28 June 2022 - Community Services

Welcome to the Community Services meeting for the 28th of June 2022. My name is Barry Calvert. I am the chairperson and a member of this committee. Firstly, I'd like Hawkesbury City Council acknowledges the Darug and Darkinjung people as the traditional custodians of the land of the Hawkesbury. We pay respect to all Elders, past, present and emerging, and acknowledge all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples as the first persons of the country. Emergency procedures. Committee members and members of the public attending the meeting in council chambers are advised that in the event of an emergency, you will be asked to proceed in an orderly manner to the nearest exit following the guidance of our warden.

Recording of the council committee meetings. I would also like to advise that meetings of council committees are recorded. In terms of the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act, this may involve the recording of personal information provided at the time of the meeting. The recordings are made to assist staff in compiling the minutes of the meeting and to enable the podcasting of council committee meetings. The provision of any information that is recorded is voluntary. If any person does not wish to be recorded, they should not address or request to address the meeting. The recordings may be made available to other persons where such access is in accordance with the relevant regulations.

The recordings are stored on council's record management system. For the benefit of those persons who will be addressing the committee, it is expected that you will refrain from making any insult, allegation or personal reflection against any person present or not at this meeting. This request relates to both your address to the meeting and any answers given in response to questions from the committee. As a courtesy to others, it is requested that mobile phones either be turned off or turned to silent. Apologies. Do we have any apologies? Nope. Declaration of interest. Do we have any declarations of interest? Yes, okay. The general manager has received a written request from Councillor Lyons-Buckett to attend tonight's meeting by audiovisual link and she's given a reason for that.

Now, in accordance with Council's Code of Meeting Practice, Councillor Lyons-Buckett is permitted to be in the meeting while the request is determined. Does someone move that Councillor Lyons-Buckett be permitted to attend the Community Services meeting of 28th June 2022 by audiovisual link? Moved that way, Mr Mayor. Moved by Councillor Wheeler, seconded by Councillor Sheather. Anyone wish to speak against it? If not, I'll put the motion. All those in favour say aye. Those against? Declare it carried. Let me get back to declarations of interest. Do we have any declarations of interest? And Councillor Lyons-Buckett, you can hear us quite well. I cannot always keep an eye on you, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, so if I overlook you, please just turn your microphone on and— Make it known to me, okay.

There's no declarations of interest, and I don't think we have any speakers, any outside speakers. No, so I won't go through all that business as well, and we'll get on to the agenda. First item on the agenda is the minutes of the last meeting. Confirmation of the minutes. I wasn't there, so we need some people who were there to move it. Moved by Councillor McMahon, seconded by Councillor Sheather. Is there any discussion about the minutes? If not, I'll put them. All those in favour say aye. Those against? Declare it carried.

Business tonight, and that is the WSROC Heat Program, and we're very lucky to have with us Kelly Gee from WSROC, who is an expert at this and has put a lot of work into this matter, and I'm really glad she's here. There is a recommendation on page 10 of your business paper, and that is based on another motion, which is on the bottom of page 10 of the business paper. So that's what we're trying to address. But firstly, I call on Kelly to give us a presentation about the WSROC Heat Smart Program. Thanks, Kelly.

Thank you, Councillor Calvert. So, yeah, thank you very much for having me here today. As mentioned, I'm Policy and Project Officer at WSROC, and I'm one of two staff that are working across WesRoc's heat projects. Heat Smart Western Sydney is a program that we've been running in partnership with Hawkesbury Council, as well as the five other councils, the local health districts, and our consultant, Risk Frontiers. Next slide. So Heat Smart is one of many projects that we're delivering under the Turn Down the Heat strategy, which is WesRoc's guiding document in terms of its work addressing heat. So Turn Down the Heat was launched in 2018 and was developed in partnership with councils and a whole range of other regional stakeholders to look at how we can better address heat across our region.

So as mentioned, I'll be talking about Heat Smart today, which is a program I've been managing, but we've also been doing a lot of other work, particularly in the urban design space, urban greening, and looking at housing standards as well. Next slide. So I thought it would be, I guess when we talk about heat, often different terms are used interchangeably, and I thought it would just be a really good opportunity to talk through the different aspects of heat because different parts of the problem have different drivers and require different solutions. So the first is climate, and I'm sure I don't need to tell anyone here that Western Sydney is very hot, and the Hawkesbury in particular is a very hot part of Western Sydney.

I'm not sure how visible it is on the screen there, but this was a temperature profile for Greater Sydney from the 4th of January 2020, and you can see a low of 32 degrees in Pittwater and a high of 50 degrees in Penrith, and that's an 18 degree difference across our city. So climate is determined by sea breezes, by geography, and it's kind of the baseline that we're working with. On top of that, we have urban heat islands, and while that term urban heat is used pretty generically, it specifically refers to the tendency of urban areas to be hotter than rural areas, and that's due to a range of factors including the heat absorption of urban surfaces like asphalt, bricks, and cement, but also due to human activities like transport, the outputs of air conditioning units, and that type of thing pumping heat into those local urban environments.

