Government Can't Do A Lot About Agents' Discrimination
 by Tim O’Dwyer
Queensland Solicitor & Consumer Advocate
watchdog@argonautlegal.com.au
In the Queensland Parliament this week a backbencher put this Dorothy Dix question to the Minister for Housing, Robert Schwarten:
"It has been drawn to my attention that a number of real estate agents on the Sunshine Coast are refusing applicants for rental properties because they have Department of Housing bond loans. Can the minister please advise if he is aware of this practice?"
This was the Minister’s lame reply:
"I thank the honourable member for her question and the fact that she wrote to me on 18 October about this matter. It is alarming, and it ought to be concerning to anybody who has any form of social justice in their conscience. Every member of this parliament knows that the honourable member is a sterling example of someone who has a very well developed social conscience, so it is not surprising to find that the honourable member is most concerned to learn that real estate agents on the Sunshine Coast have been refusing to take people who have Department of Housing bond loans on their rent rolls and into tenancies.
The reality is that those bond loans are our way, as a state government, of trying to assist people who cannot raise the bond to access the private rental market. It is of grave concern to me and to the government that real estate agents are prejudging people who come to them with a bond loan supplied by this government and saying that they are not going to provide them with a tenancy. I say to those real estate agents that they should re-examine what they are doing in that regard. I thought we had long departed from that form of discrimination of prejudging people on the basis that they are poor. The fact that they are poor and cannot raise a bond loan does not make them bad people. I would have thought that we would have moved on from that presumption.
What can I do about it? Well at the moment not a lot, unfortunately. We cannot force real estate agents to take bonds, but I have asked the Residential Tenancies Authority to examine this matter with a view to seeing what we can do. Because my view is that, if those real estate agents do not want to take a bond from a person in those circumstances for no valid reason, then it might well be that the Residential Tenancies Authority does not take bonds from them at all and therefore renders their rent roll redundant. I do not want to take that approach. I do not want to go in there with the big stick, but I am also not going to stand by and see perfectly good people discriminated against simply on the basis that they are too poor to come up with the necessary four-week bond that is required in those circumstances. I have asked the RTA to meet with the REIQ to try to unlock this situation. I do not for one moment expect private landlords to have people who do the wrong thing in their rental properties. We do not tolerate it in public housing and I do not expect private landlords to tolerate it either."
(See where the Minister recently "blasted" Tim O'Dwyer: "Queensland System Is The Best In Australia"
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