Page 239 - Week 01 - Thursday, 13 February 2020
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You are trashing the market, and we know it is going to continue. When those CoreLogic numbers come out, when you see the massive lines at open inspections, when you see people sleeping in their cars, to those opposite I say: I hope you are proud of yourselves.
I am concerned about the section of the bill regarding minimum standards. I want to be clear that this is not because the Canberra Liberals believe there should not be some form of standard in housing. We know that those opposite love to take our comments out of context, and you can be absolutely guaranteed that that will be the case in this election year. But this is the minister who has bungled almost every policy area he has had carriage of and now, in this amendment, he is asking the chamber to basically write him a blank cheque to enforce some sort of minimum standard without the need to actually tell us what he intends to do.
Deb Pippen from the Tenants’ Union was asked on the radio this morning what those minimum standards would be. She said she has no idea. She does not know, but she was absolutely certain that they would not be onerous to landlords. She was extremely confident that this government would display some common sense in this space. I do not have that confidence, and neither does the diminishing number of rental property owners, many of them mums and dads who are finding now that their retirement investment dream is turning into an absolute nightmare.
Minimum standards should be carefully considered, widely consulted on, openly discussed and not left for a decision made behind closed doors. I will reiterate that this bill further restricts the rights of property owners and comes at a time when rental prices are the highest in the country. It is not the time to be meddling with residential tenancies and risking more investors leaving the market.
I just want to close with this analogy. If a patient is scheduled to have very important heart surgery but, when the date of that surgery arrives, the patient has developed a bad cold, despite the importance of that surgery, the surgery is delayed. It is delayed because you would not be operating on a patient who is already unwell. You would not perform the operation because it would threaten the life of the patient; it would be reckless. Many of the residential tenancy changes brought forward by this government would have our full support at any other time. But at a time when we have the most expensive rents in the country, now is not the time. We need to wait for the market to recover fully before we can attempt such important surgery.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (11.57): The Greens will be supporting this bill. This bill is part of an ongoing body of work in reforming the Residential Tenancies Act 1997 that began in 2014, when a review of the act was commissioned. This review was published in 2016. As I noted when I spoke to the last government amendment to the Residential Tenancies Act, this process has not been a quick one, even by government standards. Once again I would like to extend my thanks to the very small team in JACS who have been working on this for so many years. I also thank the people in the community and, in particular, the about to be defunded Tenants’ Union, Deb Pippen and all the tenants who have responded to the government review.
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