A letter from Jenny Leong, Newtown's Greens MP

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Dear 2042 Locals,

I’m Jenny Leong, the Greens MP for the electorate of Newtown and your representative in the NSW Parliament.

As the NSW Greens spokesperson for Housing and Homelessness, so much of the work our office and I do is centred on making sure everyone has a safe, affordable, accessible and secure place to call home and on expanding protections for renters across the state. With the housing affordability crisis worsening daily and too many community members in public housing or private rentals alike struggling to keep a roof over their head, this work is more important than ever.

Yet despite unending stories of young people being kicked out of their homes in retaliation for requesting basic maintenance, or single mothers for whom a drastic price hike is a de facto eviction notice, and more older people struggling in our city, Labor has done nothing to expand protections for the 2 million people who rent statewide.

One year into the Minns NSW Labor Government’s first term, we are still yet to see progress on their election promise to finally end unfair no grounds evictions in NSW.

Under current NSW law, landlords do not need to provide a reason for evicting people from their rental home. Housing security for tenants is at the whim of their landlord - regardless of how long they have lived in a home, how they have treated it, and whether they have always paid rent on time.

According to data from Fair Trading, one tenant is evicted every 18 minutes in NSW. This grim picture is compounded by the Tenants’ Union of NSW’s Evictions Map, which shows that across the state 13,011 landlords applied for an eviction through the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT) in 2023 - the actual number of evictions is likely to be much higher, given that not every landlord progresses evictions through NCAT.

As no doubt so many of you know, renters who are evicted from their homes face an incredibly bleak rental market in which vacancy rates are at all-time lows and rents continue to rise unchecked. It’s clear that action must be taken now to protect them from this dire reality - and if the NSW Labor Government won’t move to do this, the Greens will. With all the focus on building new homes to address the housing crisis, we also need to be doing everything we can to ensure people can stay in the homes they are already in, without the risk of being evicted for no reason.

At the last Parliamentary sitting in February, I introduced a Greens Bill to finally end unfair no grounds evictions for all tenancies in NSW - like both the ACT and South Australia have already done. The Bill would establish clear grounds on which tenancies could be terminated, alongside penalties for landlords who claim to be evicting a tenant so they themselves can move into a rental home or to renovate it but do not actually do so.

We will be progressing the Bill through Parliament as soon as possible, and urge all members of Parliament to listen to the renters in their communities and urgently pass this overdue reform.

Watch my speech introducing the Bill here.

Yours sincerely, 

Jenny Leong MP

Member for Newtown

P.S. - Whether or not you rent, if you’re concerned about a local issue or if our office can assist with a specific matter, don’t hesitate to get in touch by calling us on 9517 2800, emailing newtown@parliament.nsw.gov.au, or visiting our office at 383 King Street, Newtown.

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