2025-03-18
Renters are seriously disadvantaged and their plight is ignored by our MPs. A modest proposal is to make landlords continuing to enjoy generous tax concessions conditional on them committing to agreed improvements to renters’ rights.
By Mike Shaskey, a member of the Fremantle-Tangney Greens
The recent disclosure that Perth is Australia’s newest property firework underlines the reality that housing in Australia is beyond being catastrophically out-of-control. It is like a nuclear reactor in meltdown, with its proprietors taking credit for the beautiful glow on the horizon. It is terminally, irretrievably, unfixably and irreversibly munted. No promises of money showers or magically conjured Hobbit houses will change anything. This is hot air – not even that substantial; just dreams less grounded even than those of any lottery ticket holder. The goals will come and go, unfulfilled; the pollies will go to their retirement houses and pensions and unaided tenants will still be struggling to pay other people’s mortgages to the last day of their lives, no further ahead than the first day they became trapped, maybe decades ago.
No political career is now long enough to be accountable. Neither of the duopoly blocks has the will to abandon their pendulum swing of power and do the right thing, knowing it would result in terrible retribution by the multi-propertied who now regard special treatment as a birthright. No matter that one third of Australian households are required to sustain their privilege. It is the new serfdom.
Any big party that wishes to do well in the next state and federal elections would do well to keep quiet about the housing fiasco in which they are all equally culpable and focus on ameliorating the grim reality of life as a tenant. Votes lie there. I predict that the winning party in any 2025 election will be the one that addresses the demeaning rituals a third of Australian households endure; cattle-call showings; frequent, intrusive inspections; frequent and capricious rent increases; inaccurate book-keeping enabled by half-maintained apps that allow non-parties to a tenancy access to private information; lack of secure tenure; inaccurate and unjustified warnings; and stress, stress, stress to name a few. Although Australian tenants pay dearly for their accommodation, it is unusual for them to feel ‘at home’ when they close their front doors, as the thought of the next move never, ever recedes. Constant insecurity and an endless stream of automated, and often inaccurate messages mean that a tenant can never truly relax. You think paying a mortgage is stressful? Try renting.
The estimated $27 billion spent yearly on base housing policy is close to the cost of a small war, every year. Australia at war is Australia at its best though; cohesive, strategic, supportive, bipartisan, sincere and resourceful. Whilst these adjectives may point to policy qualities required to address the housing implosion, what we will see in the 2025 debates will be the opposite; atomized, manipulative, judgmental, demeaning, partisan, two-faced and wasteful. The thing most squandered will be opportunity.
We should probably not expect more of pollies. They are human, after all, and prone to self-interest. Most are rentiers, so expecting them to give their tenants a break at a cost to their personal wealth is fantastical. The Ghost of Christmas Housed will probably not visit them to advocate for a grounded, strategic debate. Buckle up for partisan dross, but it will be a mistake for pollies to let it go at that. As Trump’s victory in the USA on the back of the votes of marginalised, unheard young men shows, a relatively small swing in a dispersed demographic can be enough to deliver power to unlikely winners. Australian tenants are not a small demographic, however, and need to be heard. By leaving the unpropertied, unheard, pollies risk backlash, and it won’t matter to the marginalised unpropertied who that is. It will be enough to a struggling tenant to see a bewildered, unseated MP shaking their head and fighting back the tears; any MP because with remarkably few exceptions they have all allowed this fiasco to develop. It can be avoided by addressing the realities of renting, not just offering highly questionable policies to help a few tenants join the ranks of the propertied. These are high cost, low impact, long-term gambles that usually die in the political process leaving renting reality unaltered.
Probably nothing that will be said by the major parties in the 2025 election will help tenants, but it could so easily be different. A multi-party move to relieve renting stress is the Christmas present most wanted by tenants. It would not be objectionable for rentiers to keep their negative gearing and GST concessions, as the Greens allowed, but let them give something for it. It is within the federal government’s taxation powers to make these benefits available only to rentiers who enter into a (not yet existing) standard Federal Sustainable Tenancy Agreement with features such as a minimum 5 year tenancy, one CPI-indexed increase a year, limits to inspections and intrusions, data privacy protections, being able to treat a property like your home; and no more posting pics of your stuff on the internet. Real accountability by rentiers and their agents for the accuracy of records and proper maintenance of apps would be welcome. This would cost decent property investors nothing if, as they claim, most already approximate these standards, and might just take enough of the sting out of the unpropertied life to gain some breathing space to allow a real, cohesive, strategic, supportive, bipartisan, sincere and resourceful strategy to be found.
Header photo: Renting Credit: ABC News Emily Piesse
[Opinions expressed are those of the author and not official policy of Greens WA]