Page 1564 - Week 06 - Thursday, 2 July 2020
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particularly early on in the COVID crisis, when there was talk of rent strikes and other action.
The COVID crisis has placed severe doubt on the degree of optimism property owners felt compared to a few months back—there is no question about that. To be fair, this government has done a number of things to relieve some of the stress on both tenants and lessors alike. I have to say they have done some wonderful things in that space. This bill establishes more rules and process in relation to co-tenancies which, by and large, clarify the rights of lessors and co-tenants alike. Among other things, it deals with the circumstances where a co-tenant wants to leave the tenancy and where a tenant wishes to admit a new tenant. I am reasonably comfortable with these provisions.
I feel a little uncomfortable about one aspect, and that relates to section 35D. In that section, if a lessor has refused consent to a new person becoming a tenant, the proponent has the option of making what is called a declaration application to ACAT to challenge the lessor’s refusal to consent. What seems a bit harsh here is that the person the lessor has refused automatically becomes a new tenant on the day the declaration application is made to ACAT, so the lessor’s refusal stands for nought. If the lessor is really serious about refusing a prospective tenant and wants to take it further, the lessor has to make an application to ACAT for an order to stop that person becoming a tenant, even though that person has already moved in. There could be many good reasons why a lessor might refuse a tenant’s application. That is just a fact of life. It seems that their right of refusal gets cut off at the knees by virtue of the new person’s automatic admission to the tenancy agreement.
We have some concerns about that area; it is a niggling issue. Irrespective, we do not wish to challenge or hinder the orderly progress of this bill. We will be alert to feedback on whether the bill creates dysfunction, and we will certainly press for that to be fixed up if that is the case. I conclude by saying that we will not be opposing this bill nor the Attorney-General’s amendments, on the basis that, on balance, the benefits outweigh the potential irritants.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (6.09): The Greens support the bill. As I have said during the debates on the last two residential tenancy amendments bills, this has been a long time coming, and it must have felt like an eternity for residents of long-stay caravan parks who have been asking for the legal protections that this bill provides. It is not perfect, and I understand that some stakeholders still have concerns—for example, regarding the mechanism for bond return in share house arrangements. Be that as it may, overall this is a sound and comprehensive package, and I would like to thank Minister Ramsay, the staff at JACS, and the many people who sat on various reference committees as part of this process.
The latter deserve particular mention. I understand that there were a number of staff changes and other things that held up the work of at least one of these committees. And there were times when the committee meetings were not held for periods of time, or when correspondence from committee members was not always answered promptly. In noting this, I would like to be clear that I am not singling out JACS for criticism; rather, there appear to be too few people working on particular projects in
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