May Azize continued:

Our campaign calls for limits to rent increases, not freezes per se. You know, we’ve got this working. We don’t need to look to overseas. We’ve got this working in Australia here in the ACT, in the ACT, there are limits on how much further than CPI landlords can increase the rent by. And we think that’s a pretty good model.

It’s actually pretty modest by international standards. In most other countries it’s really not possible for landlords to raise rents further than about 2% of CPI in Australia in just about every other part of the country outside of the ACT, landlords can hand down an unlimited rent increase.

So, you know, it’s really not surprising that we’re seeing annual rent increases every single year in the order of 5 to 10%. Young people are much more likely to be renters.

There’s a generation of people who are locked out of home ownership, and these proposals are not going to do anything for them. So I’d be really surprised and disappointed if we didn’t see something for the hundreds of thousands of people who rent.

But most importantly, the 640,000 people who are in really, really extreme rental stress with absolutely nothing that they can afford to rent, hanging on to unaffordable rentals with, with, you know, bloody fingernails.

So we need to see proposals that go beyond just providing some incentives to the private market. We’ve seen from the Labor announcement over the weekend, a proposal to build 100,000 or to give some zero interest loans to states and territories to incentivise them to work with private sector, to bring new homes online.

That’s all very indirect.