And then on top of that, we have heat waves, which are extreme meteorological events. They're broad scale, and they are really life-threatening emergencies in many cases. So just, I guess, separating those issues is really important because they do require different mechanisms to address them. Next slide. Again, Western Sydney is very hot, but it's also getting hotter, and it's getting hotter at double the rate of the Sydney CBD. This graph here is from the Greater Sydney Commission, and it looks at the number of 35 degree days per year in the Sydney CBD. Orange is Parramatta, and red line is Penrith, and Richmond and the Richmond weather station is quite similar to the Penrith line. Climate change impacts are felt more strongly in Western Sydney, but also a key driver of this is urban development, which the New South Wales government suggests will double the temperature increases predicted from climate change.

Next slide. I guess heat on its own isn't really an issue. It's an issue when it interacts with communities and infrastructure and services. Heat has killed more Australians than all other natural hazards combined. It's responsible for 60% of heat-related deaths. And some of the stats here are talking about not the mortality statistics , but some of the other impacts that heat has on the community. This was a survey we conducted in May 2020 as part of the Heat Smart program. So we can see loss of sleep, feeling unwell, exacerbation of mental health conditions, people worried about electricity costs, but also service disruptions, including losing power to their home and having transport disrupted, which I personally know is a real issue on the Richmond rail line.

Next slide. Heat also has a huge impact on city systems. Energy network failure is the biggest risk, and in past heat waves, Sydney has managed to avoid that, which is fantastic. However, with growing levels of heat, with aging infrastructure and growing populations, the risk of wide-scale outages in future summers is growing, and that has flow-on effects for not only cooling and people safety, but also the critical services of everyday life. So mains water, transport, signalling infrastructure, fuel pumping stations, and electronic payment systems, some of the impacts that we saw during the bushfires and flooding events that we've had in recent years. We also see an increased demand on health services.

In the 2017 heat wave, Greater Sydney saw a 13% increase in ambulance call-outs during the heat wave, but that can be extended also to other community services and charity organizations. Again, wide-scale city disruptions, we see increased worker absenteeism, increased likelihood of workplace injury, and generally impacts to the economy. Next slide. I've included a slide specifically on the Hawkesbury. I guess to talk about the specific challenges that we have in the Hawkesbury. So, as you can see, there's a map on the right there, which was taken from Penrith's heat study from the 2020 summer, and that study found that Agnes Banks was the hottest place in Penrith. And I think that sort of runs counterintuitive to some of the other messaging we might hear around open spaces and development, because obviously Agnes Banks isn't a greatly developed area.

It has quite good tree canopy in a lot of areas, but it really, I guess, demonstrates that the baseline for Hawkesbury is quite high, given that it's not a highly developed area, given that the green space and the tree canopy is better than some of the other areas of Western Sydney. It's really something that's relevant to this LGA. The stars there, I've noted North Richmond, Richmond, Windsor, and South Windsor town centres, and I guess, again, thinking about the different problems we're addressing in those town centres, urban heat's really important, because again, we're starting from a really hot baseline. But also noting if we're already experiencing these extreme temperatures with limited development, we really need to make sure we're supporting vulnerable groups to manage these extreme temperatures.

Next slide. Westrox developed a resilience framework to address heat. So it's really, again, ensuring we're addressing different parts of the problem. Awareness is about a community awareness. It's also about understanding the risks from an organizational perspective. We can look at reducing heat. That's addressing urban heat, greening strategies, net zero targets, and addressing climate change. But we know that it's already hot, so we do need to look at how we can adapt our current situations, social housing, existing housing, and infrastructure services. Energy system resilience is a big one to make sure that we can live comfortably and in our current climate. And we also need to recognize that regardless of what we do with urban heat and climate change, we can do the best job possible.

We're still going to have those big heat wave events that come in and are impacting people's health and wellbeing. So we need to be prepared to respond. Next slide. So that's where HeatSmart specifically comes in. So this program is really looking at how we build resilience to heat waves across Western Sydney, with a focus on vulnerable people. And it's funded under the state government Natural Disaster Resilience Program, as I mentioned, delivered in partnership with the health districts and councils. The program has two key parts. So the top line there is looking at the governance and policy around heat wave management. And the output of that has been the HeatSmart Resilience Framework. I have a few copies here if anyone would like them.

And that really outlines recommendations for improving the support systems and the governance in place for communities. On the flip side, we've also looked at building community resilience. So community awareness and giving them the skills and capacity to manage their own risk in their own situations . I've included this slide just to emphasise the amount of consultation we've done in terms of developing these resources and the framework. So we've spoken with hundreds of organisations from local government, federal agencies, interstate community organisations, infrastructure providers, the Australian Medical Association, for example. So I guess just reiterating that we've gone through this process with input from a whole lot of different organisations.

Next slide. In terms of what we found in terms of the governance processes, I think the big takeaway is that heat risk is growing, and we are not planning for heat and managing heat in the same way we are for, say, bushfire or flood. When we think about the way we manage bushfire, because that's quite a familiar and established hazard, we have the RFS who provides expert advice, and also to council and to other organisations around how we should manage that risk. We have clear roles and responsibilities. We look at prevention, preparedness and response. Unfortunately for heat at the moment, the formal guidance is only around distribution of heatwave warnings, which doesn't actually do anything to reduce the risk, and it doesn't offer practical support to vulnerable people.

