Page 3638 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 23 August 2011
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reason it is important that any information entered onto the database is accurate and not permanent.
Accuracy is important because often tenants and landlords have differing opinions of what has transpired during the term of a lease. For this reason it is important to have an independent third umpire to regulate what is accurate and what goes onto a database. I will return to this issue further in the debate when I move some amendments. Lack of permanent entries is important because all information has its use-by date. Information about tenants can become inaccurate and irrelevant over time, and the Greens believe it is also unfair for tenants to be judged by what was done many years ago when perhaps people have served their time, so to speak.
The attorney has already taken the Assembly through the extra safeguards put in place by the bill. Tenants will get more opportunities to learn of entries about them in the database and more chances to make appeals about proposed entries where they believe the entry is inaccurate. There is also a three-year life for the information, after which it must be deleted.
The bill’s intent is to give more certainty to both tenants and landlords and their agents. It gives certainty about what will lead to an entry, what appeal mechanisms exist and how long the entry will last. The Greens agree with this intent. As has been touched on, we have a number of amendments we would like to make to add further certainty. I will move those in the detail stage and discuss them at that point. For now, the Greens support the intent of this bill and the vast majority of the changes that it makes.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development, Minister for Territory and Municipal Services and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (10.46), in reply: I thank members for their support in principle of this bill. The purpose of the bill is to bring the ACT into line with nationally agreed uniform provisions regulating tenancy databases. The bill strengthens protections for tenants in the territory. While strengthening protections for tenants, the bill also recognises the right of lessors to protect their private property interests. The bill aims to strike a fair balance between the rights of lessors and tenants.
Tenancy databases are maintained by companies who collect and hold personal information about tenants, supplied mostly by real estate agents. Tenancy databases primarily contain comments about tenants related to breaches, or alleged breaches, of tenancy agreements. The personal information stored in tenancy databases can be used by members, mostly real estate agents, who pay membership fees. Members can access tenancy databases to list personal information about tenants and to use the information in tenancy databases when screening prospective tenants. Most real estate agents throughout Australia subscribe to at least one tenancy database.
Listings in tenancy databases can be entered anywhere in Australia and are accessible throughout Australia. Therefore it makes sense that laws that regulate the collection, storage and use of personal information about tenants by tenancy databases or tenancy database operators are nationally consistent. The new provisions regulating tenancy
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