The NSW Labor government wants to ban landlords from evicting tenants on the grounds they want to renovate the property – and will impose financial disincentives on those who do – as a key election promise remains unresolved.
The rental market is a missing piece of the housing puzzle the Minns government has been unable to solve as it struggles to deliver a compromise position on no-grounds evictions.
With the looming NSW Labor state conference this month the first for Chris Minns as premier, the parliamentary party will be under pressure to show members it has made headway on the policy.
Premier Chris Minns says his government must move on rental reforms because it was an election commitment. Credit: Peter Rae
No-grounds evictions are banned in all states except Western Australia, but NSW has struggled to land the reforms 16 months after coming to power.
In a bid to pressure the Minns government, Greens MP Jenny Leong introduced her own bill requiring landlords to give reasonable grounds before terminating fixed or periodic leases.
Her bill has been referred to a parliamentary inquiry, to report by September. However, Minns on Tuesday indicated that the government’s long-overdue legislation is closer as he outlined a plan to stop landlords using renovations as an excuse for evicting a tenant.
Minns told 2GB many landlords did the right thing by tenants but some, along with real estate agents, are “handing both an eviction notice or a massive rent increase [to the tenant] and then saying, ‘well, you choose’.”
Minns said some landlords could be spuriously using renovations as grounds for eviction, but an answer could be banning the property from being relisted for a period of weeks.
This would mean the landlord would forgo some rental income while the property was renovated.
Minns said the government was very aware rental reforms were urgently needed.
“We have to do something we believe, a) because it’s an election commitment, and secondly because from 2016 to 2021 we lost twice as many young people in NSW as we gained, and that’s including all the inbound migration NSW takes from the rest of the world,” Minns said.
In July last year the government released a discussion paper canvassing a ban on no-grounds evictions in both fixed and periodic leases.
In February it had received a record number of submissions, but concluded more time was needed to develop a bill.
Tenants’ Unions of NSW chief executive Leo Patterson Ross said reasonable grounds to end a tenancy was “a crucial part of a modern renting system”.
“New reasonable grounds should concentrate on whether the property is going to remain in use as a rental property,” Patterson Ross said.
“If it is genuinely being removed from use as a rental, then renters need to know they can trust that this is the case.”
Leong, the Greens spokesperson on housing and homelessness, said it was “pretty obvious to anyone who rents that real estate agents and landlords can’t police themselves”.
“Our bill would introduce a penalty of up to $11,000 for landlords who lie to evict a tenant illegally. Watering this down to a couple of thousand dollars in lost rental income is designed to mitigate the losses to landlords – including all those landlords that sit inside the Labor Party caucus.”
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