Page 4533 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 18 October 2011
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With your bill, Mr Speaker, as proposed, if it were to come into effect, what we would potentially see is a whole range of private rental dwellings where owners will simply choose not to make the investment to bring those properties up to the level of energy efficiency you have asked for—
Ms Bresnan: Point of order, Mr Speaker.
MR CORBELL: and therefore they will simply withdraw them from the rental market.
MR SPEAKER: Order, Mr Corbell! Ms Bresnan.
Ms Bresnan: My question actually was this. Given that ACT Housing does not have baseline data—I am asking you that question: if ACT Housing does not have the data, where did you get the data from?
MR CORBELL: I have answered that question. I have told Ms Bresnan that the advice came from ACT Housing and that she should ask the minister for housing for more and better particulars if she is interested in that. But it is important to make the point that even if you were to withdraw less than 100 rental properties from the ACT rental market because those owners were not prepared to make the investment mandated by the Greens’ bill, that would make the rental housing situation worse.
It is very likely that there would be a significant number of houses withdrawn from the market because of the bill, because these houses are only let for a relatively short period of time pending redevelopment or sale decisions by their owners. Therefore, they are not prepared to make the investment which might have a payback period for their tenants of a couple of years when they do not anticipate the property being in the rental market for a couple of years. They will simply withdraw the property. That will have a significant impact on rental availability.
Regrettably, this bill punishes renters. It does not help them. It punishes them. It makes it more difficult to find rental accommodation. It pushes up the overall CPI indicator in relation to rent because rents will be increased for those properties that are upgraded and that will flow through to rental increases across the board, rental increases that the ACAT will have to consider are reasonable because it would push up the CPI indicator for rent overall.
These are the types of implications that the Greens have simply failed to have regard to. These are the types of implications that will hurt renters in the ACT. It for these reasons that the government will not be supporting the bill.
MS BRESNAN: Supplementary.
MR SPEAKER: Yes, Ms Bresnan.
MS BRESNAN: Minister, what information did the government use to “estimate” that one-third of private landlords could face costs of up to $20,000, as quoted in the article?
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