Page 416 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 21 March 2023
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today, you cannot just say, “That was an unintended consequence. How could we have known that was going to happen?” You do know because you did the research, and the answer was very clear. The government does know, and the government does not care.
Of course, this is all part of this utopian Greens fairy-tale view that, if all of the evil landlords and investors leave the market, everyone will simply get to buy their own home. It is ludicrous. It is a complete fairy tale.
The anecdotal evidence from the ground is that many of these investment properties are being purchased by owner-occupiers. A stack of them are being bought by young Canberrans who had been residing with their parents, and who have utilised the bank of mum and dad to get into the market, and a number of others have been purchased by new arrivals to Canberra. This movement of stock has not seen a lot of renters become home owners.
Mr Rattenbury, Mr Davis and even Mr Dignam from Better Renting know that there is a large cohort of Canberrans who will never own their own home; they will always be renting. For a number of potential reasons, many of these people are at the bottom end of the socio-economic ladder, and they are the ones who are hurt the most by the narrowing of the rental market. I would also say that it is the properties at the lower end of the market that are offloaded first. Landlords always have a choice and renters often do not.
This bill is, in theory, designed to make renters’ lives better; for some, it will achieve the exact opposite. The bill is referred to by some in this space as “the homelessness bill” because it will force more people into homelessness. Mr Rattenbury, Mr Davis, Mr Barr, Ms Vassarotti and Ms Berry know that; they know that is the case. They know that this bill will make people homeless, but they do not care. They do not care, because they want to use the dataset of names and email addresses of renters to tell those renters that the Greens and Labor are looking out for them, and they are not. They just are not.
The Greens and, to a lesser extent, the Labor Party portray the landlord as some rich, semi-retired, suit-wearing, old white man who is sitting on his 12 investment properties and making life hell for poor renters. Propertyology research data tells us that, nationally, a quarter of our housing stock is provided to the rental market by private investors, and that more than 70 per cent of those investors have a taxable income of under $100,000. I repeat: more than 70 per cent of our landlords nationally have a personal taxable income of under $100,000.
Ninety per cent of those investors own one or two investment properties, and only 0.9 per cent own more than six. But in recent years this government has acted on the assumption that these small-time investors can tolerate being slugged with ever-higher levels of rates, fees and charges, and be asked to meet ever-higher levels of compliance and obligation. There is also the assumption that these investors will continue to carry the cost, the risk and the hassle of the provision of accommodation for others, while being on the receiving end of community hostility for being portrayed as taking houses off first homebuyers and otherwise being greedy, immoral
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