Getting their house in order
The WA government announce they are finally ending no grounds evictions, including from public housing
I had a chat with the Prime Minister last week.
Well, I say chat - I asked him some questions as he walked away from me fast. Twice.
“What do you think about the WA Labor government evicting 3000 kids from public housing in just six years?” I asked the man who regularly references his upbringing in state housing, as he got out of his Comcar at the ABC’s Perth studio. Silence.
“Why are Aussie families sleeping in tents while the gas industry gets away without paying its fair share?” I tried again as he left just as quickly a short time later.
“Good luck to you,” was all I got in response.
Fair enough. He’d just flown into Perth to kind of, sort of announce he was rejecting a tax on gas exports that almost everyone in the country supports. He probably wasn’t prepared for a vox pop about the pointy end of Western Australia’s housing crisis.
But he should have been, because it wasn’t just me asking about it. In between my first attempt and my second, the PM spent 15 minutes doing talkback. The first question he got on air was from a mother who is currently sleeping in a tent with her kids because she can’t find anywhere for them to live.
Australia’s housing crisis is acute everywhere, but it’s particularly hard to rent in WA right now. Last week, Anglicare’s annual rental affordability snapshot showed that available rentals in WA have fallen from 14,000 properties in 2018 to just 3,000 across the state today. Meanwhile, average rents in WA have gone up 75% since the pandemic, three and a half times faster than wages.
It should be unsurprising, then, that yesterday the Labor government announced reforms to WA’s rental laws to abolish no grounds evictions.
Like a gas tax, it enjoys widespread support. In polling released last month, 80% of West Australians supported ending no grounds evictions, including a large majority of landlords.
And it would make WA the final state in the country to get rid of unfair no grounds evictions - making WA tenants the last in the country (apart from the NT) who can still be evicted into homelessness with no reason given, no evidence presented, no defence available, and no chance to fix any issues.
To do it, though, a Labor government with a massive Parliamentary majority had to stare down lobbying from vested interests to enact a policy broadly supported across the community. Sound familiar?
In this case, the WA real estate industry has claimed for years that ending unfair evictions will “spook” property investors from the market - as though a house they sell just disappears in a puff of smoke - despite no evidence from any other state that ending no grounds evictions has an impact on rental supply.
The government has also had to back down from their previous position because, believe it or not, the WA government currently evicts hundreds of families every year from public housing into homelessness.
Another question I asked Albo was what he thought about WA Labor unfairly evicting up to 1300 families from public housing without grounds since they formed government in 2017 - up to 40% of more than 3000 total public housing evictions in WA during that period.
One of those evictions was Mary Anne Miller, a First Nations woman who died of sepsis a month after she was evicted from public housing and only two weeks after she gave birth to her baby daughter. Tragically, there are many such cases. More than half of the families evicted from public housing in Western Australia every year are Aboriginal.
Ms Miller never got a chance to defend herself in court, and now her defenceless children will grow up without her. Her mother, Kaye Miller, blames the Department of Housing for her daughter’s death.
Yesterday, though, Kaye was ecstatic and magnanimous. “This news comes too late for my daughter, but it’s not too late for the next family,” she told me at our office. “Hopefully this will save the life of the next young mother in my daughter’s situation.”
For those of us who have campaigned for this change for years, this is news to celebrate but also to commemorate the families for whom it came too late. This news is long overdue, and evictions from public housing have cost too many lives.
Given the WA government now intends to end unfair evictions, they need to get their own house in order and immediately stop evicting families into homelessness from public housing for no good reason. The pressure will not stop until they do.
The Prime Minister didn’t want to defend his WA counterparts during his visit last week. By the next time he comes back, he might not have to. But maybe he could learn something about using a decisive electoral mandate to deliver things that people actually want.
This piece was co-published with Cheek Media.
