Page 3718 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 24 August 2011
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some landlords would not pass on the costs. What I said was that the costs of rentals in this town are about so much more than just the cost burden on landlords. Vacancy rates and availability play a hugely significant role with our tight rental market, meaning that landlords consider what they might be able to charge in light of what the market can bear. This is not an unreasonable thing for a landlord, but it is also a reality. Rental prices are high when the market is tight.
But what I think is important to acknowledge in this debate is that not all landlords are in the same circumstances. Some may have only just bought their investment property and have large repayments to support. Some may be owner-occupiers sent overseas on a posting. Some might have owned a paid-off family inheritance for years and have no bills to pay other than the basic maintenance.
I acknowledge this, but even so I would suggest that all these landlords have an obligation to provide decent rental accommodation to their tenants. The reality is that the capacity of landlords to meet these standards will vary greatly. Some obviously already meet them. Others could easily afford to make the basic changes. Others might need more time to be able to afford changes and others might even have to seek exemptions. But in the end, there is no excuse for landlords to offset their costs onto tenants, especially when those costs can be about health and wellbeing, not just financial burden.
It is also worth remembering that if some rents do rise slightly as a result of expenses that are absorbed by landlords, it is very likely that the tenants will save over the longer term on the running costs of the property. The Greens are supportive of a discussion about how to integrate or even target landlords with some financial assistance to improve their properties—already the government offers a $500 rebate if more than $2,000 is spent on energy efficiency improvements after a heat assessment, and there are also rebates available under the ACT government’s ToiletSmart program.
Landlords, in some cases, will also be able to claim tax concessions. But it might be that landlords could be targeted, for example, in the government’s mooted energy efficiency retailer obligation bill, which we await in the spring session. In the UK, this kind of scheme had a carve-out for target groups in the community. There is no reason why the ACT scheme could not do the same to provide those specific incentives and specific helpers to get landlords across the line.
As to the bill itself, firstly, we have changed the commencement provisions in this bill as a result of community feedback, which indicated that setting January 2013 as a start time for the energy efficiency standard might be too fast for some landlords and could lead to problems with sourcing tradespeople. So all the provisions that relate to the energy efficiency standard now have a commencement date of January 2014, giving landlords more than two years notice once the bill has been passed.
The requirement to advertise an EER will have the effect of implementing the government’s COAG commitment of phasing in mandatory disclosure of residential building energy efficiency ratings for rental properties at the time of lease by May 2011. VCOSS, the Brotherhood of St Laurence and the Tenant’s Union of Victoria have all warned against introducing mandatory disclosure without introducing
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