Page 983 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 26 July 1989
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Mr Speaker, over the past several months the Residents Rally has often been contacted by individual Canberra retailers who are concerned about their rents and lease conditions. It became more and more obvious that what was needed was a close study of the retail leases area to identify how typical or otherwise the retailers who had contacted us actually were.
We decided to pursue a thorough survey of retail tenants, and the results of that survey have already received some attention in the local media. It has shown us that many different problems are being experienced by tenants, in relation to both rent increases and tenancy practices. Just as importantly, perhaps, the survey revealed that those problems are not restricted to a handful of tenants in isolated pockets of Canberra; they are far too widespread and serious for the Assembly to take any comfort in the possibility of leaving things as they are.
The situation has reached a point where tenants can no longer bite their tongues and get on with their business. Although there are obviously other, and good, reasons for its existence, the formation of the new Commercial and Retail Tenants Association, or CARTA, seems very much like a sign of the times. CARTA aims to represent the interests of commercial and retail tenants in legal, political and economic issues and its presence will serve to raise public awareness of a problem which has been a major concern of the Rally for a long time. In fact, during the election campaign, it was one of the issues on which we ran strongly with one of our candidates.
However, in the end CARTA is essentially no more than a lobby group. It will have little more real power than the tenants it represents - tenants who, in some cases, are banned by their lease conditions from even forming their own associations. Some of those bans on lease conditions, Mr Speaker, may not necessarily be written down, but they are certainly implied and have been used and operated by some unscrupulous landlords in this city.
Bans of this kind in a country which supposedly recognises freedom of association indicate that there is something seriously out of kilter in retail landlord-tenant arrangements in the ACT. The Assembly has to look squarely at the prospect of regulating commercial tenancy relationships because they are becoming far too unequal. While tenants recognise that landlords need to make a fair return on their investments, some of those landlords have taken advantage of their superior bargaining position to impose unreasonable demands on their tenants. In fact, many practices which appear to be common in the ACT would be regarded as illegal in several other States.
The Residents Rally does not believe in regulation for its own sake, but the power available to landlords and the obvious willingness of some landlords to abuse that power mean that legislation may be the only certain way for the
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