Wednesday, 29 May 2024

Housing affordability

Ellen SANDELL (Melbourne) (17:01): Today I rise to grieve for Victorian renters who are struggling to make ends meet and are being offered no solutions by their government. The average rent has increased about $200 a week since the pandemic, and in my electorate of Melbourne, where about 50 per cent of people rent, it is even worse – double the state average. In the last year alone landlords have increased rents by more than 14 per cent, nearly four times inflation. Wages have not risen 14 per cent in a year but rents have. Anglicare’s latest rental affordability snapshot found there is not one single affordable property or even one single room in a share house that is affordable for a person on youth allowance or JobSeeker nor is there anything considered affordable for single parents with a child receiving youth allowance or JobSeeker. Likewise, we are failing those in the community living with a disability. There is just one property in the entire state that is affordable to someone on the disability support pension.

If this was not bad enough, just this week we heard that somehow the rental crisis is about to get worse. Investment group Jarden found that rental inflation is expected to increase beyond the current 15-year high and hit its highest level since the global financial crisis, and it will basically keep getting worse until at least 2026. Yet Labor’s budget did nothing for renters. There were no day caps for short stays to free up the 48,000 investment properties that are sitting on Airbnb right now in Victoria. We could just free up a few thousand of those by putting a cap on Airbnb so that renters or owner-occupiers could live in them long term, but no, Labor did not want to do that. The budget had no new public housing, although Labor keeps pretending that demolishing public housing towers and privatising the replacements is the same thing. And Labor’s budget had no rent freeze. We now know from recent figures that have come out that if Labor had listened to the Greens and implemented a rent freeze back in March 2023 – just kept rents at the already inflated levels that they were in March 2023 – each renter in Melbourne would have saved about $2500 over the last year. Do you know what that would have meant for Victorian renters? The Greens do, because we actually thought to ask them. We asked the renters who are being affected by these rent increases.

Today in my grievance I want to spend most of the time reading out stories from renters – stories about the situations that they are in – because I think it is important to bring their voices into this place where decisions are being made about their lives. One renter says:

I lost my job at the end of March this year, and got no redundancy as they’d hired me as a permanent employee two weeks before they announced the closure. The same week, my rent was increased for the second time in 3 months, by $40 per week. If a rent freeze had happened, that $2500 could have meant that I could pay my share of rent until I got a new job. It would’ve changed everything.

Another renter said:

I am paying approximately half my income on rent. I am … lucky to have a roof over my head at 88 years of age and living alone … I make no demands on my landlord for fear of increase in rent. I feel precarious.

Another renter said:

$2,537 would help me afford food, pay my bills and rent and allow me to not feel like I’m drowning in financial stress for about 3 months. I suffer from mental illness and –

this money would mean –

I’d be able to afford a couple of appointments with a clinical psychologist which would be nice.

Another renter said a rent freeze would mean:

I wouldn’t be moving out and be homeless in two weeks as our landlord has not made adequate repairs, which have been a health concern, while increasing the rent by $120 a week … because the government doesn’t give a …

and then they used an expletive, which I think was entirely appropriate to describe the situation. Yet another renter said:

I am a renter, and a savings of $2,527 would enable me to pay and provide for essential things that I cannot afford to, such as:

• … school books/school fees … uniforms

• winter clothing …

• … bills during winter …

• proper food groceries

• GP and medical costs

• dental costs

Our current landlord increased rent last year, and now has given us another Notice of Rent Increase again ($306 extra/month).

This is despite the fact that we are ideal tenants, always paying rent on time and maintaining property in good condition. The landlord did not carry out any improvements on property to deserve such a rent increase, plus the fact that it’s a RentSafe compromised property, and we went without essential repairs for long periods of time.

I am challenging this notice via the Tribunal.

Regardless of outcome the landlord will give us notice to vacate after hearing, only because as renters, we have exercised our rights to challenge notice of rent increase.

It’s only a matter of time now before me and my family becomes homeless, unless there is an immediate rent freeze and a possible eviction freeze …

These stories just keep coming. They are endless. A few weeks ago I held an event at a pub in Carlton where we invited renters to come and share their stories with us. We heard from young people who told us they had their rent increased every single year, and not just by inflation, not by the same amount that their wages increased, but by 20 or 30 per cent year on year. They felt they had no choice but to accept it, because otherwise they would spend every single weekend in lines of 40 or 50 people long trying to compete for another rental and they would probably end up having to pay the same inflated rent as if they had just stayed put. I was shocked that almost every single young person in the room had an experience of taking a maintenance issue to VCAT or challenging a rent increase at VCAT. They had to wait months and months for an outcome, and many of them had their rent put up or had been evicted after they had made complaints about maintenance issues.

