Page 574 - Week 02 - Thursday, 21 February 2019
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Surely all this information would be kept safe; they are an Australian company. No. They use outsourced data providers with data centres in Australia, the United States of America, Europe and Asia. Australia’s privacy laws do not apply in these countries. In any case, no-one’s data is safe. We have seen that this week with a massive data hack in Parliament House.
We have a company that collects enough sensitive data to enable full-scale identity theft, uses it for marketing and other purposes and provides renters’ data to various third parties, but there is not a mention anywhere about whether or not this data is ever deleted. Why is this a problem? Surely the libertarian thinking would go: renters can simply choose not to use real estate agents who insist that renters use such products. Such reasoning is a convenient piece of sophistry. Renters basically have very little choice in the matter, because the power structure of being a renter is so asymmetrical compared to the power structure of being a landlord, all the more so given the very low vacancy rates in the ACT.
I would have liked to present an amendment which ensured that rental applications are only allowed to collect reasonable information and must be stored in Australia. Unfortunately, my team did not have the time and resources to finalise such an amendment in a way that tidied off all of the issues.
What the Greens amendments will do, if passed, is provide additional protections for renters. Some of these, such as the introduction of minimum rental standards and getting rid of no-cause evictions are major reforms. It is disappointing that the major parties have indicated that they will not be accepting them. Other amendments, such as providing tenants with an additional four weeks to move out if their landlord wishes to sell the property or giving renters the option to pay rent by direct bank transfer rather than forcing them to use a service that collects reams of data about them and stores it offshore, do not seem to me to be hugely controversial. Indeed, they are such no-brainers that it beggars belief that the ALP and the Liberals are not going to support them, to the best of my knowledge.
Minister Ramsay has told me on a number of occasions that some of our proposals need more policy work. That may be true for ones that we are not putting forward; that is possibly why we made that decision. But we do not believe that is the case; we have actually done a lot of the policy work for him on them. And even more than that, organisations such as, in particular, the Tenants Union have done an awful lot of this work, as has the Victorian Labor government, which recently passed a whole raft of amendments to its Residential Tenancies Act, not all of which the ACT Labor government is following.
Much of what we are proposing, including getting rid of no-cause evictions and introducing minimum standards, are policies endorsed by UnionsACT. I think that we should be leveraging off the good work of the Victorian Labor government and the Tenants Union. I agree that some reforms require more work, but not the ones I am presenting today.
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