User:LeoPatRoss/Tenants' Union of New South Wales

Tenants' Union of New South Wales

The Tenants' Union of NSW is an organisation representing the interests of tenants and other renters, including residents of residential parks and boarding houses, in New South Wales, Australia. The Tenants Union of NSW is a specialist community legal centre with its own legal practice in residential tenancies law and is the primary resource body for the State-wide network of twenty-one Tenants Advice and Advocacy Services. This network comprises both generalist and Aboriginal services.

History
The earliest reference to a tenant organisation in New South Wales is the Rent Payers Association who campaigned for fair rent legislation in the period 1910 to 1916. During the Great Depression of the 1930s houses in the coal fields of were declared ‘black’ and left to rot because of unfair evictions by landlords. The Unemployed Workers Movement in Sydney employed tactics that included occupation and sieges. The situation became volatile and there were major confrontations between large numbers of tenants and police carrying batons and guns. This forced the State Government of the day to introduce a law postponing evictions where there was hardship. During the 1950s and 1960s the source of tenant power was their potential, not their actual activity. Legislation which was a legacy of the Second World War controlled rents and restricted evictions, and tenants wielded political influence through their concentration in certain electorates. However, with the phasing out of this legislation and the growth of home ownership, tenants declined as an electoral force. New tenants outside of rent control legislation were not easily identifiable as a voting group. By the early 1970s these new tenants comprised the bulk of tenants across New South Wales. The Australian Government Commission of Inquiry into Poverty at the time reported that landlord and tenant legislation across Australia was in many respects unfair to tenants, particularly the poor and disadvantaged. Indeed, a major report to the Poverty Commission stated that the law contained grave deficiencies that needed to be remedied in the interests of tenants. [Insert reference] The Poverty Commission’s report acted as a fillip to tenant activists and Tenants Unions emerged in a number of States. So state-wide tenant organisations have existed across Australia since the middle of the 1970s and their major focus has been lobbying for a better deal for both private and social housing tenants and other renters.