Affordable Warmth: A Blueprint for Healthy, Warm Homes for All Tasmanians - Vibrant Leadership Series, #3

Within a generation, everyone in Tasmania can live in a healthy, warm and dry home.

Cold, damp and inefficient homes are one of Tasmania's most urgent and most fixable injustices. This quiet crisis steals health, drains household budgets, and deepens inequality. Each winter, and for many months on either side, thousands of Tasmanians are forced to choose between heating and eating while preventable illness rises across our communities.

Affordable Warmth shows that energy poverty is not a failure of individual behaviour or choice. It is the predictable outcome of decades of policy, regulatory, and investment decisions that have left too many homes unable to be kept warm, dry, and healthy. Grounded in lived experience and Tasmanian evidence, the book explains in clear, plain language how cold housing harms individuals, families, and the wider economy.

This is not a story of blame or despair. It is a case for prevention. Moving from lived experience to explanation to action, Affordable Warmth reframes cold housing as a systems failure that demands a systems response. It sets out a coherent pathway to end energy hardship within a generation by treating warm, efficient housing as essential social infrastructure rather than discretionary support.

Written for policymakers, educators, practitioners, and citizens alike, Affordable Warmth demonstrates how coordinated responsibility across housing, energy, health, and social systems can prevent harm, reduce long-term public costs, and improve wellbeing. Ending energy poverty is achievable. The question is whether we are willing to act on what we already know.

"If we cannot imagine a Tasmania without energy poverty, we will never build it. But if you can imagine boldly, and are willing to work together to make that future real, this book is for you."

paul mallett