Child Protection Party
The Child Protection Party often has people relating their stories to us about the issues they face with landlords – high rents with the associated high bonds, regular inspections, insecurity of tenure in the form of short term rentals being the norm, not being allowed to turn the house into a home by (e.g.) hanging a photo on a wall, and more. We know of people who have been refused rental because they are single men, they have a dog, they are older, they have a criminal record or a history of drug abuse. Both of the latter are often held against a person even though they have served their time in prison or are now clean of drugs and no longer use them. Many people consider the 3 monthly inspections to be daunting and some have reported feeling harassed.
Poverty is a major cause of child abuse. A family living at or below the poverty line experiences hardships that other, more well off, people do not have to endure. Every family has to feed, clothe, educate, obtain medical treatment and entertain their children but this is an extremely difficult thing to do if you are living at or below the poverty line.
According to ACOSS, the poverty line in Australia is $895.55/week for a couple with 2 children.
The most recent figures from the Real Estate Institute of Australia show that Adelaide has the least accessible rental market in any Australian capital city with only 0.6% of houses vacant.
Here in SA, there are 6224 people homeless, 1700 vacant housing trust houses and 17000 on the waiting list for public housing. Most, if not all, of the vacant houses are vacant due to their dilapidated state.
The biggest expense a household faces is a mortgage or rent. The average rent for a house in the metropolitan area of Adelaide is $405/week and for a unit $350/week. The bond for these is $2430 and $2100 respectively. According to RealEstate.com.au on 31st May 2022, the lowest rent available in metro Adelaide was $251/week. If the rent was $250/week or less, the bond would be $1000 (4 weeks rent). At $251/week, the bond is 6 weeks rent ($1506). For a family of 4 living on Centrelink payments, finding such sums of money is extraordinarily difficult. Many, if not all, landlords and certainly the real estate agents will know that if the rent is over $250/week a greater bond can be collected up front. Many, no doubt, take advantage of this.
A family of 4 living on Centrelink payments receives approximately $900 - $950 per fortnight. Such a family also receives other allowances but these go nowhere near addressing the issues they face. If that family is fortunate enough to find a house to rent for $250/week, firstly, they have to find the $1000 bond they must pay. Then, after payment of their rental, they are left with $450-$500 per fortnight to pay all the other expenses – food, clothing, medical, education, entertainment, travel etc. If that house is at the average cost of $405/week, they are left with around $100 or so to meet all the other expenses. This is an untenable state of affairs because such families are then forced to make hard decisions about where they can cut their spending.
Fixed tenancy agreements are normally 6 or 12 months although longer terms can, rarely, be negotiated. A landlord must give a tenant 90 days’ notice to vacate. This means that only 3 months after moving in to a house on a 6-month rental, that family must, again, find a house they can afford, find the money for the bond, pay the expenses for moving and pay the new rental which may well be higher than they had been paying.
State governments can do little about the ever-increasing costs of food, travel etc. but they most certainly can do something about the cost of rental housing and the conditions of rental.
In response to a query that I sent to then Opposition leader Peter Malinauskas prior to the last State election, I was advised that the ALP intend to address these issues by building 400 new homes across the state, upgrading 350 of the dilapidated houses and improve a further 3000 public houses across the state. The same query sent to then Premier Stephen Marshall elicited no response. To your credit, the ALP announced the start of these works shortly after coming into office.
However, while those steps are a start, they go nowhere near addressing the issues.
According to this site, the cost per square metre for a low range basic house is $1580/metre2. A 3 bedroomed house 16 metres by 8 metres would therefore cost $202240. The total cost to build the 400 houses planned would therefore be $80,896,000.
The cost of the land comprises a significant portion of the cost of a house. However, the State government owns vast tracts of land - approximately 26 million hectares – so the cost of the land to build houses should not be a factor that the government needs to consider.
If those 26 million hectares was subdivided into 500m2 blocks, 520,000,000 could be built.
520,000,000 houses!
Obviously, for a wide variety of reasons, not all of that land could be released for public housing and we most certainly don’t need that many houses.
The Child Protection Party is calling upon the state government to:
- Include the provision of public housing on the ALP platform.
- Build 2000 houses instead of the 400 proposed. If you allowed a generous 500m2 block of land per house, 20 houses could be built on 1 hectare of land. This would use up just 100 hectares of the 26 million the State government owns.
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Using the figure quoted above, 2000 3-bedroom basic houses would cost a total of $404,480,000. A lot of money but consider this:
- 1000s of jobs created to build the houses, roads and utilities to service them, and
- Retail giants like Westfield would build shopping malls thereby increasing jobs across the board, and
- Others would open restaurants, cinemas, sporting facilities etc., again increasing jobs, and
- The cost of building the houses would be recouped through rents, and most importantly,
- People would be housed.
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Amend the Residential Tenancies Act 1995 to:
- Reduce the bond to 2 weeks across the board,
- Require landlords to provide longer terms for renting a house as happens in other countries. In the UK a landlord must allow tenants up to 7 years while in Germany many tenancies are indefinite meaning a person can rent a house for their entire life.
- Amend the frequency of inspection to biannual or annual.
- Outlaw refusal to grant tenancy because of someone’s marital status, criminal history or past drug abuse.
Note: All figures quoted above were correct as of 3rd June 2022.