Next slide. The second part of the program, as I mentioned, is community engagement and upskilling. So we've developed a range of resources in partnership with the local health districts, three resources for communities, so for older residents, for children under four, and tips for a cooler home. We also have a range of social media tiles and videos to support that, and Hawkesbury staff have been really helpful in distributing those resources and sharing them via social media and other platforms. The resources have been tested with communities. So Hawkesbury Neighbour Aid was really fantastic in helping us test the Over 65s resource, and they've also been translated into 10 different languages, particularly for Different communities across Western Sydney.

The organisational resource, which is the yellow one there, is a particularly important one, I think, because despite in strategic documents talking about the importance of community organisations and service providers in supporting different groups through various natural hazards, not just heatwave, there wasn't any guidance at all available for those organisations in how they can best support their communities, but also improve their own resilience to heatwaves. So it provides some key considerations when planning for heat, but also checklists for in-home carers, etc., and that's all been sent through the health processes to obviously make sure that that's appropriate. Next slide. We delivered 20 workshops across last summer based on those resources to work with communities and organisations to talk them through that process.

We partnered with the Red Cross to do that, and that had a number of benefits. Obviously, they're quite experienced in talking to people about disaster preparedness, but also they have a huge volunteer network and can provide that content ongoing to communities, councils, organisations free of charge beyond the scope of this program. It was the first time that the Red Cross had delivered heatwave content. As I mentioned, it's often that overlooked hazard, so even for the Red Cross, it's something that they hadn't specifically focused on. So it was really great, I guess, to workshop that with them and deliver that to communities. In terms of the Hawkesbury, we ran a workshop in partnership with Council, which had 19 organisations represented, and one workshop for community members and one for GPs and health professionals.

And I will say that the Hawkesbury organisations and community members were some of the most engaged we had right across Western Sydney, which I think speaks to Council's engagement with those groups, but also due to the need and the experiences that they've had in past heatwaves. Next slide. So outcomes. We're still looking at reporting. However, in terms of outcomes, we've spoken to over 500 professionals across Western Sydney about how to better manage heat waves, including presenting to the Australian Disaster Resilience Conference. We've had key organisations formally supporting the framework, including the Bureau of Meteorology, the New South Wales AMA, and the Resilient Sydney Steering Committee, which is a committee made up of various state agencies as well as industry partners, and they have resolved to support a heat task force, which would basically include representatives from different agencies to implement the recommendations of the framework.

In terms of the community, we engaged with almost 300 participants across Western Sydney, which I must say is no mean feat in the context of COVID and floods and fires and everything else that was going on, and we relied really heavily on our council staff partners to help. of us get registration to those workshops. 3,000 downloads from the WesROC website, but that doesn't include a lot of our partners, including the health districts that also have been sharing that through their channels as well. Next slide. And I guess next steps. So next steps for WesROC, we'll be looking for funding and grant opportunities to implement some of the recommendations. We rely on grant funding from the state government often for most of our programs.

We have a few applications in progress. One is for someone to coordinate that heat task force amongst the agencies, and particularly to deliver on some of the recommendations, which include templates and guidance for councils to help them with their heat planning, as well as guidance around cooling shelters and best practice at the local level. We've also partnered with University of Sydney, Nepean Blue Mountains Health District and Nepean Blue Mountains PHN on an application to improve heat risk communication. And ongoing, we will continue our advocacy to recognise heatwave as a natural disaster under a federal legislation. So recently, several councils in Western Sydney had applied to the Climate Change Resilience Funding for heatwave resilience, but they were knocked back because heatwave is not recognised at the federal level as a disaster.

We're also looking to integrate urban heat and state planning policies, and myself and my colleague Judith are representatives to the National Construction Code Advisory Committee to increase housing standards. Next slide. Opportunities at the local scale. As I mentioned, council staff have been really supportive in all of the heat work that WesROC's been doing, and there's already work going on to have increased heat risk messaging over summer, looking at integrating heat mitigation in local planning, retrofitting existing suburbs with greening, and this is a picture I took at the back of my place in Hobartville with the awesome trees going in there, which I was very pleased to see. Working towards emissions reduction, and we know staff have been working in that space as well.

Energy resilience, developing those heat emergency plans, and also thinking about how council can work in with community organisations to support them in their work to support communities. And that's all from me.

Thanks very much, Kelly. When you said that's all from you, that's a very big presentation and very professional. Thank you for that. I might open it up for discussion rather than moving into a formal motion, if that's fine by the committee. Any discussion, please? Councillor Sheather.

Yeah, thanks, Mr Mayor. Thanks very much for the presentation. A lot of work behind that. With your community involvement, 68, I think, percent, I think, was from Hawkesbury. Some of the other local government areas were pretty light. Is there a lack of interest in some of the other councils involved?

Do you mean in the workshops? No, I think that at the timing we were doing them, it was more difficult because a lot of groups had suffered a lot from the COVID pandemic. It was a little bit difficult with engagement. But I do think it's also, I guess, a tribute to Hawkesbury Council staff in terms of engaging with the communities. And I think the Hawkesbury community generally, noting that they'd just gone through floods, fires and storms, are more, I guess, aware of some of the risks that are happening around them. So I think that, yeah, there is a general interest in this LGA.

Sorry

The Agnes Banks area, there's a hot spot. What's creating that over and above the areas around it?

I'm not sure that I'm qualified to answer that question. That research was conducted by Western Sydney University, but I think even they were a little surprised by that result. Generally speaking, though, it does reflect the importance of water in cooling. So particularly a lot of natural and native vegetation, because Australian vegetation is adapted to perform well in drought conditions, it can hold on to its water quite severely . And so if there's not that water in the environment, you know, grassed areas and hard-baked soil underneath can actually hold quite a bit of heat.

