Wednesday, 31 May 2023

 Aiv PUGLIELLI (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (18:03): (266) My adjournment matter is to the Minister for Consumer Affairs, and the action I seek is for the government to regulate short-stay accommodation such as Airbnbs to increase the housing supply available for rent. This morning I opened the Airbnb app and set the location to Melbourne, and it gave me over 1000 results. Over 1000 residences were off the rental market and advertised as short stay. Something quite bizarre actually is that it would not even give me the exact figure as to how many Airbnbs there were; it was just a vague ‘Over 1000’. Is the government getting this information? Does the government have any interest in getting this information?

The only way the public can find out currently is through third-party websites collecting data. The website Inside Airbnb claims that in the last 12 months over 15,000 entire homes were off the market at some point due to being converted to Airbnbs. Fun fact: I actually checked these same stats a few months ago, and it was just under 14,000 homes, so it appears, according to this data, that over 1000 homes have been added to Airbnb in the past few months. Thousands of properties have been removed from the rental market for months on end. We are in the worst housing crisis we have ever seen, and the government is just allowing rental supply to disappear. We should not have to rely on third-party websites to try and figure out how many rentals have been removed. That data should be public, and the government should ensure that it is accurate. We also should not have entire homes being taken off the market unchecked.

I have additional concerns that the people being forced to use Airbnbs due to the lack of rentals are not then being afforded the same protections they would have if they were in a rental. I would also note that for the periods of time some short-stay properties are vacant the owners currently do not have to pay vacancy tax. We know that landlords are taking these homes off the market simply because they make more money from short stays, but I think the landlords and the government need to understand that housing is a human right and that just because you have commodified housing does not mean you are then exempt from housing people just to chase your own profit. My generation is increasingly being priced out of the housing market to buy. Now we have been left homeless due to the rental crisis, and many are feeling abandoned and frankly terrified for their future. Yet we are having to watch rentals being taken away and converted to short stay for landlord profit, and we cannot even get transparency on how many homes have been removed.

The government has a responsibility to house people. You have a responsibility to be a leader in the country on short-stay reform, to create a public registry of Airbnbs, to cap the number of days per year that a landlord can lease out an Airbnb and to allow owners corporations the power to ban short stays in apartment buildings – to do something to help. Stop dragging your feet, and get it done.