Perth Voice Interactive

FREMANTLE’s community independent candidate Kate Hulett this week announced a range of policies which she says target WA’s housing crisis. 

As part of the policy, Ms Hulett says she will push to ban ‘no-reason’ evictions, and revise current public housing policy to prevent eviction of children into homelessness. 

“WA is the only state in the country that continues to allow no-reason evictions, whereby families are evicted from their homes without being given any reason or opportunity to address it,” Ms Hulett said. 

“Worse still, as the WA government is the largest landlord in the state, with more than 30,000 public housing tenancies, the Labor government, as landlord, has evicted hundreds of families from public housing every year for no reason.”

WA housing minister John Carey denies this and says Ms Hulett’s claim is “false” and “uninformed” (See his letter).

Speaking from the abandoned Edgar Court public housing in Beaconsfield, Ms Hulett says the state government’s position is not conducive to its “eviction is a last resort” claim. 

“People were evicted from those homes because upgrades were supposed to happen five years ago,” Ms Hulett said. 

“It obviously wasn’t the last resort, because those houses are still standing, and those people could still be living here. 

“The government have policies that say housing is a human right, but that doesn’t sit comfortably with saying ‘eviction is a last resort’.”

Ms Hulett’s policy calls for a “minimum annual investment” in public housing which she says will achieve net-zero homelessness in WA by 2030, and proposes a public housing maintenance program to fill over 2000 currently empty public houses in WA. 

Inflation

She also wants to limit rent increases to the rate of inflation if she is elected to the seat of Fremantle at the March 8 election. 

Last year, the Cook government implemented rental reforms which restrict landlords from rent increases to once annually, but Ms Hulett says this was “inadequate” and required further reform. 

“Disappointingly, whilst the government’s rental reforms limited the number of times a landlord can raise the rent to once per year, it did not restrict the amount by which landlords can increase the rent,” Ms Hulett said. 

“This means that many renters are now worse off than they were before these reforms, many at risk of one massive annual increase that could be beyond their capacity to pay, risking eviction and homelessness.” 

Landlords Advisory Services owner Glen O’Brien is not supportive of a cap on rent, saying it could “disincentivise” property owners from purchasing rentals while interrupting the market. 

“The rental market sets itself…it’s supply and demand, so if the government interferes with the free market economy, then we have a skewed situation where things become out of whack,” Mr O’Brien said. 

“Leaving the government to supply housing has obviously been a disaster, so who else is going to provide housing? 

“We have to incentivise people to contribute to our housing stock through investment and wealth creation.” 

Earlier this week, Ms Hulett also announced she had received $20,000 in funding from Climate 200, who famously funded a range of Teal independents at the 2022 federal election. 

“I only applied a couple of weeks ago, when I began my campaign,” Ms Hulett said. 

“As far as I am aware, they have had many applications from across Australia, and they have a board of people who evaluate each application, and assess whether there is evidence that the community are likely to support the candidate. 

“It’s a really democratic way to support candidates who are pushing for serious climate action.” 

by KATHERINE KRAAYVANGER