Yep.

With our staff, through you, Mr Mayor, the background and support that our staff is giving here, could someone make comment on the sort of hours or work we've been doing and that sort of thing?

I guess highlight that involvement in this particular program has really sort of has involvement right across the organisation. So there's a whole range of staff that are involved, whether it's staff from my strategic planning section looking at more strategy and policy related stuff, to community partnerships in terms of, I guess, the more boots-on-ground and active involvement with the community, that side of things, and then obviously through our resilience planning as well. So it's right across the organisation. So a bit hard to quantify in terms of an overall impact to the organisation in terms of total number of hours, yeah.

Thanks, Mr Mayor, and thanks, Kelly. That was really useful, I think, and it's— I hope some people are playing at home. We never know, because at the moment it's cold. I think coming into Council's first time, I've been warm all day because it's freezing in my house. But— and then we've had these two relatively cool summers on the back of that, and it's interesting, I think, that some of the statistics that you've showed us have come out of, you know, on the back of that really awful 2019-2020 summer when, you know, and I think the Hawkesbury residents were acutely aware of those heat impacts because we'd spent so much of that summer with a fire burning on our doorsteps. So for us, I think, you know, heat is very real, and we know that we've had people die in their homes due to heat in this LGA.

So it's a really severe problem for us, but we've now had these two years where we've probably taken our eye off the ball a little bit, and a lot of our planning and our resilience thinking has been around flooding. And this is probably a really good time to get ready for another hot summer because we know we'll get one at some stage, depending on when the flooding lets up. We've got a heat— an emergency heat plan, and I don't know if WesROC has seen that and how that sits with the recommendations for what we should be doing around heat. I think some of the information that's come back to us, particularly in attachment two around the community organisation results. I wonder if perhaps those community organisations aren't accessing a different group of people, or they're having different conversations than we might necessarily have when we hit people directly, because they have an existing relationship with those organisations.

But there's stuff in there, I think, that's particularly useful for us to know. So our plans basically consist of keeping the main library and the pool open until later, because we don't have big shopping centres like Blacktown or Parramatta where people can go and get some respite. So for us, they have to come to community facilities. And I always wonder then what happens, you know, when we close the library at eight or nine o'clock. It's not cool, you know, by then. And it's a bit cooler, but it's not cool. And anybody who doesn't have air conditioning at home or who can't afford to run their air conditioning is then pushed out into the heat. And I think we need to have, as a council, a discussion about what we do about facilities that can keep people cool through the night if it's that hot.

You know, we're looking at lack of sleep and that sort of stuff. We're already seeing that. So because at the moment, I think the only places to go after we close our doors are places like the RSL clubs. And that's fine if you're a member, or you live five kilometres away and you don't have to pay for membership, or if you can afford to pay. But it doesn't work for people who can't, who can't afford to pay, or who feel that they have to buy a drink, buy food, buy something while they're sitting there. It's also no good for people who don't like, or who have a bad history of places with alcohol or gaming machines. So I think we're not— We're doing something, but we're probably still not doing enough.

And some guidance on what more we could do, I think, would be helpful in the context of the Hawkesbury. The other thing, and this is probably more of a question for Mr. Kearns, is we've put—I think, have we put the urban heat plans— I think when we saw the LEP, those urban heat planning recommendations were going in holus-bolus into the LEP. Is that still the case?

Council is still to consider the sort of LEP review, so there was obviously consideration of the toolkit and whether it was adopted in full as per the toolkit. I guess feedback that we received through our LEP DCP reference group was, I guess, stressed the importance of having consistent LEP DCP provisions right across a number of councils, rather than each individual council having separate sort of controls there. But yeah, certainly looking to pick up from the toolkit as much as we can.

Kelly, how much has that toolkit—do you know how much that toolkit's been taken up across Western Sydney councils?

I can't give you an exact up-to-date move, but all different councils, because some councils are working to accelerated programs, and they were required to have their—particularly the merged councils, they had to have their LEPs and DCPs in quite early, so a lot of them are going to come back to that in the second round of review, which is currently underway. To my knowledge, Cumberland and Penrith Council have both had their LEP and DCP reviews gone through the gateway system with state government, so they currently have those—sorry, Penrith might be still under consideration with the state government, but it's been approved by council. But broadly speaking, and also I must say, other councils outside kind of, you know, Western Sydney have really taken that up as well.

Camden Council in particular has really taken on some of those recommendations. So I guess each council working at its own speed, we are seeing those recommendations taken up across the region and Greater Sydney as well.

That's really good to know. I think firstly because it does, as Mr. Kern says, it does provide some certainty. But one of the really troubling things I think that I picked up when going through that, and some of the information that came back in some of these documents, the Heat Smart documents, is about how housing is fine if you've with active cooling, and what we've now got is, you know, an increasing number of houses, you know, having grown up in bog-standard brick veneer and tile in Western Sydney, that they're hot. Those houses are really hot unless you've got some active means of cooling them, and, you know, a fan doesn't cut it, you know, once it's over 35. So I think it's that we're going to have to start mandating for a higher standard for housing because we're really condemning people to misery or outrageously high energy bills without it. I can see you want to say something.

