Housing advocates call for commitment to low-cost rentals

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Housing advocates are calling for the major parties to pledge more for renters with a growing number of Australians needing to rent long-term.  'Everybody's home' is a campaign focused on the housing crisis and is calling for parties to commit to more low-cost rentals and affordable housing. National spokesperson for 'Everybody's Home' Maiy Azize says the fact there hasn't been any announcements for renters is a huge problem.

Transcript

00:00One third of Australians rent. More and more Australians are going to be renting for life.

00:06And 640,000 renters across the country are in really, really extreme rental stress. There's

00:13just nothing put on the table for them at this election, which is really disappointing

00:16to see.

00:17So what we're seeing from major parties is proposals that might seem on the surface

00:22like they're going to put a bit of extra money in the pockets of people when they go out

00:25and compete for housing. But the problem is when you put a couple of extra thousand dollars,

00:31a couple of extra tens of thousands of dollars in people's pockets when they go out to auction

00:34and bid for homes, is that everybody else has that money as well. And what it does is push

00:38up the cost of housing. It's not really helping anybody get ahead. So it's not just not helping

00:43renters, it's not helping people get into home ownership necessarily either. It's just pushing

00:47up the cost of housing for everybody.

00:49Our campaign calls for limits to rent increases, not freezes per se. You know, we've got this

00:55working, we don't need to look to overseas, we've got this working in Australia, here in

00:59the ACT. In the ACT there are limits on how much further than CPI landlords can increase

01:06the rent by and we think that's a pretty good model. It's actually pretty modest by international

01:10standards. In most other countries it's really not possible for landlords to raise rents further

01:17than about 2% of CPI. In Australia, in just about every other part of the country outside

01:21of the ACT, landlords can hand down an unlimited rent increase. So, you know, it's really not

01:26surprising that we're seeing annual rent increases every single year in the order of 5-10%.

01:33Young people are much more likely to be renters. There's a generation of people who are locked

01:36out of home ownership and these proposals are not going to do anything for them. So I'd

01:39be really surprised and disappointed if we didn't see something for the hundreds of thousands

01:45of people who rent. But most importantly the 640,000 people who are in really, really extreme

01:51rental stress with absolutely nothing that they can afford to rent, hanging on to unaffordable

01:56rentals with bloody fingernails. So we need to see proposals that go beyond just providing

02:02some incentives to the private market. We've seen from the Labor announcement over the weekend

02:06a proposal to build 100,000 or to give some zero interest loans to states and territories

02:12to incentivise them to work with private sector to bring new homes online. That's all very

02:18indirect. The problem we have in Australia is that we're not building things that people

02:22can afford to buy. We've actually built a million new homes over the past 10 years and

02:26the problem with that, we've never actually had more homes per person than we have now.

02:30It's not making housing more affordable because we don't have the government in there building

02:34things and working with the private sector to build things that are actually affordable.

02:38When you look around the world at the countries that are doing this well, the countries that have

02:42either avoided their housing crisis altogether or managed to turn it around, they are countries

02:46where the government is actually not just leaving it to the private sector, they are providing

02:51quite a bit of housing themselves. So we need to see proposals that go beyond just subsidising

02:56people to buy homes, just providing some incentives for the private sector to build and actually

03:02building things that are affordable, mandating them to be affordable, making sure they're things

03:06that people can afford to rent and to buy.

Category

Transcript

Recommended