Page 1052 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 May 2020
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for landlords who rent their properties through a community housing provider for affordable rent for those on low and moderate incomes, and to make the scheme permanent. Members may recall that I have been banging on about this during this Assembly. Unfortunately, apart from Mr Coe, most of you were not here to remember that I was also involved in this in the Seventh Assembly. I am very pleased that we finally have the land tax exemption. I am gratified to see that it has been working so well and that there was unanimous agreement with this recommendation.
Yesterday I got a one-year report on the Rentwell scheme, which is the Canberra YWCA’s implementation of the land tax exemption scheme. The report said that it now has 25 properties under the scheme, which has led to 49 tenants. It has cost the ACT government the huge sum of $10,900 in land tax forgone but in exchange for this it has passed on rent relief equivalent to $81,632 to the tenants. So, effectively, the landlords have donated that to the tenants. This says what I have been arguing for, for literally decades—that this is the most cost-effective way for the ACT government to do affordable housing: to leverage off the goodwill of many people in the community. I sincerely hope that, as a result of this and the committee’s recommendations and the sheer sensibleness of the idea, it will become a permanent feature of the ACT affordable housing landscape.
Another obvious recommendation is recommendation 3, which basically tells the government to contact tenants and landlords about what the changes are. It is clear from discussions, particularly on Facebook, that a lot of people have absolutely no idea what the legal changes are. Recommendations 4 and 5 are about standard terms and rights documents for tenants and landlords in a transfer scheme. Legal Aid said that it was working on them. It would be very good if it were able to do this, particularly recommendation 5, to establish a more convenient rental transfer system. I am aware that this was a problem well before COVID-19.
Recommendations 6 and 7 talk about what is going to happen when the current rent moratorium is over. The basic point is that we do not know. This is expected to happen in late October. You can only say that it is “expected”, because my reading of the Assembly legislation is that in the ACT it could be over a lot quicker than that—that is, when the public health declaration is over. We need to tidy this up so that at least the minimum amount of time that it will apply is clear to people. Regardless of when it is over, tenants will potentially be left with thousands of dollars in debt and no obvious way to pay it back. Landlords will potentially be left with debts that they need paid in order to pay their mortgage or other living expenses, and there is no obvious way for them to recover it.
We need some sort of process to help landlords and tenants establish a fair and equitable way of resolving the situation so that we do not have the situation where, okay, people were housed for a few months but after that there is a tsunami of homelessness. Unless we think about this a lot more, that is what we are heading for. This is obviously not a problem just in the ACT; this will be all throughout Australia. It is something that the ACT, with the other states, needs to seriously look at.
Recommendation 8 is a small recommendation but one which will help share the pain if implemented. I point out that it has been implemented in New South Wales. It
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