‘Mould': Horror truth about renting in Oz
Twenty per cent of Australian rentals have mouldy bathrooms, a new survey has found.
Research from the Australian Council of Social Service and the University of NSW has found on top of the mouldy bathrooms, some 70 per cent of tenants are too scared to ask for repair work for fear of copping a rent increase.
'This report validates what renters across Australia already know. Despite extensive rental laws on paper, this report exposes the stark gap between legislation and reality for Australian renters,' National Association of Renters' Organisations spokesman Leo Patterson Ross said.
'Weak oversight of rental costs, property standards and industry practices have denied renters the benefits of a safe, stable and healthy home.' A survey of 1000 Australian renters found 20 per cent have mouldy bathrooms. Supplied Credit: Supplied
The social services council and university surveyed 1019 people who rent in the private sector across the country.
The survey found 73 per cent of renters had a rent increase in the past year; a third of renters said a 5 per cent hike would make it difficult to cover rent.
About one-in-three rental houses had cockroaches or ants, a quarter had leaks or flooding and 18 per cent had mould in the bathroom.
Tenants fear that asking for repairs to be done can lead to rent hikes (68 per cent) or evictions (56 per cent).
Social services council chief executive, Cassandra Goldia, said the housing market was failing.
'It is completely unacceptable that people in the private rental market are nervous about asking for essential repairs because they fear a rent increase or eviction notice,' Dr Goldie said. Advocates say there are large gaps between rental laws and the protections for tenants in reality. NewsWire / David Crosling Credit: News Corp Australia
'Everyone deserves to be able to live in secure homes without the constant fear of losing their home.
'We urge state and federal governments to work together to cap rent increases, abolish no-grounds evictions and boost social housing to ensure people on low incomes have safe, secure and affordable homes.'
The university, social services council, National Shelter and the National Association of Renters' have identified five points to address concerns stemming from the report.
First, legislated national limits on the amount and frequency of rent increases.
No-grounds evictions and further renter protections are the second point the group says need to be addressed.
Funding boosts to tenant advice services, raising income support and Jobseeker payments and finally a boost to the number of social houses are on the group's to-do list.
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The story she told for the rest of her life was one of noble courage, of nurses holding hands, calmly and silently marching into the sea, until cut down by machine gun fire. Fifty years after the event, many people interested in this wartime incident began questioning the veracity of Bullwinkel's account, as the Japanese responsible for the massacre were from the same unit that had raped and murdered British and Chinese nurses in Hong Kong. Japanese historian Yuki Tanaka was even brave enough to suggest that Vivian 'did not tell the truth' at the International Military Tribunal in 1946, to save her dead colleagues from 'the disgrace of being known as victims of rape'. 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A former employee of the (now) Department of Veterans' Affairs, revealed that Bullwinkel's files had been 'more closely guarded than the nuclear codes' because 'she had been raped by the Japanese on Bangka Island'. A female army officer reported that in the early 1990s, when chatting to Vivian about her forthcoming biography, published in 1999, she confided that her biographer was refusing to allow her to tell all the facts, to let the truth be known. When asked, 'Well, what is the truth?' Vivian replied, 'we were not just marched into the sea. We were raped and tortured, and then we were marched into the sea'. She told a similar story to a friend, a fellow ex-POW and a police officer, who had suffered terribly on the Burma-Thai railway. Despite her wish to have 'all the facts' revealed, Vivian, by now in failing health, was denied this right by her biographer, who had simply repeated the oft told, censored story. Seven months after publication, death silenced her forever. She died of a heart attack on July 3, 2000, aged 84. Determined to give her the voice she had been so long denied, I began an investigation to determine who had shut her down, and when. Loading The gagging had begun in 1945 with an order issued by Lord Mountbatten's South-east Asia command, forbidding any recovered prisoner of war from making any statement without military clearance. As soon as it was known that Australian nurses had been recovered from a prison camp in Sumatra, an Australian officer was dispatched to Singapore, where he prepared a statement that Vivian signed. It mirrored the sanitised version of the massacre which, by this time, had been published worldwide. The Australian military and government believed that the public should be shielded from the harsh realities of war, but determining who had silenced Vivian was going to be a challenge. However, blessed with a knowledge of how war crimes units operated, I took a punt and was rewarded when I came across a lengthy statement by Francis Hughes, a war crimes investigator. It was a gift from heaven – the missing piece, which vindicated everything Vivian had said. Hughes, who had served in a highly secret wartime unit, applied for service with 1 Australian War Crimes Section. Based in Singapore, his task was to sift through affidavits documenting atrocities to extract data for use by the prosecution. In due course, he came across one from Vivian, not the sanitised version of events but one given to war crimes investigators in which she stated all the facts. Horrified, he sought advice from his superiors who, on learning that the nurses had been subjected to rape that was 'continuous and shocking', decreed that the details should never be disclosed, out of consideration for their families and that no one, including Vivian, who knew the truth, must ever reveal it. Hughes remained tight-lipped for almost 60 years. It is amazing that, in the more than 20 years that his statement has been on the public record, no one noticed it. He also made a second statement, alluding to a cover-up, but that too passed unnoticed. Vivian's affidavit also confirmed that some nurses had been forced to act as comfort women. After reading her affidavit, Hughes reported, 'one knows exactly how they had been subject to indescribable conditions by Japanese officers who were using Dutch Club for this activity'. There is no doubt that Vivian Bullwinkel was not only brutally violated, she was forced to suffer in silence all her life by a succession of men who thought they knew best. She wanted a voice and I am privileged to give it to her. There are sure to be some who would prefer that such a story be left untold, but to continue to deliberately air brush events that are uncomfortable truths, serves no purpose but to subvert our wartime history. I like to get to the heart of the matter. All my books have uncovered a story that was not known before. Truth suppressed, facts buried, for many and varied reasons. The families of the nurses have a right to know. Vivian wanted them to know. To continue to deny the existence of an atrocity, hidden for so long, protects no one but the perpetrators.
