Reprinted from the Nation of Change
Earlier this month, Hawaii State representative Tom Bower (D) began walking the streets of his Waikiki district with a sledgehammer, and smashing shopping carts used by homeless people. “Disgusted” by the city’s chronic homelessness problem, Bower decided to take matters into his own hands — literally. He also took to rousing homeless people if he saw them sleeping at bus stops during the day.
On 12 December 2013, the Senate referred an inquiry into affordable housing to the Senate Economics References Committee for inquiry and report. Submissions should be received by 25 March 2014. The reporting date is 26 June 2014.
Find out more here.
Picture from the Bulletin
Good news for some but not so for those locked into overpriced agreements. Read the Rockhampton Bulletin article here.
Listen to this ABC Radio National documentary on the WA hardline ‘three strikes and you’re out policy’ by clicking this link. Or read the introduction below.
No-one likes bad neighbours, and West Australia’s hardline three strikes policy to evict troublesome public housing tenants is popular with residents keen to preserve the tranquillity in their streets.Queensland has now embraced its own version of the policy, and there are calls in South Australia for that state to do the same.But in WA there are growing concerns among housing advocates and welfare groups that the hardline approach is having a devastating impact on Indigenous families, forcing many children into homelessness”. From Perth, Andrew O’Connor reports on three women living with the consequences of eviction. Listen to the piece here.
Read this story from the Brisbane Times from January 14. The comments on the story also make interesting reading.
Stronger tenancy laws – do you think we need them? This article in The Conversation follows on from the Radio National Breakfast piece we posted on the 6th.
Listen here for an interview by the Tenants’ Union of Queensland’s (TUQ) Executive Director,
Penny Carr, about tenant advice funding and what 2014 holds for tenants and the TUQ.
Save Tenant Services wishes everyone a happy, healthy and successful 2014. And once again we would like to thank you for all your support throughout last year.
You, STS supporters, are awesome!
We wish you a happy and safe time spent with family and friends over the festive season.
Tenant advice services help people avoid homelessness and reduce demand on social housing and homelessness services. Help save tenant services in Queensland.
We think this is a good article. Queensland lead the way introducing protections against the unreasonable practices of tenancy database companies. Now most, if not all states and territories have some form of protection, despite that some companies continually try to find new ways to work around them.
It was Queensland tenant advocates that pushed for these initial protections, not industry. What will happen when the advocates are gone? The market will become skewed and unfair. It’s going to be a rocky road ahead for Qld tenants.
TROUBLED tenants on the Fraser Coast will have nowhere to get face-to-face help with closure of the Fraser Coast office of the Tenants Union of Queensland (TUQ).
For 19 years the not-for-profit organisation provided an outreach service from the Maryborough Neighbourhood Centre every Monday, offering advice and assistance to renters. (Read the entire article directly from the website here).
