2016-05-06
Ms SPRINGLE (South Eastern Metropolitan) — The Greens will be voting in favour of the Rooming House Operators Bill 2015. Overall it is a good bill that reflects substantial consultation with the housing sector. Groups that work with people who are often extraordinarily disadvantaged, as Ms Patten has already alluded to, like the Consumer Action Law Centre, the Tenants Union of Victoria, the Council to Homeless Persons and the Housing for the Aged Action Group have been campaigning for a long, long time — tirelessly — for improvements to the regulations of the rooming house sector. In 2013 they won a very substantial victory with rooming house standards. Credit for that must go to the former Minister for Consumer Affairs, Michael O'Brien of the Baillieu government, for pressing ahead with many of the outstanding recommendations from the rooming house task force, which reported in 2009.
The improvement to rooming house regulation has been supported by governments of both colours. It always had, and always will have, the support of the Greens. Of course we would have wanted the process to move much more quickly. Together with earlier amendments in 2012, the Residential Tenancies Amendment (Rooming House Standards) Bill 2013 created much-needed regulation in the rooming house sector. This bill addresses the main gap that was left by the Baillieu government, which was recommendation 15 in the rooming house task force report.
What this bill does is address the main gap that was left by the Baillieu government, which was recommendation 15 in the rooming house task force report — the creation of a register of rooming house operators and that operators hold a current licence. The licensing scheme will be managed by existing authorities, namely the Business Licensing Authority (BLA) and the director of Consumer Affairs Victoria. The register of rooming house operators will record information about licensees; applications, including refused applications; cancellations by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal; and decisions made by the BLA. This information is to be made publicly available, in line with the recommendations of the task force.
Most significantly licensees must prove themselves to be a fit and proper person to hold a rooming house licence, and there are a number of criteria that would disqualify a person from being assessed as fit and proper. I do note that the government introduced some house amendments before the bill passed the Assembly, and I understand that the amendment essentially clarifies the process for rooming house operators who need to issue a notice to vacate because they have had their licence cancelled.
As I have said, the Greens do support the majority of this bill, but there is one element that we cannot support, and it is the element that Ms Patten has already spoken about. As it is now, the bill lists a range of criteria that would disqualify a person from being seen as a fit and proper person to hold a rooming house licence. As Ms Patten said, the particular way in which these criteria are listed in the bill contains a real risk that people who are convicted of a relatively minor offence will be unnecessarily disqualified from qualifying for rooming house licences. For example, if a 21-year-old does something stupid and relatively minor, for which he or she is nevertheless found guilty and sentenced to, say, a good behaviour bond, that person will be disqualified from operating a rooming house when they are 30.
We think the current provisions are far too broad. Ms Patten's amendments would restrict the disqualifying criteria to offences of fraud, dishonesty, child pornography, certain specific offences in the Sex Work Act 1994 and certain other serious offences. We do want people who have committed serious offences of this nature to be disqualified from becoming rooming house operators; we absolutely want to clean up that industry. What we do not want is for the disqualification criteria to be so broad so as to disqualify people for having committed quite minor offences nearly a decade ago, for example.
Importantly the amendment also protects people who are engaged in sex work. As it currently is, the bill would disqualify a person who was found guilty of a street sex offence, which carries a maximum penalty of three months imprisonment, from operating a rooming house for the next decade. Sex work should not be criminalised, and nor should engaging in sex work disqualify a person from running a rooming house business for the next decade. We support the amendments being put forward by Ms Patten. They provide better protections for sex workers, and we believe they avoid the problems created by the broadness of the current provisions.
Meanwhile I can understand the philosophical jitters about licensing schemes based on fit and proper person tests. There can never be any guarantee that just because a person formally qualifies as a fit and proper person on paper, he or she will always do the right thing as a rooming house operator. Likewise, just because a person meets one of the disqualification criteria on paper, and therefore cannot be a fit and proper person, does not mean that that person would not potentially make a very good operator.
We cannot guarantee that a person will or will not do the right thing as a rooming house operator, but past behaviour is the best indicator of future behaviour, and we need to be doing anything we can to protect the rights and interests of people who are living in rooming houses.
I do know that the Registered Accommodation Association of Victoria, which is the peak body for rooming house operators, is worried that landlords will lose their licences for minor technical breaches. There appears to be very little in this bill that provides a basis for this concern. The association has also claimed that there are few appeal rights, whereas we believe the bill does appear to have appropriate appeal rights.
We must remember why we are having this debate and why a registration and licensing scheme was recommended by the task force in the first place. The rooming house task force was established by the Brumby government in July 2009, largely in response to a massive and long-running campaign by 40 organisations for better regulation. That campaign was itself a response to inaction following the shocking, tragic and entirely preventable deaths of Christopher Giorgi and Leigh Sinclair on the night of the AFL Grand Final in 2006. Christopher, 24, and Leigh, 25, were a young couple who, heartbreakingly, could not escape after their Brunswick rooming house caught fire.
The coroner's report, which was released in the same month in 2009 as the Brumby government's task force report was released, found that there had been some terrible failures by many individuals and agencies. It found that there had been significant failures by the owners of the property and also by Moreland City Council, whose offices were only three doors down from the property that caught fire, but there had also been massive failures on the part of the rooming house operators, who simply should not have been operating rooming houses in 2006. Some of those operators even had criminal convictions for crimes such as fraud. The coroner found that these operators routinely failed to make themselves aware of their legal obligations, meanwhile earning tens of thousands of dollars every month by charging desperate tenants high rents in run-down properties across Melbourne.
