The rental crisis in New South Wales is completely out of control, and unless you’re a billionaire property developer, you know people impacted by it. We want to work collaboratively with Labor, but the truth needs to be pointed out – and the truth is, Labor’s plan for renters amounts to tinkering around the edges.
They said they’ll make it easier to have pets in rentals, but the truth is they’re just introducing a form to request a pet that landlords can still reject. They say they’ll stop secret rent bidding, but they’re only banning the secret nature of rent bidding, which means bids on completely unaffordable housing must be made public to all bidders… It’s nowhere near good enough!
It’s great to see, after years of campaigning by the Greens, rental rights groups and tenancy groups, that NSW Labor and Liberals have committed to banning unfair, no-grounds evictions, but that is a pitiful bare minimum.
We need a circuit breaker. We need an immediate rent freeze, a cutting of rents, and an independent body to determine and control rents, a massive investment into social and public housing, a ban on evictions into homelessness, 100% public housing on public land and more – so we can start treating housing like the human right that it is, and not an asset for dodgy landlords and big greedy developers to play with and profit from at their will.
To do that, we need to make sure that tomorrow, we elect as many Greens to Parliament as possible, to hold the Balance of Power, to secure our position to demand a cut to rents as a requirement of a working agreement with Labor.
No matter where you are in the state, you can make a bold statement to the major parties that tinkering around the edges of a completely untenable housing crisis is not acceptable. Tomorrow, vote for housing justice. Vote 1 Greens.