Wednesday, 1 April 2026

 Gabrielle DE VIETRI (Richmond) (09:40): I move:

That I introduce a bill for an act to amend the Residential Tenancies Act 1997 to provide that rent increases under residential tenancy agreements must not exceed certain amounts and for other purposes.

Everyone deserves a home they can afford. That should not depend on luck, on family wealth or on navigating a rigged system, but right now that is exactly what is happening. Wages have stagnated while rents continue to rise, and that is because under Labor your rent can go up by however much your property investor wants to put it up. In the last five years rents have gone up 2½ times faster than wages. For many renters it is not a question of if the rents will go up, it is by how much and whether they can survive it. Will they have to skip meals? Will they have to put off seeing the doctor? Will they have to pull their kids out of school, pack up and leave their home? And now this: global shocks having local impacts. We know what happens when costs start to rise: property investors seek to preserve their own profits, and it is renters who bear the brunt. For hundreds of thousands of renters, many of whom are joining us today, living in rental stress another rent hike could just push them over the edge. That is why today we must debate this bill for an immediate rent freeze to protect renters from the growing cost-of-living crisis, from rising fuel prices and from growing interest rates, because what renters need right now is stability and an immediate rent freeze will give them stability and confidence.

The rental crisis is a political choice. The major old parties have created a system that perpetuates inequality – a system that serves the property industry, the banks, the developers, wealthy investors, whose profits depend on rents continuing to rise without limits, and a system that favours the interests of their donors rather than the people they are supposed to represent. As a result inequality in Victoria is deepening, and without rent controls wealth will continue to concentrate in the hands of those who already own properties.

Today, the Greens are putting forward a different choice. This bill will make unlimited rent increases illegal. It introduces a two-year rent freeze, an emergency circuit breaker to give renters breathing room and allow wages the chance to catch up. After that it caps rent increases so they simply cannot rise faster than wages. We know what Labor and the Liberals will say. They will say rent controls do not work. They will say, ‘What about taxes?’ They will say investors will flee the state and rental supply will collapse. They will say, ‘Haven’t we done enough already?’ They will bang on about the tinkering and the tweaks they have made under pressure from the Greens and the community, but here is the truth: as long as unlimited rent increases are still legal, renters will continue to live in insecure, unaffordable housing. Rent controls already exist across the world, including in 16 European countries and in the ACT, where the Greens in government introduced rent controls, the only jurisdiction in Australia where rents have not gone up drastically out of sync with wages, and the sky has not fallen in. Let us be clear about this panic of moral investor flight: when a property investor sells a property, it is bought by someone else – maybe someone who has long been locked out of home ownership, maybe a young growing family – or perhaps it will be bought by another property investor and it will remain a rental. What the property does not do is disappear.

So we can continue down the current path, where rents keep rising more and more and people are pushed into housing stress and homelessness, or we can act. If a landlord cannot afford to keep a long-term rental, they can sell. It does not have to be this way. Unlimited rent increases should be illegal. It is not a radical idea. It is common sense, and it is urgently needed. Let us give renters a fair deal. Let us cap rent increases so you can afford your home and even save for the future. We need rent controls, and we need them now.

 Katie HALL (Footscray) (09:44): I oppose the introduction of this bill, primarily because – and I know it is April Fools’ Day, but renters should not be treated like fools – the Greens introduced a near identical bill in the Legislative Council I believe two years ago and have left it to languish and die. If this was the transformational move that they claim it is, why have they left it sitting in the upper house since 2023? The Greens are trying to pass off a stale bill as fresh action, because why would they want to do anything more than run a brand?

This is classic Greens politics. The Greens have never built a thing. But we know that the best way to make more rentals available and to drive down rents is to build more homes, and Victoria continues to build and approve thousands more homes than any other state in the country. Melbourne’s average rent is below the national average, including in the ACT, which the Greens have highlighted as an example of where these controls work. They do not work. This is classic Greens politics: it is maximum outrage and minimum honesty about their own record. And we know that the members opposite, at every opportunity they have, whether it is in the Council or indeed in this place, block housing developments. We know that the member who is seeking to introduce this bill has done it herself.