Am I able to? Yeah, so I guess that's one of, in the urban planning toolkit, one of the things that was really useful for us to really outline, I guess, where councils can play a role and where they can't. And unfortunately, in some of those areas around standards, that's beyond the scope of councils. We are, so the future-proofing residential project that I had on the slide at the beginning, part of that, and Hawkesbury is supporting that as well, is looking at testing the current BASIX system, which is the state government rating system for housing, to see how that performs in future climates, but also both with the National Construction Code and BASIX, the new housing, and I know that that doesn't speak to older housing that needs adaptation, but that new housing is tested and assessed in the presence of air conditioning.

So we're not testing our homes in the absence of air conditioning, which we know is the reality, particularly for vulnerable communities. But also if we do experience those wide-scale outages during a really hot summer, we need to make sure that our housing is of a standard that it can protect life safety in some of those events. Yeah,

Thank you. And I think that was, reading that was really troubling for me, that that's a glaring, that's a glaring hole. Just another question for our staff. I noticed in this, in the community organisation survey stuff, and there's particular reference from a Hawkesbury organisation. I'm happy for this to be taken on notice and come back to Council when the minutes of the meeting come to Council. But there's reference here to not all of our community buildings being air conditioned, and I know that's the case because we've only just air conditioned the one closest to me. Can we get some information as to how many of those facilities are air conditioned? Because I think that's something that we need to start putting into our forward planning and budget. Thanks. And the hours that they're open. Thanks. Yep , take that question on notice.

Mr Kearns, did you want to add something? Okay. Councillor Wheeler, I went with the CEO of Wesrock to the state planning minister, the previous state planning minister, and went through this, and he was most impressed with the urban heat strategy and the changes to housing planning, and said he would look at bringing them in on a statewide, some of them on a statewide basis. Since then we've got a new planning minister who I think is not quite as keen I might say, so we might have to go back and do it again. But Wesrock is pushing that on a statewide basis. Yeah.

I was just going to say, perhaps you might need to send another delegation. We

Will.

Is it also worthwhile to that end Council considering putting up a motion to Local Government New South Wales? Firstly, that recommendation that heat waves be considered natural disasters, but also pushing the uptake of— of heat planning and revisions to the National Construction Code and BASIX.

If you want to put that forward, that's fine.

Could I add that to the motion that we've got? It'll have to, I think it'll have to come back to Council as part of the suite of local government New South Wales motions. But if we flag that it exists, Council develop a motion to Local Government New South Wales requesting that heat waves be considered natural disasters and requesting a revision of BASIX and the National Construction Code to consider heat something . I'm sure there's proper words for that, but I can't find them at the moment.

I just wanted to clarify, tonight's recommendation is just that Council officers continue involvement in WSROC and Heat Smart program. It's just the two lines, and then there's two points, one and two of the previous motion that are being considered tonight, but according to what's written here, they're not actually being moved ; they're being considered. So while you're doing that, Councillor Wheeler, you might want to clarify exactly what we're going to move, but I'll leave you to think about that. It would be a combination of points one and two from the background plus tonight's recommendation plus what you're putting forward. If you'd like to consider doing that, and in the meantime, Council aligns the bucket wishes to address the meeting. Councillor.

Thank you, Chair . Thank you for that, Kelly. That was really good. I think, did you do the presentation at the recent Western Sydney webinar ?

Could I clarify which webinar?

The one that Sebastian Fouch spoke at as well.

Again, that’s been quite a few.

It would either be myself or my colleague, but I was going to ask a question, and I thought if it was you, it’ll be the same question again because I asked that question there. Feel free

To ask it again. That’s fine.

But it’s really good, and it’s a really good program. But, I mean, as you said, it’s been being developed since 2018, and of course time is of the essence when we’re looking at this sort of thing. So the concerns I have around that is similar to some of the ones that Councillor Wheeler raised, but my real concern is about the timeline of having anything actually really in place. Because we know, as all this is going on, there are swathes of developments going across Western Sydney that are, of course, the contributors to this urban heat in the first place as they clear all the land and they build all these really inappropriate houses for a hot climate, is basically what they’re doing. They’re building boxes in hot, asphalt-clad, untreed areas.

So when it comes to implementing this, how soon is a practical— you know, I mean, we can look for funding and do all of this sort of thing, but in terms of what Councillor Wheeler has raised about putting a motion to Local Government New South Wales, I think we have to go a lot further and a lot faster because the lobbying needs to be done around the design of this housing. If people are going to still keep building those thousands, tens of thousands of houses like they do, the problem is just being exacerbated in a really, really— You know, ballooning way because we know what the impact of that is. So with regard to lobbying in terms of dealing with BASIX, and we all know that BASIX is very easy to get around in terms of how you can comply with a BASIX statement.

It does not mean that there's any good outcomes in terms of the environment or in terms of the actual house itself. So a priority, I would think, would be really raising the level, and I know some individual councils, I think Parramatta has done it through their DCP, but there's a number of areas that that could be formed up to be much stronger. So is Westrock really heavily lobbying on that behalf and, you know, with vigour, I guess is what I'm saying, around the design, not just of housing, but around the design of place, around the whole design of where housing is going and what that looks like?

