the official part of ceremonies throughout the region.

“I’ve done them in helicopters over the falls, on the Maid of the Mists, in the Prince of Wales Hotel. On any given Sunday in Niagara Falls in the heat of the summer, I would see myself doing as many as 10 to 12 weddings. So you’d do this one, which would be a 20- or 30-minute ceremony, you’d jump in your car and go to the next one. I’ve seen me running from one wedding to another.”

After three years grinding it out in the wedding factory, he heard about an opening at the Christian Community Church in Minto, and he moved home.

He came to a church that was on its last legs, with an attendance of about 15 members on Sunday mornings. This was exactly the kind of job Austin was looking for.

“I get satisfaction out of trying to make things better,” he says. “I like the challenge of taking something that is down and doing everything I can to lift it up.”

By the time he left the church this spring, he had transformed it. The congregation had grown to about 80 people. The church had been renovated and had a new $30,000 roof. He created a support group for widows, an “overcomers” group for those with addictions, and various bible study groups.

He re-opened a youth centre that had closed in the 1990s to create a place for young people to gather off the street. The building, also on Main Street, is now a youth drop-in centre with a pool table and ping pong table, and it hosts dances and educational programming for young people, funded in part by grants from the Protestant Orphanage Foundation that were secured by Austin.

“My goal, which I think I achieved, was to take the church and bring it to the community,” he says. “We always say, ‘Come to church.’ But the theme of the Gospels is, ‘You go out.’ I think politics is a lot like that.”

Austin had a good life, with a home on the banks of Newcastle Stream, next to a stretch of New Brunswick forest where he fished for trout in the summer and hunted in the fall.

Then politics came calling. He was a life-long Tory. His father was president of the riding association and he had followed in his footsteps as a local political organizer.

So his first move was to seek the PC nomination for Grand Lake-Gagetown, which he lost to Ross Wetmore.

By then he was becoming disaffected with the whole system.

“You wake up some morning, you pick up the newspaper, and there on the front page is ‘NB Power up for sale.’ People are looking around saying, ‘What? Where did that come from?’

“And when the news comes out about NB Power up for sale, the Memorandum of Understanding is that thick, you know they’ve been working on this for months, and they did this without the public ever knowing. That’s where I have a problem with government. I understand that there are times when government has to close the door and has to negotiate in private. I get that.

“But everybody says the process that brought it about is where the real problem lies. It’s not whether it should be sold or not is the big issue, it’s how it was done.”

He decided that despite Tory leader David Alward’s pledge to consult the public before making decisions, the PC Party wasn’t about to make meaningful changes in the system.

“We keep swapping politicians,” he says. “We put in a Liberal and then take them out. We put a Conservative back in and then take them out and put a Liberal back in. We keep getting the same results. People are still hopeless and frustrated with government and they’ve lost all faith in how government is run in this province.

“So it’s not just NB Power that has caused us to create the People’s Alliance. It’s our understanding that the system has got to be made better.

“I’m so tired of politicians just saying what people want to hear, and then doing something the exact opposite. Help me understand why the PCs or the Liberals would want to change the system. They hold a monopoly of government. People in power don’t want change because they hold power.”

This spring and summer Austin created the new party, held a policy convention, and then worked hard to recruit candidates throughout the province. The People’s Alliance has 14 candidates, which is a reasonable beginning for a new party in its first campaign.

The candidates are a mix of former Tories, Liberals and NDP supporters and include a number of high profile people who already have significant support in their regions, such as John Craig, the mayor of St. Andrews who is running in Charlotte-Campobello, and Terry James, the mayor of Blacks Harbour, who is running in Charlotte-The Isles. The role the People’s Alliance will play in this campaign won’t easily be measured by polling before election day.

For his part, Austin is concentrating on his own riding.

“I’ve got to work myself here. I’ve done all I can do for the province right up until the writ was dropped. Where we are new I have no choice but to make sure the message gets out here. We understand that this one is a very winnable riding and we don’t want to lose that opportunity.”

He does want to be included in the televised debates, and thinks he has a legitimate claim to be there. There is no question that People’s Alliance needs the opportunity to show itself and its young leader to New Brunswickers.

“We call it democracy and if you aren’t allowing all the legitimate voices to be heard it’s not a democracy.

“Our biggest challenge politically is to get people to see and understand what we are all about. We’re not radicals or revolutionaries. We’re not fly-by-night people. We believe the system can be better. We believe politics can be better and we believe government can be better. That’s why we are fighting so hard and sacrificing so much to try to get our message out there.

“It’s a challenge. We knew getting into this that it was going to be a big challenge in every area, including family and finances, and it has. But if you believe strongly in something, you push forward with it.

“At the end of the day, if we really think something’s wrong, what are we doing to make it right?”

Fourteenth in a series of conversations with prominent New Brunswickers. The series, by noted journalist Philip Lee, continues tomorrow with Green Party leader Jack MacDougall.

Today Kris Austin People’s Alliance Party

Tuesday Jack MacDougall Green Party

Wednesday Roger Duguay New Democratic Party

Thursday David Alward Progressive Conservative Party

Friday Shawn Graham Liberal Party