Report finds increasing number of Australian renters fear confronting landlords
Published 23 June 2025, 8:43 am
A shortage of residential properties available for rent may be discouraging some renters from claiming their full rights as tenants. According to a new report - almost seven out of ten private renters surveyed worry about asking for repairs in case the landlord retaliates by increasing their rent.
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The Australian
an hour ago
- The Australian
Clarence Valley council finds a perfect one-stop solution
Clarence Valley Council's landmark alliance with TechnologyOne has turned years of asset management frustration into a model for digital transformation, giving the council unprecedented visibility over $2bn in assets spread across 10,000sq km. The Northern Rivers region of NSW has endured a spate of natural disasters in recent years, from bushfires of 2019-20 to the February 2022 floods. For many councils in the area, such conditions have significantly strained already limited resources and exposed the inefficiencies of paper-based or siloed technology systems. Clarence Valley's answer has been to modernise and integrate by adopting TechnologyOne's Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system. Within its first month of going live with TechnologyOne's Asset & Operations Maintenance (AOM) module and Field App, the council seamlessly recorded about 500 defects across the Clarence Valley, a 'staggering' jump from previous months. AOM gives full visibility into the cost and performance of every asset. The Field App also brings administration into the field, letting crews work offline and automatically sync data back to the EAM platform. Together, they have given Clarence Valley a single source of truth for all asset operations. Manual paperwork has been replaced by synchronised tablets in the field, allowing crews to receive real-time job updates and saving hours of travel and administration work as data is handled seamlessly from the field straight into the database. The impact has been dramatic: a bridge crew completed its entire annual program in six months instead of the planned 12, enabling more projects to be handled in-house and reducing reliance on contractors. Clarence Valley Council lead analyst Kate Maginnity said the council's transformation addressed long-standing fragmentation issues. 'We found that within each asset class we had multiple systems. I could talk to four different teams that had four different management techniques, processes and strategic plans,' she said. 'As of today, we class all elements that are made for a pedestrian to walk on as a footpath rather than dividing them out and this is where we will see efficiencies going forward. Through this approach we now understand the primary purpose of assets and have a system in place that can help us mitigate complex processes. It means we can stop reengineering the same thing and it assists us in applying consistent asset management practices, helping us get the most out of our large asset base.' TechnologyOne's executive vice-president for local government, Ben Malpass, said Clarence Valley Council had previously purchased TechnologyOne Financials, HR and Payroll. 'So EAM was the next significant step in Clarence Valley's digital transformation,' Mr Malpass said. 'Being able to implement our Asset & Operations Maintenance (AOM) along with the Field App has been a big game changer for them.' Before AOM and Field App, Mr Malpass said crews were bogged down in paperwork. 'Clarence had to manually process something like 3000 different timesheet entires per week,' he said. 'So if you were a field crew staff member, and you were out there working all week on projects, you would have to finish on the job early on a Friday because you needed to fill in your timesheets and associate each of the jobs that you were working on throughout that week to a specific cost code and to a timesheet. 'If you are a crew worker, that is not time well spent and the last thing anyone wants to do on a Friday. So by implementing the Field Apps capability, all that has been completely automated for them. Crews now check into a job on their device, they check out of a job once completed and that records how much time they are working on a job, as well as all the consumables they use. 'So the next week, the truck is filled with the right consumables for the following week. Field App eliminates all those manual tasks that councils need to operate under becoming a real game changer for the council staff. 'Enterprise Asset Management also enabled Clarence Valley to be far more proactive in the management of assets for residents where they are identifying issues and defects, whether it is a pothole or a signpost that has fallen down, or a park barbecue that's not working. 'Councils can record, manage and communicate back to the community to say, 'Hey, we've picked up on an issue and going to be fixing that in two weeks' time, and this is the schedule.' Then once it is fixed, it's automatically communicated back to the community.' Alongside the implementation of Asset & Operations Maintenance and Field App, Clarence Valley Council has also launched a new initiative called 'An Asset is an Asset, is an Asset', and this has become ingrained within workplace culture and processes. This initiative assists in improving asset management understanding across the workforce and simplifying how an asset is classified, as well as determining subsequent asset componentisation, recognition, lifecycle and condition attributes. 'Information at your fingertips and real-time data means we are better at making more informed decisions, quickly,' the council's Ms Maginnity said. TechnologyOne believes the implementation of EAM highlights not only the community benefits of proactively managing council assets, but the benefits to revenues and profits. 'There is an obligation to the community to actually engage and manage the resources that the community are asking for as effectively as possible,' Mr Malpass said. 'But councils are also financially strained. 'They are trying to become more productive and efficient with systemising technologies. Enterprise Asset Management has a potentially huge impact on their bottom line.'
