Page 1569 - Week 06 - Thursday, 2 July 2020
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Importantly, the bill proposes to make occupancy principles mandatory. This will ensure consistent protections for all people so that occupancy agreements contain a basic level of protection while still retaining the flexibility to tailor an agreement to the particular needs of that accommodation. The mandatory nature of the occupancy principles will increase the clarity and the enforceability of occupancy agreements for all parties. A feature of the unique relationship between students and education providers has driven the need to create limited exceptions for education providers. Student occupancy agreements are inherently different from other agreements in a number of ways.
The bill also proposes amendments to the legal framework applicable to people who reside in caravan and manufactured home parks. The bill acknowledges that many individuals in these parks own their dwellings but lease the site on which the dwelling is located. It addresses the rights and obligations of dwelling owners and park operators in relation to the sale of dwellings, how they can be removed from a park if they have been abandoned and how interest in the dwelling can be assigned to others.
Finally, with the amendments to share housing, the bill contains a new framework to modernise the operation of share housing in the ACT. Share housing is an extremely common form of tenancy for the ACT, commonly used by students and young professionals. Share houses by definition involve multiple parties, and occupancy agreements are most commonly used in situations where individual occupants share communal space, such as in boarding houses, student accommodation and crisis accommodation.
The reforms in this bill will ensure that a tenancy agreement survives a change to the parties, removing the need for new condition reports, clarifying who is responsible for damage at the end of the tenancy and improving the process for managing bonds associated with share houses. The bill proposes a model that is simpler, more modern and which better reflects community behaviours and expectations.
I note the comments of Ms Le Couteur in relation to the further protection of tenants during COVID-19. As has been mentioned, these are dealt with appropriately in the ministerial declaration under the first COVID emergency act. It is appropriate that matters specifically relating to COVID-19 issues are and continue to be dealt with in specific legislation and instruments. The government is committed to that because that provides a clearer, more flexible and more transparent response for the community in relation to the COVID situation. Ms Le Couteur notes that it is not an ideal way of operating to use her amendments, and we agree. It is a flawed process, and so we will not be.
I also note the importance of the issues behind the circulated amendments. They are important principles and important foundational elements. They are the matters the government has already been working on for some time. There is, of course, some distance between important issues or positive ideas and sound legislation. I note that Ms Le Couteur speaks specifically in relation to lifting some matters across from New South Wales legislation in relation to mediation. Our moratorium provisions are not identical to New South Wales and so lifting amendments across from New South
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