The fact is that fines alone will not deter people from shirking their legal duties as rooming house operators, and while mandatory minimum rooming house standards are certainly better than nothing, they are not enough to stop really seedy characters from sucking enormous profits out of the rooming house business while people with next to nothing are forced to live in substandard conditions. The seedy characters that have for too long dominated the rooming house sector are unfortunately the reason we need a publicly accessible register and a licensing scheme complete with a fit and proper person test.
Rooming houses like the one Christopher Giorgi and Leigh Sinclair died in in 2006 should simply not exist. Just because a person does not have the money or the means to get into the mainstream private rental market does not mean they should have to live in substandard conditions. It is one thing for an ocean-view townhouse to be out of your reach because you cannot afford it; it is an entirely different thing to have to accept a place with no hot water, intermittent electricity, huge holes in the roof or a lack of working smoke alarms — not in 2016, and not in Victoria.
Ideally of course we would not be relying so much on rooming houses. Rooming houses are accommodation options right at the bottom of the private rental market, where rooms are rented to individuals or couples who would otherwise struggle to enter the private rental market. We have come to rely on rooming houses because successive governments have allowed the public housing stock to run down so alarmingly. There are now 35 000 applicants on Victoria's public housing waiting list, including 10 000 applicants for emergency housing.
The Victorian Public Tenants Association says the actual number of people waiting for public housing is probably more like 60 000 people. In 2014 Victoria had by far the lowest rate of social housing in Australia at just 3.4 per cent, according to the Making Social Housing Work report that was produced by the Community Housing Federation of Victoria, the Victorian Council of Social Service, the Council to Homeless Persons, the Victorian Public Tenants Association, the Tenants Union of Victoria, Justice Connect and Domestic Violence Victoria. According to that report Victoria needs to just about double its supply of public housing. That certainly has not happened.
Organisations that work with homeless people are often forced to use rooming houses, both registered and unregistered — those then being illegal rooming houses — because there are very few other options for them. It is very difficult to be precise about the number of people living in rooming houses because unfortunately so many rooming houses continue to operate outside the law. The 2001 census reported that there were nearly 4400 rooming house residents in Victoria, though Associate Professor Chris Chamberlain of RMIT University has calculated that there might be as many as 12 500 people living in Victorian rooming houses.
And of course no amount of regulation will ever stop people acting outside the law. That is the domain of enforcement bodies like councils, the BLA, Consumer Affairs Victoria and the police, but that does not mean we as legislators should not do whatever we can to plug obvious gaps and close obvious loopholes in the regulatory system. One of the obvious gaps that looks like it will continue to exist is a control on the amount that can be charged in rent for a room in a rooming house. At present people can be charged enormous amounts, sometimes up to $200 a week and even more, to stay in a room for a week. It is one thing to ensure that people convicted of fraud are not allowed to operate rooming houses, and that is what this bill does, but it is an entirely different thing to talk about rent controls and rent ceilings.
Because of the extreme shortage of public housing, among those who are often forced to access rooming house accommodation are people who are fleeing domestic violence. Rooming houses, along with hotels, motels and caravan parks are among the kinds of inappropriate accommodation identified by the Royal Commission into Family Violence in which victims of family violence too often find themselves. The commission found that far too often rooming houses are 'unsafe, unpleasant and alienating, particularly for children'.
Also among the people who are forced into rooming house accommodation are perpetrators of family violence, who have been banned from their home because of an intervention order. The royal commission heard evidence that sometimes women are placed in rooming houses that also accommodate perpetrators of family violence. And quite often, understandably, too many women choose to return to a violent relationship rather than stay in unfamiliar, unsafe and ad hoc rooming house accommodation. 'Why didn't she just leave?' is a question we still hear people ask of, especially, women in violent relationships. Of course the answer is very often because her situation is incredibly complicated, not least because in many cases the alternative is a room in a substandard rooming house.
There are also cases where people choose to remain homeless instead of paying quite steeply for a substandard room in a rooming house. Of course the word 'choose' is not at all adequate to reflect the so-called options facing some members of our community. There really are some completely shocking stories of rooming houses out there. I was very moved to hear the account of the member for Carrum in the Legislative Assembly of finding her missing father-in-law in what she called a 'vile' and 'appalling' rooming house after 20 years of searching. The member for Frankston in the Legislative Assembly told of being called to a rooming house fire when he was a firefighter and needing to break through doors with padlocks on them to rescue people living there. None of these situations is acceptable or tolerable, and they underscore the need for an urgent, massive increase in this state's investment in public housing.
Meanwhile, this bill, and the register and licensing scheme that it will bring into operation will almost certainly improve the circumstances of the children, women and men who live in rooming houses, if only because the seediest of characters, the characters who have been cashing in on the misfortune and disadvantage of the least fortunate in our community, will no longer be able to do so. We agree it is a good bill, except for the current disqualification criteria, which are too broad, so we will be voting in favour of Ms Patten's amendments.
In Committee: We have already stated that we will be supporting Ms Patten's amendments, and I just want to take up the point the minister made around street sex work being criminal. It is a longstanding Greens policy that sex work be completely decriminalised; therefore there is even more reason for us to support the amendments before us today.