Ellen Sandell: On a point of order, Speaker, this is a procedural debate about the first reading of a bill, and it is not an opportunity to attack other members of the Parliament.

The SPEAKER: The member for Footscray will come back to the procedural motion.

Katie HALL: The bill that is being sought to be introduced is exactly the same as the bill that the Greens introduced to the upper house two years ago, and for that reason I believe that this is a stunt. It comes on a day when Victoria has introduced reforms from the Allan Labor government that are making renting fairer. Victoria is the best place in Australia to rent a property, and the reason it is the best place in Australia to rent a property is not only because it is cheaper but because we have introduced more than 150 protections, including a nation-leading rental bond scheme.

Renters need real relief and more homes, not a Greens slogan which can go out on TikTok or in a media release or whatever. We are introducing real reforms, and I know the Greens like to take credit for every reform that the Labor government introduces – they are very good at it. But we know, when it comes to the reality of what the Greens actions are, that when the member for Richmond was on Yarra council she voted down social and affordable housing in her community. We have seen it time and time again, so do not be disingenuous. Those opposite should not be disingenuous with the renters of Victoria, because in Victoria the Allan Labor government has transformed renting, with more than 150 reforms.

I did some googling this morning, and one of the things I have been really concerned about is the way the Greens political party are actively scaring people in public housing. They are running around telling public housing tenants that they will be homeless and not that we are building new livable homes for those communities. But I also discovered that the member for Richmond is running a fundraiser. She is selling bottles of merlot to ‘stop the de-merlot-ition’. So after a hard day campaigning and scaring people, you go – (Time expired)

 Ellen SANDELL (Melbourne) (09:50): I rise to speak on this debate and talk about why it is such an urgent debate and why this bill, the Greens bill for rent controls, must urgently be debated and passed through this Parliament today. One in three Victorian households now rent. That is not a niche issue. These are not just students renting for a short period before they can go and buy their own home; these are working people with good full-time jobs who cannot afford to buy a house and believe now that they might be renting their entire lives.

[NAMES AWAITING VERIFICATION]

Renters are people who contact me with their stories every single week – people like Petra from Princes Hill, whose landlord has owned her rental for more than 20 years and has made no updates to the property in that time but still tries to increase her rent by between 11 and 17 per cent every single year. It is Petra who has to go and fight that rent increase. There is Ruby in the CBD, whose rent in my electorate has increased more than 10 per cent every year for the last five years – 50 per cent in the last five years alone. Meg pays two-thirds of her income in rent and is too afraid to ask for repairs out of fear of a rent increase or fear that she will be evicted. Natasha told me that her real estate agent said she would get a good rental reference as long as she did not make any maintenance requests while she lived in the property. How are people supposed to live like this? How could it not be urgent for Parliament to finally, finally do something to actually address this crisis, bring in rent controls in Victoria and make sure that people’s rent is not so out of whack with wages?

The thing is that the rental crisis does not just hurt individual renters – it actually hurts the entire community and it hurts the economy, because every rent increase is a dollar that cannot be spent at the local cafe, at the footy or at the local shoe shop buying school shoes for the kids. Instead, it is a dollar that goes straight into a landlord’s pocket, and research shows that that money is far less likely to flow back into our local shopping strips and communities. Rent controls are deflationary, meaning that they also support mortgage holders because they put downward pressure on inflation and downward pressure on interest rates, which benefits everybody.

It is young Victorians who are paying the highest price here – young people that are being forced out of our inner suburbs, the suburbs that they study in, that they work in and that they perhaps grew up in, and they are being pushed further and further out just to find a place that they can afford. That means longer commutes, more money on transport, less time for study and less time for friends and family when you are young. It means more pressure to pick up extra shifts just to cover the rent. And we are forcing an entire generation to choose between their education or having an affordable roof over their head. That affordable rental corridor that once ran through suburbs in my electorate – North Melbourne, Carlton, Fitzroy, Brunswick, Northcote – has almost completely vanished in our city. The creative studios, the share houses, the first apartments that people got when they moved out of home – they are now almost entirely gone. Melbourne, especially inner Melbourne, is at risk of becoming a city without young people. Think about that – a city without artists and without the people who give it its life and its soul. A city where nurses, cleaners and baristas cannot afford to live anywhere near where they work, and when they finish their shift they have to travel an hour to get home and an hour back in. What kind of city is that? It is not the city that we know, and it is not the city that we should be creating.