The short answer is yes. We were really heavily, I think as has previously been mentioned, really involved, heavily involved in the design and place SEPP, and the Department of Planning had been looking at our work in that space as potentially a tool for councils to be used, but also looking at some of the recommendations. So unfortunately, as has been mentioned, that's since been repealed, which makes things quite difficult. But as I mentioned, with regards to BASIX specifically, we are doing that work in partnership with the state government, and we're hoping that that can drive some of that forward. But unfortunately, urban planning is by its nature quite a slow-moving... You know, industry, it takes quite a long time for those plans to be updated.

And I think where we've just really been focusing on is raising the issue with as many people as possible, all different types of organisations, because ultimately, WESROC, as an advocacy organisation, as a local government organisation, we are limited, I suppose, in what we can actually deliver in that space when it is a state government or a federal government responsibility. But we are definitely doing all that we can. I would be very open to additional suggestions, if Council has any, about what we could be doing in this space, whether it is additional meetings with our President and with our CEO, or whether potentially , you know, we've always discussed a delegation of Western Sydney mayors potentially that could meet with the Planning Minister.

But yeah , I suppose. The answer, simple answer is yes, we are doing as much as we can in terms of lobbying.

Okay. I think the other, the flip side of that, of course, would be to look at what types of incentives could in fact be given around this space, because I think until there's something that makes people want to change their habits, if the changes in regulation and legislation are too slow, the only other thing that will make any change will be, aside from the fact that people should simply see that building something that's more sustainable and cooler would be a better outcome, particularly for the long term. I think incentives are probably the other thing that can be looked at that could encourage people to build housing that is going to be cooler into the future, and it is quite achievable.

I mean, it's ridiculous, really, in this country when we know that simply the orientation of houses, the various aspects of how you design a house, it's quite achievable to, you know, live in a house that's reasonably cooled, particularly by using, you know, things like external shutters and things like that that can keep it cool. The other, and of course then we've got the massive problem of how do you retrofit all that development that is in Western Sydney? How do you ever go back and make those houses cooler when we're going to have the issue, and the other issue that you raised is around the power security. So power security is something that I've pushed for for years in this council, and some people think it's not an issue at all, but I believe it's a huge issue and it's going to be a bigger issue in the future.

I've just returned last week from the Australian Local Government General Assembly, and we were hearing from a council in Western... Australia, the shire of Northampton, which had a really severe cyclone. And when they lost power, it was 50 degrees. So they not only had no power, they had no cooling. They had these massive issues, and it was all around the power loss and just the sheer logistics of getting some power back on simply to cool the people or to cool any food in their area or whatever was huge. So I spoke to the CEO of that council after and asked him what they had done to secure their power, because I know Western Australia uses a lot of community battery storage and things like that, which is obviously what we are going to have to move towards.

And he said there were these new things which were called power on site. So they're a combination of solar, battery storage, and diesel generator backup. So I think that into the future, as well as one of their townships in that shire actually putting on a microgrid for their electricity. So I'm just wondering what is happening in that space in terms of negotiating around power security, because for us here, it's not just about heat, it is about flood and fire. But really, it's heat that will knock out the most people when we have the power losses that we're bound to have through floods and fire anyway.

So. Moving into another program, which I'm actually not a part of, which is the Western Sydney Energy Program, the staff managing that program just, was it last week or the week before, had one of the first Western Sydney Council workshops with Endeavour Energy, looking at issues like community batteries and power resilience, because it definitely is something that will need to be considered moving forward. So there are avenues, and Hawkesbury staff are involved in those discussions with Endeavour Energy. With regards to power provision for communities in public spaces, Blacktown City Council ran a pilot heat refuge program last summer, which we collaborated— they collaborated in with the Heat Smart framework as well.

And there are a lot of learnings from them. So I think one of the recommendations that we've come out of this is that we should look at that more as a region because obviously there's a lot of technical aspects to that. Obviously, the issue of people having to go home after closing hours and how that's best managed is, it's quite a complex space. And beyond power security in terms of the actual electricity, one of the biggest challenges that Blacktown City Council faced was appropriate venues, because most air conditioning systems are only rated to function at around 43, 44 degrees. And once it goes beyond that, you might then have issues with the actual functionality of the air conditioning unit, which of course is a huge risk if you've got a whole lot of vulnerable people in a single place.

So there's a lot of considerations to be made, and that is one of the grant applications that we have in at the moment, is we're hoping to get funding to look at that. That said, we will do as much as we can if we don't receive funding, but unfortunately that's the nature of our operations, is that we are reliant on that grant funding.

Thank you. Good luck with that. I hope you get the grant funding for it because it really is a priority. I think it really is what's going to be life-saving further down the track.

Thanks. Thank you, Councillor Lyons-Buckett. Is there any further discussion? Councillor Wheeler.

A few more questions, if I could, Mr Deputy Mayor. Mr Kearns, do we have a timeline on the LEP coming back to Council when that's likely ?

Yeah, we're looking to secure a briefing or workshop session with councillors in the near future and looking to bring that back to Council probably in August. Okay. Thanks

What we I'm just thinking of the , you asked me to have a look at the previous recommendation, which... Which has sort of two parts to it. What resources have we already allocated to heat resilience ? It talks in here about the committee working alongside staff to build on the work that's been done and make recommendations on how to achieve greater community input. I'm a bit unsure of how we do that without knowing what's gone before us besides the stuff from WSROC.

