Rental accommodation - Protections

7 May 2026

Motion

Hon Tim Clifford (10:30 am) without notice: I move:

That this house:

(a) acknowledges that the Cook government has finally stood up to the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia by announcing a ban on no-fault evictions, unlike its many predecessors, including the previous Labor government that had a double majority;

(b) notes the failure of successive governments to adequately deal with the rental crisis, by implementing rent control measures;

(c) acknowledges that the right of every Western Australian to a home must be prioritised over the interests of investors;

(d) rejects dangerous and divisive rhetoric that falsely blames the rental crisis on immigrants, when it is clear that the rental crisis is a policy failure;

(e) calls on the government to continue working to bring renters’ rights into line with best practice; and

(f) calls on the government to spend a large part of any budget surplus on public housing, noting that efforts to increase rental supply have so far failed to address the need at lower price points.

Hon Dr Steve Thomas (10:51 am) :

Thank you, President! Pardon my enthusiasm.

I congratulate Hon Tim Clifford; this is my personal congratulations. I know that Hon Tim Clifford has campaigned on this issue for many years. I knew him prior to his re-emergence in the Legislative Council. He was passionate about these issues in a previous Parliament and he has been passionate about these issues again. Not too many people get to mount a campaign that actually changes the government's plan and policy. Well done, Hon Tim Clifford, not that I necessarily agree with his outcome, but congratulations on achieving it. I like to think I have done the same thing in energy in completely changing the government's policy and agenda, with a bit of help from Hon Dr Brad Pettitt. He has achieved something. I will warn the honourable member that nobody likes the "I told you so" speech, so he will have to work at that one pretty hard, but he has achieved something significant, so well done on his work.

Having said that, I will talk about the potential impacts on landlords across the board, not even those most affected by the changes pushed by Hon Tim Clifford and now adopted by the government, but a larger package of impacts on landlords. It is unfortunate that we vilify landlords in the debates around rentals et cetera, because landlords provide a service to people. Landlords are critically important. The vast majority of housing stock available in the marketplace is owned by the private sector, and those people need support as well as the people who are renters. I start with this concept. It is difficult to tell people to invest in residential real estate at the moment. Most of the people I know who have invested in it in the past are getting out of it. Some of them are particularly good at it but many of them say that the difficulty is that if they look at investing in commercial real estate, that is a contract where they have far more control over their asset than in residential real estate, where previous changes mean they have less control over their asset. Therefore, a number of people are shifting in the marketplace. That is not to say that no-fault evictions and the discussion around that has driven that particular process, but it is one of the many parts of this policy that they have to deal with.

I actually suspect that a far bigger impact on the stock of residential housing will be the federal Albanese government as it discusses changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing. That will probably have a far bigger impact on what is happening in the rental marketplace, but this may also have an impact. The biggest problem we have today is that we are discussing things that will be announced in budgets at a state level this afternoon and at a federal level next Tuesday. When someone asks, "What is the opposition's position on the proposal by Hon Tim Clifford or what is being proposed by the state government or by the Albanese government?", my answer is, "How would I know until I have seen it?" How would I know and understand the impacts on renters, landlords and property owners until we see the legislation and know what the impacts will be? It is very hard to give a position on this motion or whatever the government might do at two o'clock this afternoon until I have been through it in detail.

It is possible, I suspect, that the federal changes on, particularly, negative gearing will have a far bigger impact. Negative gearing is a tax deduction for a legitimate expense. If someone buys an investment property and they have to upgrade something, if it is a capital gain, they put it through a depreciation process. If it is a fixing of a property, then guess what? It is like every other business. I have run a business. I ran a business for nearly 20 years. When there is an expense, I get a tax deduction for it. That is federal legislation, not state, but it is a potential multi-pronged attack—potentially, if that is what it looks like—on residential landlords, who in my view are sick and tired of being vilified. Many of them do the right thing. Many of them try to look after their tenants and many of them have not put their rent up arbitrarily. There are some great landlords out there. There are some terrible landlords out there who rort the system and make it worse for everybody, but we could say the same for every industry, including mine, the veterinary profession.

I will not mention the number for members of Parliament and politicians, President. That might be dangerous and I might not get protection of parliamentary privilege! Obviously, 20% of the population are lunatics who do the wrong thing, in every field. We understand that, but there are some very good landlords out there who may or may not be negatively impacted going forward by both the state and federal proposals to changes to their business model. And so, somebody in my view, needs to speak up for those who take their hard-earned dollars and invest in residential real estate that provides housing for a number of people who cannot invest in it themselves for a lot of financial reasons.

Part of that financial reason, and we do not address this very often because it is too politically dangerous, is that the price of housing in Western Australia doubled in about 2003, 2004 and 2005, and it doubled again over the last three years. The price of housing compared with average income used to be three to one. The average income is now just over $100,000 and the average house price is about $840,000, so it is now eight to one. It was previously higher than that. The biggest issue is the cost of housing. If the government is going to make housing more affordable more generally, it has to make houses cheaper, and nobody who currently owns a house and has invested in it or owns their own home is going to like that as a policy position. That is very difficult to sell, so we fiddle around the edges on housing policy.

I will ask at some point, and perhaps I will have a conversation outside with the mover of the motion, about his comments around the impacts of no-fault evictions over east. He may well be right, and we will chase that up, no doubt, in the fullness of time, because there will be some legislation to debate. I am interested to see whether that has had any impact on overall housing stocks and housing availability, because it looks like states in Australia that have no-fault evictions, and Western Australia and the Northern Territory that do not, all have a housing crisis. I am not convinced that Victoria's situation is any better than ours. Does it get more people into houses? I am not convinced. Will it protect renters? It obviously will. Will it disadvantage landlords? It may well do, but it might not have a huge impact compared with some of the other impacts that will be enforced upon people who invest by the federal government, particularly in terms of capital gains tax and negative gearing. It is a little hard to say whether the opposition supports or opposes the motion given we have a limited amount of technical detail. The detail is always where the devil is and that will ultimately determine what the opposition thinks of any of these proposals and what those impacts are.

In my last minutes, I will throw in a couple of other options that we do not talk about that we might play with. There are some interesting ways we might address housing availability. One of those I have talked about publicly for a while now. If we are going to limit taxation on investment housing, there is a better way to do it in my view, and that is land tax. When someone buys their own house, they do not pay land tax on that because it is their principal place of residence. If they buy an investment house, they will pay land tax—and holy mackerel, they pay a lot of land tax now. What if as a policy position we said, "Your first two residential houses will be land tax free if they go into the long-term rental market"? I like that. I actually think that is better than what is being proposed by Hon Tim Clifford, and I have a lot of respect for Hon Tim Clifford.

Hon Kate Doust : Have you just made a policy announcement for your party?

Hon Dr Steve Thomas : No. I have talked about this for many years; it is my personal position, Hon Kate Doust. This is not a new concept.

I actually think there are other options we should look at that give a better return. Apparently, the government is going to announce some stamp duty changes. I would be very interested in seeing the technical detail of that because it may or may not be a good thing. It might be terrible or it might not be enough. We will have a look at that when we get to the budget this afternoon. We should also look at other options, and that is not to immediately dismiss what Hon Tim Clifford is putting forward. I think we need to have a serious look at all these things and we need a proper analysis of those likely impacts.

I will finish on this note. It is critical to me that those people who have worked hard their entire lives and have used residential property investment as their wealth creation device—I am not ashamed of people who create wealth; I think it is great for the economy—should not be vilified as a part of this process. The vast majority of them should not be demonised. They deserve as much protection as everybody else. I will stand in this place in the fullness of time to deliver that.