Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Family Feud is for tenants' rights!

Last night something big happened for tenants rights in Australia. Family Feud big.

In amongst questions about yo-yos, and what social events men find boring, there was a question that perked up the ears of a number of Brown Couch friends. The question, what are the reasons why tenants might get evicted. The answers, in order were: rent arrears; being noisy; being messy; causing damage; parties.... And that's it.

At first we thought they'd just forgotten about evictions for "no grounds" (when really, it's because you asked for repairs), or evictions for moving vulnerable people out to make way for casinos, or evictions for developers to double their money in a month.
Then we realised, this wasn't an accident. Family Feud and their audience of more than half a million Australians every night can arguably serve as a touchstone for community standards.

Family Feud asks 100 people for their answers to a variety of questions, and in this case gave the top five reasons a tenant might get evicted. In fact answer 5 (parties) only attracted seven responses, and there were only two responses not represented on the board.
What is important is that all of the answers were evictions for breaches of the tenancy agreement. The contestants, even the ones who gave "incorrect" responses, identified possible breaches of the agreement. No one thought tenants should be evicted for no reason.

We'd like to thank Grant and the Family Feud production team, the Dean and Beattie families, and most importantly, the people of Australia, for recognising the need for tenancy reform through the introduction of reasonable grounds terminations.

Visit our website for more information on our position in relation to reasonable grounds terminations

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please keep your comments PC - that is, polite and civilised. Comments may be removed at the discretion of the blog administrator; no correspondence will be entered into. Comments that are abusive of individual persons, or are sexist, racist or otherwise offensive will be removed, so don’t bother leaving them.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.