I guess it gets back to that comment before in terms of our involvement in this program has been right across the organisation, and it's really essentially absorbed by each different section in terms of their continued involvement in the different programs. So there's, I guess, there's no single line item in the budget that you could say is dedicated to heat partner.

So I'm not entirely sure what we would do working alongside the staff, but I'm happy to be guided on that, and I'm happy to recommend that the committee continues to do so. I'm just not sure what we've done so far. And I guess then the next question that would be helpful for Council to consider, perhaps when this comes back to the whole Council, is what further resources are required so that we can start considering that if there's an urgent requirement in quarterly reviews or if we need to be earmarking that for future budgets, given that we've just passed next year, or the next financial year's budget. So some idea of resource allocation would be helpful. And then there's a, I notice there's a— Item two that you referred to is that Council request the committee to consider whether we should appoint a delegated staff officer as the heat coordinator.

So I think we'd need some more information about that role and where we would find that resourcing before we were to consider that further.

Can I just point out that point two was meant to be that we delegate the responsibility to someone, not that we necessarily employ a new person. But I'll leave that for discussion. Councillor McMahon, you had something

Yes, thank you, Deputy Mayor, and thank you, Kelly, for your presentation. Very professional and very informative as well. And I think that we do have this as an issue to be very considerate about heading into summer, but also most importantly with something you just touched on, and that's with electricity reliability right now. And I think that with what's happened over the last few weeks in terms of confusion about electricity reliability in winter, I think we're going to have a lot of that in summer. And my concern for that is, of course, the rising cost of electricity, not just reliability but affordability, and the fact that with the rising cost of living, interest rates going up, inflation going up, the average Aussie family being able to afford to turn their electricity on in times of cold and, of course, in times of heat.

So thank you for all of that information. It's vital. Can I just please ask, and it's something I actually asked Councillor Calvert a couple of weeks ago when he issued a media release in regards to some WestRock information, and you touched on it tonight. You said that... Heat waves have contributed to the highest death rate. Is that, sorry, New South Wales, Australia? Australia. Australia. Can you let us know what that is? Because I have never ever once in the media heard that or seen that, ever. So what is a heat wave-related death, if you don't mind?

Again, probably beyond the breadth of my expertise, but so that was a piece of research done by academics, and there's actually been a revision of that research. So it measured deaths attributed to heat wave between 1900 and— I'm going to have to remember the year— early 2000s, and then it's just been revised to update to 2018 recently. So I guess the key thing is there, heat-related deaths— it's a tricky question because currently the health system in Australia, or New South Wales, I should say, is not measuring heat-related deaths as a path of course. So it is expected that also that that figure is highly underestimated, which is really concerning. So if it's been actually registered as a heat-related death, it would have been directly from heat stroke.

However, we know that people with heart conditions, for example, will have their condition exacerbated in a heat wave and they might die of cardiac arrest, even whereas they may not have if it wasn't a heat wave. So some of those derivative types of heat-related deaths wouldn't necessarily be accounted in that number. So that is based on coroners' reports where heat has been listed as a direct cause of death, which would, yeah.

So there is concrete reference to heat when that data is analysed, but I note you've said it was data analysed by academics, not by Department of Health. Yeah. Yeah. I just— nothing to do with you. I've said this to the Deputy Mayor before. I think we need to be very cautious, even as a council, not even as Wedge Rock. Putting out that sort of information, because as I said, never came across me before to hear that this is the most cause relating to the biggest deaths. I was like, what does that mean? And the fact that it's hard to define, I think we need to be very cautious about those sorts of things. Secondly, Deputy Mayor, I'm going to let— I've got issues with point two, but I'm going to let it pass tonight and I'll support it until I see what the contents of the motion are, which will be brought back to Council.

So that, I think, is when I'll save my debate on that issue. So I'll let that pass as it is tonight till the motion is worked upon and I know the details of that motion where I'll debate it further. Again, you have asked for us to touch on point two and actually come up with some wording for the recommendation tonight. I'm very happy to put something up there in terms of looking at delegating responsibility for that issue to a staff member, but specifically not be hiring a new staff member. I think we need to put that into words as a point three very clearly. We don't have the expenditure for it. We're running on the smell of an oily rag here at Hawkesbury. We can't afford to employ someone else to do that job, especially when we're paying a considerable amount of money to WesROC to do this work.

So if we could maybe add a point three, if the mover and seconder are okay with that, that we delegate the responsibility in this sector to a current staff member and not employ a new employee specifically for that role.

I'm taking on board what you're saying, but we don't actually have a mover and a seconder at this

Oh, we don't. We're just in discussion. Okay, well, okay. Until we have a mover and seconder, if that could be a point three, I think we need to clarify that specifically because when we met before and you weren't here for that meeting, we came back for this item alone. So I think we need to be very clear on where we're proceeding with this item and actually get it. Something done about it so we know where we're heading. So I think that needs to be the point three. Are staff working on that wording? Yeah. Okay, great, thank you. And I think that that's all for now. I think, is that the last bit we need tidying up?

Well, I was just about to get my broom out and do a

Bit of tidying. Excellent

I look forward

To hearing about what your broom will entail. Well, that will be all from me. Thank you, Deputy Mayor.

