In partnership with National Shelter, our Shelter organisations across Australia and other stakeholders, we invite you to join us in our investigation into private rental tenancies. There is no data available to the public to help us understand the reasons why tenancies end and other information about renting.
 
We have a few quick and easy questions for you to answer so we can understand how tenancies end, bonds, rental bidding, the effects of the pandemic and more! We will routinely publish the results and undertake advocacy to improve the private rental system. Your answers are guaranteed to be anonymous. Please share with your networks!

We will be using the hashtags #MakeRentingFair #Renting, and encourage others to do the same!

Join us to find out what National Shelter has been doing recently and to contribute to our advocacy for social and affordable housing. The meeting will be held on Zoom, so please register below in order to access the meeting. 

National Shelter wishes to acknowledge the extraordinary fortitude of public housing tenants locked down in North Melbourne over the past fortnight.  One of the upsides has been journalist interest in publishing the stories and lives of many of the residents. It has provided an insight into the much stereotyped world of public housing tenants and demonstrated their resilience, diversity and the positive contribution of public housing to their settlement in Australia and the valuable role played by public housing in providing secure housing that enables people to participate in jobs, education and local community. 

It’s also shown the community support that local groups have provided and hopefully aids in challenging the negative stereotypes far too many people have of social housing. What is true is the neglect governments have shown to public housing buildings and tenants over the past 15 years, these stories have shown the uplift possible if we decided, as a nation, to invest instead of turn away. Bravo tenants and thanks Guardian Australia for publishing the series.

A Completely Different World

My Daughter Wants to be a Doctor

The Challenges Refugees Face 

The Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs inquiry into homelessness has been conducting hearings to support the various submissions made to it. National Shelter provided evidence about the need for a National Housing Strategy to tackle our housing issues and how we also have an opportunity to end rough sleeping in Australia by providing more permanent housing in the short term through head-leasing programs and over the longer term by building social and affordable housing. We have provided further input on the Social Housing Acceleration and Renovation Program (SHARP) proposal and challenged the narrow views of some Committee members on the nature of overcrowding, which contributed significantly to increases in homelessness recorded in census 2016.

If you would like to read transcripts of evidence they can be found here. 
National Shelter’s submission to the Inquiry can be found here. 

In our last enews, we shared a table of measures by state governments we now need to update following further announcements by the governments of Western Australia and Queensland. WA has announced $319m to build and renovate and Queensland has announced $100m to build social housing.

We have also been promoting the merits of the SHARP proposal which would be an economic recovery program dedicated to building and upgrading social and affordable housing. We have been in discussions with a range of private sector peak bodies who support the proposal and are hopeful this may come together into a more significant push for social housing.

National Shelter has been pleased to see associate membership and state membership renewals coming in. We are in the process of finalising our End of Financial Year position, which looks better than we’ve experienced for 5 years. We are still extremely stretched financially but are encouraged that the support shown by members will ensure we maintain our profile and presence for the next 12 months and beyond. Since we were defunded 6 years ago we have managed to maintain our level of operations and have even grown.

The COVID period has been a very uncertain one for renters. The various measures introduced by state governments to ensure renters did not get evicted have been welcome and, along with Jobseeker and Jobkeeper, have allowed renters to maintain their housing. Many stories have also emerged about lower rents and rising vacancies and the rising cost of negative gearing (now over $13B per annum). 

National Shelter will have a better idea of what has happened to rental affordability as we prepare for the next Rental Affordability Index (RAI) but cheaper rents don’t necessarily mean more affordable rents. The importance of the RAI is measuring rents against incomes and with so many households now having their income impacted by COVID, affordability remains obscure until we do that comparison.

We also wish to observe that now would be a good time to look at the combined cost of Capital Gains Tax (CGT) exemptions to investors in the rental market. It is difficult to tackle CGT when gains are being made but as house prices are stagnant at best and predicted to fall it would be a good time to tackle the excessive generosity of Capital Gains Tax.