Right now in Victoria there is no legal limit on how much a landlord can increase your rent – none. The only option renters have is to challenge an increase after the fact, bearing all the costs and all the stress themselves. It is simply not fair. It is not a fair system. It is a system that is rigged against the people who can least afford it. It is rigged against renters, it is rigged against young people and it is rigged against the working class. It is time to do things differently. We can look overseas at the 16 European countries that have some form of rent control. We can also look here in our own backyard in the ACT, where a Greens–Labor government introduced rent controls that are working. Rent controls work, and we can adopt one of these models here in Victoria to make sure that people can actually afford the roof over their head. There is no reason why Labor could not do this tomorrow if they had the guts.

 Sarah CONNOLLY (Laverton) (09:55): Well, well, well – we know it is an election year when the Greens start using words like ‘rigged’ and ‘urgent’. Anything when it comes to the Greens is urgent because they are a party running out of ideas. They are a party running on fumes. They are a party that only opens their offices four days a week. They spend no time here in the chamber debating the really important stuff. Four days a week on taxpayers money their offices are open, and they come here with a recycled press release to pretend to put forward a new bill before this house. Well, you are caught out. It is an election year, so hear me clearly when I say we will not be lectured by the Greens, who have a substantive record of standing in the way of not only Victorians but vulnerable Victorians, including young Victorians – Greens voters – by peddling false information that time and time again they are called out on here in this place. The only problem is we cannot put it on social media because the Greens never turn up to Parliament. So it is absolutely fantastic to have three of you, the full Greens party, in the chamber today to hear a reckoning and hear the truth about your party.

The Greens party have never delivered a single piece of housing infrastructure in this state. They have time and time again blocked housing, whether it is here in this Parliament as part of our important policy and legislative reform to build more homes, to get people into homes and to enable people to afford their rent. They talk about our government tinkering around the edges. We have made 150 impactful –

Ellen Sandell: On a point of order, Speaker, there is a lot of talk about misinformation in politics at the moment, and I think it is incumbent upon members to not misinform the house. The point of order is that the member for Laverton is misinforming the house and misleading the house, because the Greens did not vote against the bill that she says we did.

The SPEAKER: That is not a point of order.

Sarah CONNOLLY: Misinformation is something that is incredibly dangerous during an election year, and I will note that those opposite, the Greens party, provided their own little bit of misinformation recently, claiming that it was their idea for free public transport during a fuel emergency and crisis – to introduce free public transport here in this state in April. What a joke – talk about misinformation. Even my 12-year-old was able to call out the member for Richmond for telling such little furphies, I will say. They are up to the old tricks.

This is the party that is getting on and building more homes. We want to see people get into more rentals, we want to see prices that are affordable, and that includes building more homes. What I would say to the Greens party is: get out of the way. Stop blocking our ability to build more homes here in this state. People want more homes. They need to be able to afford to rent. I have spent many years in this state as a renter. Here in this place – and I have said that those opposite hardly ever attend sittings here in this place – they have never talked about what life is like for themselves as renters. I have stood here time and time again, by the way, talking about what life is like for a renter. Renters know that we need to build more homes. That enables us to get into rentals and be able to afford rentals. 150 significant rental reforms have come through this place by this government alone in the past almost 12 years – significant rental reforms. That has not just happened by chance, and it certainly has not happened because the Greens over there have attended Parliament. It has happened because Labor has been out on the hustings talking to people and talking to renters. This side of the house is full of people who do rent.

