Residential property investors collectively receive billions of dollars in subsidies.

It is entirely fair, as is the case with others receiving government handouts (including members of society's poorest), to impose obligations on them in return for the generous assistance they are provided, and it is GENEROUS or otherwise they wouldn't be in the game.

On water efficiency, the investor should be denied the right to recover water usage charges from a tenant unless water fittings are of the highest efficiency available (eg 4.5/3L toilet cistern, hot water recirculation device, insulated hot water pipes throughout, high efficiency tap and shower fittings and a rainwater tank with a capacity minimum of 1000 Litres per bedroom for all semi-detached and freestanding rental properties.

As a condition of receiving such generous federal tax subsidies, the investor should be forbidden from replacing hot water when its needed to be replaced with anything that does not include solar panels, ie they MUST go solar to get the tax breaks when replacing hot water. It must also be a precondition to receive such subsidies that any existing property be retrofitted with ceiling insulation throughout, and that any new property taken up must also have wall and ceiling insulation.

Its obvious that the market or the industry won't pick up its act, so regulation is necessary to drive change. Its often only through regulation that change which has been difficult to achieve can be achieved.

The country's renters have among them many of its poorest and most vulnerable citizens, paying more for essential uses of hot water and power than many of the well-off. This must change.

Subsidies bollocks,

The government is doing its best to suck off the profits with land tax, capital gains tax, and if there is anything left, income tax.

Guaranteed, the gov would not see the green improvements as tax deductable. If this was the case, then maybe the landlords might use some of what is left do upgrade their retirement investments.

Profitable landlords: Do they exist?

If property investing wasn't a highly profitable wealth creation strategy, then so many people wouldn't be doing it, so many people are doing it, so ergo it is highly profitable. Its money made from government and off the backs of many of society's poorer and more vulnerable citizens, not hard-earned dough, and I think it could also be called non-personal exertion income. Lets just refer to the bulk of them as Slumlords, driving artificially high prices for essentially substandard housing, often uninsulated and highly environmentally unsustainable and energy inefficient.

The billions of dollars in subsidies are all the tax breaks and deductions, and also in recent years the granting under some conditions of capital gains tax concessions and capitulation of state governments (their dropping or cutting land tax) to the investor lobby.

Many experts now agree that negative gearing has driven up demand for, and the price of, housing and land to artifically high levels. Go figure.

Indignant outcast,

For someone who has probably spent most of his life mooching off the system to cast stones at the majority of investors, who have invested their life savings in a property or two as an inflation proof retirement income, is a little rich.

The rental return is about 40% of the interest they pay, so the renters are being subsidised by the expected capital gain.

These are often the people that fund the construction of new homes and without their hard earned investment, indigents such yourself would have to either rely on state housing or, god forbid, work and pay off a mortage.

I sometimes get the impression that there is a whole "other population" in Australia, where people wander around in healthy natural-fibre underwear, gathering woolly thoughts, dreaming up right-on fantasies, and turning them into articles like this, that they can keep looking up on the Internet and experience the warm, soggy feeling of holier-than-thouness.

I'm just glad I don't actually get introduced to these folk. Suppressing hysterical laughter can be unhealthy, and I'd hate to vomit all over their sandals.

"The property market has delivered considerable financial rewards to Australian landlords and lined the pockets of real estate agents across the country"

Well, there goes lunch.

"The property market" does not, in any way shape or form "deliver" anything to anybody, let alone "considerable financial rewards".

Sure, there are investors, who - just like everybody else in the real world - have to endure the good with the bad, the rough with the smooth, the paying tenants as well as the absconders, the model tenants as well as the ones who trash the place beyond recognition.

It is nothing more sinister than a financial equation that might offer an adequate reward to the investor. "Considerable financial rewards" simply don't come into it.

The authors make a very persuasive case, in the course of a number of paragraphs, as to why there exists no incentive for landlords to "go green". Having made their point so eloquently, their sole suggestion is that the landlords' "windfall" should be used to this end.

And presumably, since they are tarred with the same brush, "real estate agents across the country" should be asked to contribute too, although - despite having introduced them - the article is strangely silent on the means by which this could occur.

The only possible position from which such a solution can be aired without danger of the authors being drowned in a sea of raucous mirth, is a solidly tenured position in the halls of academe.

I rarely begrudge the part of my taxes that pays for the education of young Australia. But today I'm prepared to make an exception.