“This morning I sat down and had a coffee with Eliza, a small-business owner and mother of three from Epping. Eliza is educated, hard-working, and entrepreneurial. She’s also at the end of her tether. For reasons outside of her control, Eliza has found herself locked out of the housing market, and she’s also about to be out of a home and looking for her fifth rental property in the space of nine years.
”I’m sorry to get emotional,” she said to me. ”But it’s so hard to raise a family in an environment like this. Every time you take a step forward you get the rug pulled out from under you. I just want to live my life – but I can’t see a future here unless I’ve got stable living arrangements.”
Every year, her rental costs bite deeper into her family budget – and she doesn’t think she’s getting her money’s worth. She’s been in places where water runs down the wall when it rains, places where inspectors and renovators enter uninvited at all hours of the day, places where landlords impose bizarre and unreasonable restrictions on what she can do in her own home. And she’s starting to realise that the Government is more interested in looking out for investors than it is in helping people in her situation.
”What’s happening to our country?” she asked. ”Every day the rich get richer and the poor get poorer – and rent is a big part of that. All I want is a fair go for my family. What happened to the fair go?”
Many people mistakenly think that #rentersrights is only a problem for the young – but Eliza’s story is a familiar one for far too many people in Bennelong, where there are more renters than home owners, and which since the election of the Abbott-Turnbull Government has suffered the biggest increase in the price of housing in the entire country. And Australia has the most expensive and least regulated markets for renters in the world.
Let’s change that, together. #greens16”
Posted June 21 2016