This is just another ploy, another election pitch, and I am sure it will go up on social media as the election pitch for the member for Richmond. I would say she is in trouble. Indeed she is in trouble; we on this side of the house know that. People in this state are waking up and seeing the Greens party for what they really are. I have no doubt that at some stage this week, if they ever get out of the tram tracks of Melbourne, they will get under the West Gate Tunnel on Footscray Road and notice the veloway. And do you know what colour the veloway is? Come on, people – it is green. With this kind of party politics I am convinced that the Greens party will say that the veloway was their idea and therefore that is why it is green. This is the mentality of those opposite. This is the mentality of that party. I wholeheartedly oppose the introduction of this bill.

 Tim READ (Brunswick) (10:00): I am supporting today’s introduction of the Greens Residential Tenancies Amendment (Rent Controls) Bill 2026. The Greens believe every Victorian has a right to a stable home. But for too many Victorian renters, their anxiety about becoming homeless due to rising rents is real. Australia is becoming an increasingly unequal country, and that is because we tax income but barely tax wealth at all. As house prices and rents soar, property investors are flourishing while renters struggle to make ends meet. This is trickle-up economics. We need to introduce the Greens rent control bill today, because successive governments have created a system that punches down on renters and allows landlords to hike rents far beyond what is affordable. Sure, renters can appeal those rent increases to VCAT, but if their proposed increase is on a par with similar properties in the area, it is unlikely that they have got a chance. For example, in my electorate of Brunswick, where almost half of all residents rent, the median rent has increased over 7 per cent in the last year, but average incomes only went up by 3.5 per cent. Using similar properties in your area as the yardstick for what is reasonable when rents are racing ahead of income is just, well, unreasonable.

It is curious that the government has a razor-sharp focus on price gouging at the bowser right now – and so they should because that affects almost all of us – but no such focus on landlords price gouging renters, because that is just a problem for what they might regard as the tenant underclass. Our current unfair system does not just make renting unaffordable, it makes home ownership a fantasy. When there is nothing left over after rent, Victorian renters simply cannot save for a deposit. We need to introduce this bill today because of the pain that rising rents are inflicting on Victorian renters from all walks of life.

At my office I have had a parent who is an architect and academic contact us because they could not secure a rental. We have spoken with artists forced out of share houses because a landlord decided to extract whatever the market would bear. We have heard from a single mother with an immaculate rental record who was turned away from rentals again and again. A recent ACOSS survey found that half of renters had already gone without food or medicine to pay their energy bills. There are zero properties in all of Victoria considered affordable for a single person on a Centrelink benefit – zero. Every year a landlord raises rent above wages is another year that wealth is transferred from those with less to those with more. This is like the Robin Hood story where the Sheriff of Nottingham wins.

But in this house we have the power to put an end to rent gouging. This bill, if introduced today, will freeze rents for two years. This is the urgent relief that renters desperately need in this cost-of-living crisis. Then after the two-year rent freeze, future increases will be capped at whichever is lower, wage growth or inflation, not whatever a landlord decides on a Tuesday morning after their agents called them to suggest that they could extract more from their tenants. We need this bill because rents must reflect what people earn and what things cost. Renters deserve the stability to plan, to budget and perhaps to save for a home of their own, to live without their entire lives consumed by rising housing costs and the fear of homelessness.

I am proud of what the Greens and community advocates have achieved for renters this term. We pushed for, and the government legislated, bans on no-grounds evictions, on rental bidding and on dodgy third-party application fees. By the same method, we have obtained standardised lease forms, a portable bond scheme, extended 90-day notice periods, mandatory heating and cooling and real energy efficiency measures. Our work on an empty homes tax and negotiations with the government to obtain Airbnb regulation have helped stabilise rental costs more here than in other Australian city, and now the Greens want to make rent controls a reality too. We want to advocate for them so that the government legislates them and then blames us for claiming credit. The Greens vision for affordable housing goes further than this bill alone, however. We want a genuine expansion of public and community housing for the more than 100,000 people on the waiting list, but today, this bill is a step forward in the right direction towards fairness for renters.