What I'm going to suggest is that what's on the screen firstly should have a heading that says the committee recommends to Council, one, that Council, as it says there, Council officers continue their involvement, blah blah blah. Point two, that Council develop a motion to be sent to local government New South Wales regarding heat waves as a natural disaster, etcetera. So not that we develop the motion here, but we ask Council to develop the motion. The third point I was going to put up is that talking about us working with the WesRocs Heat Smart program is that Council should consider developing its own heat plan of how Hawkesbury Council can work with the community, with community input, to develop a long-standing heat plan, a long-term one, not a quick thing for one week.

And that is not something that would require mountains of money tomorrow. That's something we would build into all our LEPs and everything else over time. And the fourth one is that we nominate a staff member to become the HEAT. We ask Council to nominate a staff member to become our HEAT representative or HEAT coordinator. How does that tidying up sound to everyone? Councillor Wheeler, are you okay with that? You want to see it on the screen? Yeah.

Does Council need to do four, or would that be the general managers within the general managers remit under three?

It's a recommendation to Council, point four. It's just a recommendation to Council. So Council would then— We can't

Decide who it would be, I think is what Councillor Weaver's saying. We wouldn't be deciding on the staff member.

The general manager would decide. Yeah. So we're just recommending to Council that they ask the general manager to nominate somebody. Yeah.

I'm not sure that we need four.

Sorry, Councillor Lyons-Buckett, I couldn't hear you. Sorry,

That says Council nominate a staff member, so it needs to say Council request the general manager to nominate.

Yes. Can we have that changed, please? So how are we sitting with those, Councillor Sheather, you wanted to—

Three

And four.

Yeah.

Mr Deputy Mayor, I'm comfortable with where we're going with that. I've got a question, though, in relation to— excuse me— and a comment that you touched on about, in relation to how we deal with heat in the future with our Council. Some of the discussion that Councillor Lyons-Buckett spoke of, and I don't disagree with it, about multiple housing on our boundaries and all that sort of stuff, but is— Where's the limit of this committee?

This committee makes recommendations to Council.

Yeah, but in relation to our city, or are we looking at, rather than supporting WSROC, to be involved outside? Normally, with something like that, there'd be a motion from a councillor and the council would debate it. But is it a part of this committee to—

This committee can recommend that Council consider going outside their local government area. It's up to Council whether they actually do that or not. That's fine. Councillor McMahon, did you have something?

Oh, sorry, thank you. I was just going to say, I've just seen the change to point three, so I was just going to tidy that up, but it looks like it's been done. Thank you.

Thank you. Councillor Wheeler.

Thanks. I'm happy with what's on the screen now . I think, though, we might need— councillors might need some further information about the role of the heat coordinator if we're going to determine whether we do three and four when it comes back to Council. So any report to Council would need to include that information. Okay. And then can I just ask an additional question? Yes. Have we had any contact with our social housing provider, Wentworth Housing about their, or Link Wentworth now, I think they are, about what they're doing in this space?

Megan?

Yes, I can confirm that Link Wentworth actually led a project with other social housing providers and across council areas specifically to look at the heat risk and experience of residents living in their social housing properties. The outcome of that project, and I think, I do believe that Weez Rockerball's been in touch with Wentworth with regards to the findings. Resources were developed in response to that, and there were, unsurprisingly, I suppose, some fairly significant risks that residents in their properties were exposed to. And it was really heartening to see that within this Weez Rock presentation, the complexities around social housing and the fact that residents are living in properties that are constrained by the housing provider and the limitations they actually have to put in any mitigation infrastructure is, you know, that is a real issue.

Kelly, you want to just add something, did you?

No,

Just playing with the button. Councillor Lyons-Buckett.

Yes, I did go to about a program called Don't Swelter in Shelter, I think it was, which Link Wentworth ran. And it was about, yeah, the challenges that social housing, of course, community public, of what there's very little public and community housing, of the issues they had around trying to retrofit and cool. And it was obviously an area that still needs a lot of work done. And I think that was where I first had heard around the movement to ensure that even though those people may live in very hot housing, that doing as much as possible to cool the surrounds, to cool the areas that they can access to go outside as much as possible is just as important, because there are so many limitations on what the government will allow people in those sort of housing to actually retrofit and to do. They can't just go and put an air conditioner in and things like that.

Thank you. We have a motion which all of us have input into. Would someone like to move it? Councillor McMahon, seconded Councillor Wheeler. Any further discussion on the motion? No. I'll move the motion. All those in favour say aye. Declare it carried. In favour, Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Sheather, Councillor McMahon, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Lyons-Buckett. Declare it carried unanimously.

Kelly, I just want to say thanks very much for your input today. And what we've said here today is we're going to have an ongoing relationship with WSROC, and we hope to see you in that relationship. It's been really good. Does anyone want to add anything to that? No. Now, is there any further business?

Yes

There should

Be. It's part three of the background on page 10. Outstanding matters held over from the previous committee also to be considered, including the report working group such as the dementia working group. Yep. Where might we be up to with that?

I might ask Ms. Zhang if she wants to talk about it.

Yep, sure. A report was provided at the last Community Services Committee meeting with regards to the status of the Dementia Friendly Working Group and the Dementia Friendly Plan and the implementation of that plan. So it was indicated at that meeting that outstanding items in that plan, it's expected will be finalised by the end of this calendar year.

Any further business? If not, thank you, councillors. Thank you, staff members, and thank you, Kelly. And I'll close the meeting at 6.12 p.

M.