Episode 27 - How Renters Having Decent Rights Helps Us All (Guest Host Mark O'Brien, CEO of the Tenants Union Victoria)

http://www.MakeRentingFair.org

01:24 What's going to happen to our country and why housing policy makes one of the biggest differences to how we turn out in 20 years
04:50 The demographic/social security time bomb being created by locking a generation out of housing
06:49 How improving renters' rights could help with housing affordability generally
13:54 Transience - what taking away security of tenure does to a community
15:00 More Australians discovering the unfairness of living without housing stability
16:43 The Victorian review of the Residential Tenancies Act
18:50 The competing proposals for changes
20:08 The real estate lobby's ideas to make the present situation even worse, starting with making it easier to evict people - more grounds, faster, and easier
24:32 Is the aim just to reinforce the idea of renters as a peasant class who survive at the whim of landlords?
25:05 The real estate lobby wanting *even more* than "no reason" evictions - they want "any reason" evictions. Making it even easier to discriminate against people and punish tenants for daring to exercise a right
27:56 Why it's important to get rid of the "no reason" eviction power
29:24 Jeremy derails discussion to put his proposal to require landlords evicting at their own convenience to pay the tenants' reasonable removal costs and release the bond sooner
32:19 Would such renters' rights deter people from investing in housing? Only the speculators who are the problem
34:16 The Dickensian system we're presently moving towards instead
36:25 Stopping tenants enforcing their rights
37:00 Tenants Union fighting to improve tenancy stability, and what will happen  to the state if it leaves it as is or makes it worse
38:22 They don't think it's your home - landlords' powers to invade your home for inspections or selling the property - and their ideas to make it worse
43:30 Pets - a basic right enjoyed by non-renting Australians, but which some landlords seem to think they should have the power to deny
49:20 Tenancy databases, unenforceable protections
50:25 The extraordinary, poorly regulated power of agents
54:12 Better privacy protections
55:22 Rent bidding and AirBnB
57:28 Fighting the idea that landlords should have the right to control what tenants do in their homes
59:36 Getting people fired up to fight for these rights - and overcoming idea there's something shameful about renting long-term
01:01:36 How creating a power then turns it into a requirement - giving agents the power to come through homes every 6 months has turned it into something they have to do for their clients
01:03:58 Doing something about it - Make Renting Fair http://www.makerentingfair.org
01:07:07 Renters being treated as - and then thinking of themselves as - second-class citizens
01:09:34 How can someone have more rights leasing a car than a tenant has in their home?