It seems highly likely the government will be making some temporary changes to tenancy laws to support tenants unable to pay their rent due to COVID-19 job losses for example. Here’s what the Prime Minister said on Sunday night (with highlighting by us) and we will be updating our clients as soon as there’s further announcements:
“States also agreed today, and further work will be done on this, are working to identify how relief can be provided for tenants in both commercial tenancies and residential tenancies to ensure that in hardship conditions there will be relief that will be available and ensuring the tenancy legislation is protecting those tenants over the next six months at least. That work will be done by states and territories as it is a state and territory matter, and that work will be led by Western Australia, together with New South Wales, working with all the other states and territories to bring back some model rules that can be applied in hardship cases. So understanding what the trigger might be and how in those circumstances that tenants would be able to maintain their tenancies. Now I know that will mean something for landlords, just as the decision taken today means something for banks, just like the decisions we have already taken as a Commonwealth Government means things for our balance sheets and as a people for the Commonwealth Government as it does for the states. It will also mean something for those, who sadly, might be stood down from their employment and have to look at their annual leave arrangements and sick leave arrangements. All Australians are going to be making sacrifices obviously, in the months ahead, and everyone does have that role to play and that will include landlords, at the end of the day for people who are enduring real hardship.”
Never let a crisis go to waste, they say, and Labor and the political left in Australia are seizing the COVID 19 crisis here, with both horny hands. The Queensland Government has already foreshadowed anti-Landlord changes to the tenancy laws. The present crisis is a wonderful opportunity for State Labor Governments everywhere to punish the Landlord even further, and this opportunity will not be wasted. It will all be for the tenant, and against the landlord. Already we can see the shape of things to come. The tenant won’t have to pay the rent, if he/she can demonstrate being affected by the crisis: the tenant cant be evicted; the landlord cant make inspections … the list will go on and on. The landlord is, by definition, a rich b…… who can absorb any extra impost laid upon him. And if the landlord cant pay his mortgage, or rates, because the tenant isn’t paying him … Well, that’s what you get for being a filthy capitalist, and trying to save and invest in the first place, ain’t it?
History is full of government laws and programs that have been touted as “temporary”, only to thereafter become entrenched. This will make it clear to everyone that private property rights are nothing of the sort – not any longer. The landlord will have all of the responsibility but no control over the benefits. The government gets to control the benefits but has none of the responsibility. Time for a serious rethink about the future of such “investments”.