Page 241 - Week 01 - Thursday, 13 February 2020
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passed on to the tenants in the form of higher rents, and whether rental supply may be reduced if properties were withdrawn from the market due to the costs of retrofitting.
But context is important. The costs that Minister Corbell was speaking of related to energy efficiency measures. My amendment, quite deliberately, did not include any reference to energy efficiency, which Minister Ramsay was fully aware of, I assume. I recognise that energy efficiency in rental dwellings is a very difficult matter. I know that more work will be done on this, and I commend the government for including this as one of the actions in the climate strategy. My colleague Minister Rattenbury also talked about that in his media release this morning, when he referred to increased climate change measures that are funded in the latest budget update.
My amendments in February last year only went to the most basic minimum standards. This is important, because the current wording in the RTA is grossly inadequate. It simply says that a dwelling needs to be “fit for habitation”, which is clearly incredibly debatable and does not provide clarity to tenants, lessors or ACAT. Having something that is a little more prescriptive than that would have been helpful. I was not talking about maximum standards, just basic stuff—minor details like hotplates that work and a front door that locks.
During the debate last February, Minister Ramsay noted:
The government shares Mr Corbell’s views on this issue. The aim is noble. The practicalities need more work.
He was going to ask his directorate to look into it; evidently, they have done that, and this bill is presumably the result. The “more work” has in fact given us an additional 30 words on the subject, and that is it. A regulation may make provision relating to minimum standards, which does not seem like a huge advance on the practicalities compared to the amendment that I put forward. It seems like something that will allow the minister of the day to do more or less what they want, which, I note, is what Mr Parton said.
My amendment was a little bit more practicable in so far as it said that there needs to be public consultation on this, and potentially requiring a dwelling to comply with minimum housing standards. My amendment also contained the boring but hopefully really useful requirement that detailed that tenants may give rectification notices if their house does not meet standards, or the Commissioner for Fair Trading may investigate breaches of standards. It seems that this was too much detail. Given the comments by Mr Parton about implementation, it might have been useful to have a bit more detail. What we have now is a very simple framework that will allow standards to be developed.
I assume that the positive aspect is that it is felt to be different enough from the ongoing Greens work on this issue that Minister Ramsay can feel that the Labor Party owns it and that it does not involve whatever the issues were that former Minister Corbell had with it. Hopefully, it means that, nine years after the Greens first proposed it, it will finally get done.
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