‘There’s real powerlessness’: Australian renters at the mercy of no-cause evictions

It was a tradesperson attending the house for another job who first alerted Natalie to the fact the wooden front stairway of her rental, a decaying Queenslander in an inner Brisbane suburb, was coming away from the wall.

"The thing was cracking and breaking away," Natalie says. "We alerted the real estate agent, and they came and wrapped warning tape around the stairs and told us not to use them. They said they'd fix it straight away."

Then the merry-go-round began. Tradespeople would turn up, assess the damage and send an email to the real estate agent, but no one ever came to fix anything.

"The real estate agent had people come out to look at it and give quotes, but never actioned the quotes. We'd follow up, they'd push us off, we'd follow up, they'd push us off," Natalie says.

With the front stairs unusable and the front door inaccessible, for months the household was forced to enter and exit the building through the back door, which required walking up a concrete path, including stairs, at the side of the house. Those stairs were also cracking and sloping, thanks to the same foundational damage.

The troubles began in April that year. In September, the real estate agent offered the household a new 12-month lease at the same rent, to take effect the following January.

"But we didn't want to sign it if they hadn't fixed the stairs," Natalie says.

In November, she sent the agent an email. "I said, if you don't give me a timeline to fix this within the next two weeks, we'll issue a notice to remedy breach. Then six days later they sent us an eviction notice."

Natalie and the rest of her household were issued with a "no-grounds" termination - a form of eviction in which the landlord does not need to provide a reason for ending a lease.

At the time, it was legal to evict a tenant without a reason in Queensland. The law was changed last year to outlaw the practice, except at the end of a fixed-term agreement.

Tenants' advocates say that in practice, this functions in much the same way as a blanket no-grounds option.

"Some of the better Australian jurisdictions only allow [no-grounds eviction] at the end of the first fixed term," says Joel Dignam, executive director of the advocacy organisation Better Renting. "But tenants around Australia are still able to be kicked out, or given notice, and then the property advertised for rental again only a couple of weeks later."

Tasmania has had a system similar to the new rules in Queensland since 1997. In Victoria, reforms that came into force in March last year made no-cause eviction legal only at the end of the first fixed-term agreement. However, there are still some reasons unrelated to the tenancy - such as sale of the property, or the desire to do major works - that landlords can use to evict a tenant at other times, although they must provide evidence.

In New South Wales, no-grounds evictions remain legal. A report on the cost and effects of eviction from the NSW Tenants' Union this year said eviction was "too often relied on".

"It is relatively easy for a landlord to evict a renter, and often accepted as a standard or common practice. This is so much the case that we currently accept 'no reason' in NSW tenancy law to be a good enough reason to evict. As a community, we are failing to effectively challenge its prevalence despite the clear harm that results from its use," the report said.

Researchers found the average total cost of eviction for renters ranged from $3,215 for a single-person household in greater Sydney to $5,400 for a family in regional NSW. Renters often found it traumatic, destabilising and stressful and an estimated 30% of renters in the state went through it.

Dignam says it's the threat of eviction as much as the reality that causes much of the harm to renters.

"That causes tenants to hold back, self-sensor and limit self-advocacy. That's our big concern - that landlords can wield that power, even if they don't put the eviction into effect."

Natalie believes her eviction was in direct response to her attempting to assert her rights as a renter. "We'd been offered another lease a month or two earlier. They were happy enough to have us prior to that, but then after we said we'd issue a breach, they evicted us."

And it wasn't the end of things. Two weeks before they were due to vacate, Natalie fell over on the cracked concrete side stairs and broke her leg. The fracture, just above her ankle, required two surgeries to fix. She hadn't planned to hire movers, but was forced to do so. She had to borrow money from her parents to cover the cost.

Natalie has a personal injury claim against the landlord pending. She hopes it will be resolved later this year.

Natalie, her partner and friends left the property in 2019. Only thanks to the passage of time does she feel confident enough to speak out about her experience, and asks that her surname not be used, as she is still renting.

"There's real powerlessness for renters," she says. "I had just finished studying law at the time when all this happened; I know how to negotiate, but you just can't because there are zero protections."

Better Renting and other tenants' advocacy groups argue the no-grounds eviction - and the end-of-lease evictions that function in the same way - ought to be abolished.