ABC News
5 hours ago
- ABC News
Bigger properties occupied by smaller households in major housing mismatch, Cotality finds
In a reminder of how broken housing affordability and access is, new analysis highlights a major mismatch between the size of Australian homes and the number of people living in them. While the vast bulk of Australian housing is built for larger families, property research firm Cotality has found more than 60 per cent of households are made up of just one or two people. It reveals a misalignment between "who lives in our homes and the kinds of homes we're building", Cotality's head of head of Australian research Eliza Owen said in the report. "Of the lone-person households in Australia, the data suggests around 40 per cent are aged 65 and over," Ms Owen said. "The highest share of households is two people, but the highest share of housing has three bedrooms. "While there's nothing wrong with more bedrooms than people in a dwelling, there could be some inefficiencies in the way housing is being allocated," Ms Owen said. "After all, a 'traditional' family of four may have more need for a three-bedroom dwelling than a household of two people." The report cited data from the 2021 Census, which showed there were more two-person family households in three-bedroom dwellings (about 1.3 million), than three or four-person family households (about 1.1 million). Ms Owen has suggested a way to fix the "efficiency question", which she knows is not politically appealing — send a price signal. "Governments could make it more expensive to have more housing than you need, and cheaper to live in smaller housing," she wrote in her research note. She said that logic often leads to calls for tax reform including abolishing stamp duty to cheaper to move between housing, replacing it with a broad-based land tax (which raises costs the more land you own). "These options are both politically difficult as it would involve moving from a tax that applies to a small amount of voters each year who purchase property to one that will tax two thirds of voters (property owners)," she noted. Independent housing researcher Cameron Kusher, speaking to The Business in July, argued high transaction costs, namely stamp duty, discourage moving to a "better sized property" and can lead to people purchasing larger homes than they need to begin with. "People just feel like if I can get a better and bigger home sooner, that's a better outcome," he said. "If we look at what is being built, it's usually very large houses, four or five bedrooms, taking up most of the land on these new housing sites," Mr Kusher said. "A lot of it comes down to how much a piece of a property, [and] how much the land and the house, costs. "I think a lot of people are building bigger homes, thinking 'I'll spend a little bit more up-front and my family will grow into this home'. "It might just be a couple grandkids, or they're planning to have a couple of kids." He noted the effects of rapidly increasing property prices, which can leave people priced out of re-entering the market, and the fact that larger properties can be more likely to appreciate in value at a faster pace. Cotality's Ms Owen said other policy options to encourage people to move into appropriately sized homes could include reforming pension asset tests to include the value of the family home. "Strides are already being taken on the supply side to establish well-located apartments in our larger cities, that can accommodate smaller households. "But shifting demand through tax reform could help the take-up of these new homes." The government has accepted it is not on track to meet the target to build 1.2 million homes in five years, but Treasurer Jim Chalmers has stood by the ambition, despite Treasury advice it would not be met. In another recent note, Ms Owen questioned the focus of state and federal governments on speeding up building approvals to boost housing supply, warning that the construction industry simply cannot keep pace. "With completion times already above average and construction costs elevated, it seems an odd time to be incentivising more dwelling approvals and commencements," she said. Cameron Kusher argued past experience could be a guide on how to approach today's housing problems and ease the construction crunch. "Maybe we need to go back to how things were 30 or 40 years ago, where you have smaller homes and you make them easy to renovate," he told The Business. "Over time, people can actually add bedrooms, bathrooms, car parks, verandahs and all these sorts of things to add value to the home.
SBS Australia
6 hours ago
- SBS Australia
Australis's housing crisis focus of day two of economic roundtable
Australis's housing crisis focus of day two of economic roundtable Published 20 August 2025, 9:06 am Housing has been placed under the spotlight on the second day of the government's economic roundtable. Moves to make the construction code simpler and cheaper have attracted widespread support but there's a push to better utilise the skills of permanent migrants to help be part of the solution.
