Canberra Liberals MLA Mark Parton, Shadow Minister for Housing and Homelessness, responds to Anglicare’s annual Rental Affordability Snapshot, published yesterday, which found once again that housing and rent were unaffordable for many Canberrans, particularly minimum-wage workers and people on welfare.
Canberra has again been proven to be one of the worst places in Australia to rent, and it should be no surprise to anyone. The individual stories playing out in the suburbs are soul-destroying for those impacted.
What we’re seeing here is a perfect storm of flawed Labor/Greens policy come together at a time when there’s already a worrying national problem. But why is it worse here than most places?
It’s worse because of long-term land release policy, which has artificially inflated the cost of all forms of housing across Canberra; spiralling rates and land tax, which is always passed on to tenants; and the continual changes to residential tenancy legislation, which force more and more landlords out of the markets. The investors who choose to stay will, of course, be forced to fork out thousands of dollars per property in new maintenance requirements that are likely to be passed on to tenants.
All this has led to Canberra being a city that is unaffordable for most basic wage earners, and absolutely unaffordable for those on welfare.
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Those who find themselves unable to afford private rentals are then dismayed by the continual mismanagement of the government’s housing stocks. We see dozens of properties on the long-term vacant list, ongoing failures in the maintenance space, and an inability to consider the needs of tenants right across the city.
The government should have instituted the plan that the Liberals took to the election in 2020 which would have delivered hundreds more social and affordable dwellings through community housing providers.
Ultimately, the conversation about [raising] the rate of welfare [as Anglicare and others propose] is a federal one, but it must be said that the gap between current welfare and what would be needed to get a private rental in Canberra is so great that the solutions are closer to home than Parliament House.
