Professor Emma Baker, Director of the Australian Centre for Housing Research at the University of Adelaide, has led a study to produce the first and largest dataset about the realities of being a renter in Australia.
The team collected around 15,000 survey responses from public and private tenants to discover who rents, why they rent, and what the conditions the properties they rent are in.
"What we found is a really broad range of incomes, so it's not just people living in rental, because they have to, it's a lot of people who are living in rental because they want to, you know, because they want to live close to their kids schools, they want to live in a nicer area, they might need to move around for employment. And there's also, you know, a whole section of Australians who are living in rental while they wait to save for a home, and then there's a whole lot of people who are in there because they can't afford to get into homeownership."
Leo Patterson Ross, chief executive of Tenants' Union New South Wales, says Australia’s rental laws, as well as the lack of available, affordable housing means there’s a large power imbalance between tenants and landlords.
"Primarily this is around how easy it is to evict a tenant and in every state and territory, a landlord can evict a tenant without any reason. In Victoria, that's been limited to just at the end of the first fixed term and Tasmania also has a limit on fixed terms, Queensland's bringing that in. But you can always be evicted without there being any good reason. And that's the real reason that they can evade the various terms of the agreement like repairs, because they always have a trump card to say, ‘well, I don't actually want to deal with you, and your request for repairs, I'm just going to find someone else who is happy to accept the property as it is’."
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