Page 576 - Week 02 - Thursday, 21 February 2019
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in more investors leaving the market. They are doing it already. This will result in fewer and fewer properties in the rental pool, which will exacerbate every single negative experience that renters, and potential renters, are going through.
I have spoken to a genuine rental advocate, who quietly agrees with me but did not want to go on the public record as saying it because this individual would be out of step with those who are pushing for it. You can get out all of your flyers to rental apartment blocks; you can send off your emails to all of those renters whose email addresses you might have got through Better Renting; you can sidle up to those renters and declare your love for them; you can tell them how good you were with this bill and how those evil Liberals were opposing it. But the stark reality is that this bill, this document, at its most extreme point, will actually make people homeless. The rental market will tighten. You can roll your eyes all you like, Mr Pettersson. It will make people homeless. It will tighten the market. The fact that we are sitting here debating it is already tightening the market.
There is no doubt that this bill’s entire purpose is an attempt to fool renters into thinking that the Labor Party and the Greens care about them. Josh is a young man with a dog. You can write to him and tell him how much you have helped him and that you have won the right for him to have his dog in his home. If he gets completely priced out of the market by its further tightening, Josh becomes a homeless man with a dog, who can sleep soundly on the street in the blissful knowledge that Labor and the Greens won these rights for him. This will tighten the market. It will make it more difficult for people to get into the private rental market.
Ms Cheyne, you can make that face at me all you like, but that will be the result. There is no doubt that the housing affordability crisis engulfing the ACT has been created by the excessive tax policies and restrictive land release policies implemented by this Labor-Greens government. Rather than take real and decisive action on this affordability crisis that we are witnessing in the territory, we now have the highest rents in the country.
I worked out the speaking notes for this speech in part because I was expecting it to be brought on in November. In those speaking notes I said that I could guarantee that in 2019 we would become the most expensive rental city in Australia. And we are, already. This is not the time to do it. I am sure that all renters out there in the suburbs will go to bed tonight and breathe a sigh of relief in knowing that, despite their rents being almost to the point of being out of control, they will now be able to hang a picture on the wall without asking permission of the property owner.
I am not saying that that stuff is not important. That is not what I am saying. I am saying that, at this time, in this market, it is not the time to do it. It is just not the time to move those goalposts. Of course, the relief for those renters will be short and very temporary, as we know that these changes, along with a multitude of changes made last year, will further restrict the rights of the property owner and will push them out of the market. Along with restrictive land tax policies, higher rates and this government’s hell-bent attitude of demonising those who own rental properties, we are seeing more property owners leaving the market than ever before.
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