 Nathan LAMBERT (Preston) (10:05): I rise to oppose the procedural motion by the member for Richmond, and I do so predominantly on the grounds that we all know that the best way to advance good public policy within this place is to work closely with ministers and the government to bring a coordinated and comprehensive set of rental reforms to this place, as this government has been doing. I genuinely think that even the Greens members of this place would recognise that the ministers that we have had – certainly the current Minister for Consumer Affairs and particularly if I can give credit to the Minister for Public and Active Transport when she was formerly in this role – not only have been very active and reforming ministers but have been very open to listening, certainly to issues that I have brought to them on behalf of renters and I know to many issues that my colleagues have brought. I know this directly from my own experience working with the ministers on the issue of rental applications, which many of us know for a long time were ludicrous in the sorts of things that they would ask you for, the sort of data that was clearly being harvested and the very genuine and important questions about where that data was going when you were filling out 15 different references and when you were being asked the names of your pets – all these extraordinary things that real estate agents and landlords were putting in applications. I know that is an issue we talked about three or four years ago now. I think, to give credit, it was an issue raised by the Victorian Socialists and Jordan van den Lamb and an issue that the minister has taken action on. In fact I was absolutely thrilled to see, as other members would have been thrilled to see, that the new standard rental application was released I think just earlier this week. Certainly I saw a copy of it. We will be sharing it around our electorate because that is good news for renters. I just give that as an example of the way in which our ministers have worked with all of us within this chamber, have worked with renters and have certainly worked with the tenants union, or Tenants Victoria, I should say, as they are now called.

In fact I think we had a good example of it in the chamber yesterday, when the member for Brunswick raised an issue related to this practice that some of us have seen where a property has been advertised at a very low price, a sort of bait-and-switch-style strategy, and then built into the agreement is a jump in the rent that occurs around three months or four months later. That is something I think that all of us look at and think does look like a concerning practice. I am not sure how widespread it is. I will be straight up that no-one in Preston or Reservoir has yet raised it with me. But again, perhaps to give credit where it is due, I did see through the Victorian Socialists that they had raised that through some of their social media. The member for Brunswick raised it, and I think the minister in his answer showed, as he always does, his thoughtfulness on these issues. I know I certainly spoke to him about it, but I think also in his answer he set out his thinking on precisely this issue that we have with the bill in front of us today. He talked at some length, as members will remember, about the new powers of Consumer Affairs Victoria and Rental Dispute Resolution Victoria, and the way in which they now not only take into account, as members have mentioned earlier in this debate, the market rates of rent but can also look at the scale of a rental increase and how that scale compares to current inflation.

I know members who have helped and supported renters in their electorates will know that a really tragic thing and a tough thing you sometimes see is that someone has had the benefit of a pretty good and cheap rental rate. They have had a property that they might have been renting in Reservoir for only $100 a week or something, which is a good rate. Suddenly they get a new landlord or the property changes hands, and it does jump up by a lot. There is a certain argument that it is only just jumping up to the market rate that others in that street are paying. But we have now introduced these important changes to minimise that shock and to really do exactly what it is that I think the Greens bill is intending to do. I will not repeat here in this chamber everything the minister went through but just refer the Greens back to his comments and his way of talking about this. I think it is important to remember that whilst there are different approaches – the Greens have talked about, I think, 16 countries that do this, and I have had a look at some of those ways in which it is done, and they do vary a lot – in some of those countries it is a rental cap of no more than a 20 or 30 per cent increase in a year, the sort of thing that I think would be captured by existing Victorian legislation. I am not sure if the Greens have put a number on it or the member for Richmond has a number on what sort of cap you would put on the annual increase.

A member interjected.

Nathan LAMBERT: Well, the wage price index. These are the discussions I would encourage the Greens to have with the minister. I will return, if I can, to my central point, which is that our ministers have been really open to these discussions. The minister only yesterday was setting out exactly his thinking on this particular issue and his track record. I do not have time left here, but all of those issues that he mentioned yesterday about the work that we have done with evictions, the work we have done to support renters and make Victoria the fairest place to rent are reasons why we should work through him.

James Newbury: As we support the right of all members to introduce matters into the chamber, I seek leave to speak.

Leave refused.

Assembly divided on motion: