In an on-air blunder, NSW Housing Minister Rose Jackson has seemingly revealed she does not know how much her constituents are paying for rent.
The topic of rent in the city came up as Jackson was speaking with ABC Radio Sydney host Hamish Macdonald.
“What do you reckon is a reasonable price to pay in rent for a two-bedroom flat in Sydney?” Macdonald asked.
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“Well, I mean it kind of depends where in Sydney,” Jackson said.
“I mean, Sydney’s a big city.
“I mean, a couple of hundred bucks, right?”
Macdonald questioned: “Where can you get a two-bedroom flat for a couple of hundred bucks?”
Jackson replied: “Well, a week? I don’t know, there are places in Sydney you can.”
She then said “not all flats are the same”, suggesting the rentals she meant exist in places such as Western Sydney.
“This is the thing about the housing market, there’s a lot of variety — like a luxe two-bed penthouse in the eastern suburbs is pretty different to a neat and tidy, two-bedroom flat next to a train station in Western Sydney,” she said.
The median rent in Sydney is $720 a week, according to Domain’s most recent report.
Jackson did not specify what a “couple hundred bucks” is, and later said likening it to $200 was putting “words in my mouth”.
The Tenants Union of NSW has been contacted for comment by 7NEWS.com.au.
Sydney’s rental market is the most expensive in the nation, with changes recently passed through state parliament to protect tenants’ rights such as a long-awaited ban on landlords evicting tenants for no reason.
However, advocates say more needs to be done.
More than 2,200,000 tenants have been waiting for the overhaul after Labor and the coalition went into the 2023 state election promising to ban no-grounds evictions.
In response to the changes, Tenants’ Union chief executive Leo Patterson Ross said the threat of eviction made tenants hesitant to ask for repairs or negotiate rent hikes.
“This is the single most significant change we can make to residential tenancies law, as without protection from unfair eviction in place we can’t rely on other parts of the law to function properly,” he said.
Homelessness NSW chief executive Dominique Rowe said the changes should relieve some pressure on homelessness services, which more than 68,000 people turned to for help every year.
“One of the main causes of homelessness is eviction from private rentals, so anything we can do to reduce evictions will keep people in housing and take pressure off our homelessness services,” she said.
At the time Jackson said the changes to tenancies were straightforward and reasonable.
“There are millions of renters in our state … for those millions of people they have a reasonable expectation the rental market will provide them with safe and secure housing,” she said.
Opponents to the bill expressed concerns it made investment less attractive and would not help increase housing supply.
– With AAP