Should people be made to pay for the damage they do to their public housing. Duh! Of course they should. Getting them to pay is another matter.

I rented my house out for 3 years & had 4 tenants in that time. Only one left the house in a habitable state. As for the bond. They don't pay rent for the last 4 weeks & stuff the bond. Could I retrieve the damages? Of course I could take them to Court, solicitors love that sort of thing & they still don't pay up after the Court Order. You still have to pay the solicitor though. Real Estate Agents, no responsibility.

Public Housing should be made of Masonry Block, walls, robes & the kitchen fittings, etc. Before the tenant moves in they should have to attend a full day course on what is expected in the way of behaviour, hygiene, cleanliness & budgeting, etc. Then the housing should be inspected monthly. If the house is not up to standard, another inspection a week later, then a cleaning crew should be sent in. The tenants made to pay for the clean up with a direct debit from their banking account or their Centre Link Payment.

3 clean ups & they're out permanently from Government Housing,their details & a report sent to all Real Estate Agents.

Dear worldwatcher,

Of course people should be held accountable for
wilful damage caused. And there should be regular inspections
of the properties for the sake of health and safety.
People should also be educated in what standards of
behaviour are expected of them prior to their acquiring
the properties. As Poirot stated - it's a no-brainer.

Speaking for my State and this would apply elsewhere (with bells on in the ACT!), Public housing tenants are covered by the same rental tenancy regulations as apply to privately owned housing. The rental tenancy regulations expressly provide that any Public housing policy must ensure Public housing tenants are advantaged with more rights and benefits. They cannot be disadvantaged.

Rental tenancy regulations are deliberately framed to ensure that the most disadvantaged and vulnerable in the community can get housing and are protected from penalty for the foibles expected of this population.

That means that the private owner and the State are forever their brother's keepers. To give an example, the owner of a rental is required by law to distribute the RTA's own policy and guidelines to the tenant. It is not enough that the policy is public and freely available, or that tenant advocacy services receive public funding, a tenant is always decreed to be 'informationally disadvantaged' and less than personally competent. The tenant cannot be relied upon to read a guvvy site or get a booklet from the Post Office. The building owner become an extension of the State welfare service and a tool of the RTA and will be fined severely if s/he does not obtain and provide RTA policy and guidelines to the tenant.

contin below..

contd..

Likewise it is the State through the RTAs that has taken over residential tenancy agreements and State influence and control permeates down to the most minor responsibilities, always ensuring to transfer the traditional responsibilities of tenants (eg for minor maintenance and upkeep) to the owner. Recently the Qld RTA has taken to giving advice (it will become direction in time via Tribunal decisions) to owners on how to manage their property, and instance being that the owner should have contractors clean gutters routinely and regularly throughout the year. Likewise, rental property must always be maintained to 'good' condition. That is a condition rarely achieved for private homes ie principal place of residence because it is prohibitively expensive.

There is every encouragement and protection for a tenant to be casual with the expensive asset at his disposal and precious little the owner, including Public Housing, can do about it. Although well meant, weighting the tenancy provisions for the tenant and replacing his responsibilities with a extreme duty of care for the owner advantages the quick-witted professional tenants and those who refuse (usually willfully) to take responsibility for their actions to abuse the system. That adds enormous overheads, the cost of which must be passed on in rents and limits the supply of rental housing.

Well my view on state housing, is that such housing should be in the form of rooms to rent, in a unit complex, not a stand alone house.

Why should anyone, just because they have kids, be entitled to thier own house to live in, when unit style accommodation would offer far better value for money for the tax payer, because after all said and done, it's the tax payer that provides housing, just as much as the governments.

So I say that all state (houses) should be sold off to tenants, by way of a rent to buy scheme, with the funds generated going towards building state units, because after all, state housing, like any form of welfare, should be a 'hand up', not a 'hand out' which is so often the case.

Finally, yes, all damage sustained, regardless of who causes it, should be the responsibility of the tenant.

Of cause I will get hung for this, but that's life when you tell it how you see it.

rehctub,

Your "rooms to rent" idea is straight out of the annals of the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. I mentioned tenements that accommodated up to twenty families....they all had "rooms".

What a great retrograde idea...let's make all the plebs feel like they're crud. Let's not give them any pride in running their own "house"hold. Let's get all the kids to grow up with a chip on their shoulders, because they were the "roomies" - the kids that grew up living in rooms because their families didn't deserve to have a house.

"Why should anyone, just because they have kids,be entitle to their own house to live in..."

What a question from a twentieth century middle-class male who inhabits a technologically advanced industrial country.

It's straight out of Dickens.

Sheesh!