“Human rights? Yeh right, they should be grateful to have somewhere to live” seems to be the thinking in faraway Tramalot Castle, where Baron Rattenbury is trying to screw the peasants. It’s another “Seven Days” with IAN MEIKLE.

THE territory’s biggest landlord has just copped a clip over the ear from the ACT Human Rights Commission for planning to put its tenants in an evictable position that would breach their human rights. 

Now, what neo-liberal scallywags would deliberately attempt to put tenants with disabilities, older people, single parents, children and young people at risk, people escaping family or personal violence as well as tenants with backgrounds of trauma including refugees, and those reliant on social security payments in this fragile position with no recourse to appeal?

The ACT Labor-Greens government, of course!

In response to its public exposure draft of the Residential Tenancies Legislation Amendment Bill 2022, Dr Helen Watchirs (President and Human Rights Commissioner) and Karen Toohey (Discrimination, Health Services, and Disability and Community Services Commissioner) have fired a warning bazooka across the bows of Attorney-General Shane Rattenbury’s whizkids, the Legislation, Policy and Programs people at the Justice and Community Safety Directorate.

“While the ACT Human Rights Commission welcomes aspects of the draft bill, we cannot support it in its current form. The proposed termination provisions for social housing, community housing and supported accommodation tenancies give rise to serious issues of incompatibility with the Human Rights Act 2004,” they wrote in an 11-page pasting.

A third of households in the ACT are renters. The ACT government is proposing laws to remove “no-cause evictions”, make it an offence for landlords or agents to solicit rent bids and strengthen minimum standards for rental properties, that is unless you’re a Housing ACT tenant.

“It will replace ‘no-cause’ evictions for social housing tenants with several new grounds for eviction that are excessively broad and often not subject to administrative review,” said ACT Council of Social Service CEO Dr Emma Campbell. 

“While this legislation introduces more protections for private tenants, it takes away security of tenure from social-housing tenants, by introducing a raft of reforms that will allow social-housing tenancies to be terminated with little or no consideration of the circumstances of the tenant.” Rattenbury, with a straight face and no reference to the lot of social-housing tenants, said: “With growing pressure on rental affordability and availability, the ACT government is modernising tenancy laws to create more secure housing and a fairer rental system for all Canberrans.” 

But the Human Rights Commission is on to him: “While the draft Bill… promotes the rights of private tenants, paradoxically it reduces security of housing for those tenants in the ACT community with the most acute experiences of disadvantage… where eviction from home is therefore most likely to lead to homelessness.

“Our primary concern with the proposed termination provisions is that they confer broad and non-reviewable discretions on public, community and affordable-housing lessors. This sits in direct contrast to section 28 of the Human Rights Act, which states: ‘Human rights may be subject only to reasonable limits set by laws’.

“The draft bill proposes a departure from the longstanding status quo whereby all tenancies include the same clauses no matter if the tenancy is with a private or social housing lessor.” 

AND so, back to the pothole frontline where I have a couple of updates. 

The “CityNews” pet pothole in Belconnen has been filled pretty quickly. Big tick.

Meanwhile, south at Cooleman Court, where my Stirling snout initially introduced us to the mother of all potholes, principally the work of heavy buses and fruitless repairs over years. 

He reports it’s been fixed, only to subside in a couple of days, scoring the repair work at 1/10. 

“The base is not strong enough to cater for buses,” he bristles.

“The whole area at the bus stop needs to be cut out to a depth of at least 30 centimetres, a proper base installed and tamped down and then veneered with asphalt – and the bill sent to the company that did the original work. 

“It’s time local member and Minister for City Services, the man of Steel, and his senior road-making and pothole-filling executives got out there and kicked arse!”

Another reader thinks the prevalence of potholes on ACT roads are the result of cheap road laying.

“I took a friend along on a day’s ‘Canola Drive’ through some of the beautiful Hilltops area via Binalong/Harden-Murrumburrah/Boorowa and back,” she writes. “For that day I’d especially put a note on my dashboard: ‘Drive slowly to see any potholes’.

“On return I realised that we’d neither seen nor hit any potholes once we’d left the ACT on that day.”

HOW does this work? A seriously inattentive young householder who sold her Tuggeranong Valley house and moved to Weston Creek in 2018, recently wondered if she’d been paying the annual rates on the new place. She couldn’t recall any rates notices. Best to check. A call to Canberra Connect that only took an hour in wait time (lucky, I guess), revealed a festering, silent debt of $14,500 (including $2300 in penalties). Yikes! How is this possible, she asked?

Turns out the revenue logs diligently kept sending rates notices – year after year – for her new address to her old address and, four years on, no single bureaucrat troubled themselves to wonder why the rates were never paid. Not one knocked on the Weston Creek door. No one wrote. They just kept adding penalties and blindly sending rate notices to the wrong address. 

Considering how broke this government is, you’ve got to wonder at the lack of energy to chase debt. The Bank of Dad is getting it sorted.

Ian Meikle is the editor of “CityNews” and can be heard with Rod Henshaw on the “CityNews Sunday Roast” news and interview program, 2CC, 9am-noon. There are more of his columns on citynews.com.au