Renting is not just something that people do for a few years. It is not just something that people do as a student now before they are able to buy their own home. These are people in their 20s, 30s and 40s with good jobs who are paying half their income in rent and also living in precarious situations, where they enrol their kids in school but have no idea whether they will be able to keep living in that suburb where they send their kids to school or whether they will have to move next year just like they did the year before. It is not just affecting people’s hip pockets; it is affecting their ability to build a life, to be part of the community, to put down roots. It is affecting their mental health and ability to live their lives because they are being forced to move every year, which in itself is such a stressful thing. I am sure everyone knows how stressful it is having to move house, especially when you are given just a few weeks notice. People feel they have no stability in their lives, and they are having to spend all their spare time worrying about where they are going to live.

And it was not just young people at this event either. I had a woman come up to me in the street the other day. She was in her late 50s. She told me she had been a lifelong renter and is a single mum. She has a good job in community services, but it is not super well paid being in the community services sector. She has taken time off from the workforce, like a lot of people do, to raise her daughter. She has always worked. She has always had enough to pay her rent, but not quite enough to save to buy a home. Now she is looking at what happens when she retires. Her landlord has just said he will put up her rent. She told me she will pay whatever he asks, because this is her community. She does not want to move. But when she retires there is no way she can afford the rent that she currently pays when is on the pension or with the meagre amount of super that she has been able to amass. And she is worried about what happens to her daughter. Will she ever be able to afford a stable home given that she cannot help her out through the bank of mum and dad?

I want to say to those people out there who are looking at their kids, worried that they will never be able to afford a stable home, who are feeling bad and guilty that they cannot give them money to buy a home: it is not your fault. It is not your fault that you cannot afford a home despite working so incredibly hard. It is the fault of governments who have put in place deliberate policies to lock people out of the housing market. It is the fault of Labor and the Liberals who have cared more about the investor class, more about the wealthy people, than they have about putting a roof over everyone’s head. The housing system is broken, and it is breaking people. And there is actually something that Labor and the Liberals could do about it if they chose to. They are simply choosing not to. I know that Labor pretends this crisis does not exist. Or they say it is a problem but supply is the issue, but then they completely ignore the 48,000 homes that are on Airbnb that could be brought onto the market in an instant if they properly regulated that industry. Labor says it is a problem, but they do not act like it is a problem. The Premier has used words like ‘people are choosing to rent’, like it is a lifestyle choice, not something people have been forced to do due to active choices that governments have made.

But these are real people. These are actually real people that I am talking about, and they are suffering. In fact it is 30 per cent of people in Victoria who rent – real people. It is 30 per cent of Victorians whose rental stress has gotten so much worse since the pandemic. And these renters cannot just go and buy a home, as much as many of them would like to, because house prices have climbed further and further out of reach. Rents go up, and it erodes people’s savings that they might have used to buy a home. Something has to change.

Many landlords might be doing the right thing. Many are not. But this is not about pitting one group against another. It is about the fundamental right of everyone to have a roof over their head. I fundamentally do not believe we should have a society where it is easier for someone to buy their seventh home than it is to buy their first. I do not believe society is fair when our government gives tax breaks to people who own multiple investment properties when others cannot afford even one home. Surely the measure of a fair society is whether everyone has the basics to live. Shouldn’t we at least make sure everyone has one home before we give tax handouts from all working Australians to people to buy multiple homes? Because what we are doing is we are taking tax money away from workers and giving it straight to property investors. That is actually what we are doing.

The thing is that there are solutions available here. The Labor government is just choosing not to use them. These solutions are available at all levels of government, including the state government. During the pandemic Labor did implement freezes on rents, and it worked. The ACT has a rate cap. It works. Other countries have rate caps in one way or another. They work. In Canada, China, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Singapore – this is not just one or two places – New York, California, even in that beacon of capitalism the United States of America, they regulate their rent increases.

The other thing is the tide is turning. Thirty per cent of Victorians rent. Millennials and gen Z are becoming a bigger voting bloc than any other generation, and they will not stand by as governments who have so severely screwed them over continue to do nothing about the rental crisis. They will not stand by while Labor and the Liberals are actively supporting policies to lock them out of the housing market, to lock them out of being able to afford to buy or rent a home. People are fed up, and the result will be seen at the ballot box in the next few years. So if Labor actually want to show they care about people, even if they just want to show that they care about saving their own skin, they will do something to fix the housing crisis. They will regulate Airbnb. They will put a freeze and a cap on rents. They will advocate to their federal colleagues to actually get rid of negative gearing and capital gains discounts, which are completely screwing over younger generations. The rent is too damn high, so why won’t Labor actually do something about it?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I acknowledge in the gallery the Honourable Chris Pearce, the former federal member for Aston. Welcome, sir.