Legislative Council, Wednesday 20 August 2026
Ms FORREST (Murchison) – Thank you, Mr President. Like other members, I rise to speak in support of the Residential Tenancy Amendment (Safety Modifications) Bill 2025. I’ll make some comments around the amendments that have been proposed in broad terms before we get to the committee stage.
On the face of this short and technical bill that inserts a small number of new sections into the Residential Tenancy Act 1997 that deal with a single discrete issue: the tenant’s ability to fix furniture to the wall of a rental home to stop it from tipping over. The scope here is very narrow in its application; I’m sure that’s an intentional approach. I do note – and I’ll speak about it a little more broadly – the comments made by the members and also I appreciate the member for Hobart reading parts of the TasCOSS submission out. I won’t repeat all that, but in broad terms, I will speak to this.
It seems that this is potentially a missed opportunity to take what is a simple and reasonable approach to other safety modifications and things like that, other than just securing a piece of furniture to the wall, which is critically important. I’ll come to that bit more in a moment.
The underlying purpose is really important here. It goes to something basic: whether a child playing in their bedroom or an older person moving through their own lounge room can be safe from a bookcase or a chest of drawers or a television from falling on them. A grown adult can also be injured, but children and older people are much more vulnerable in these settings. So many pieces of furniture are top heavy and can be unstable, particularly on uneven surfaces, and it doesn’t take much to topple them over. I know that in some rental properties the floors are quite uneven. They’re older properties. They’ve had various floor coverings over the years, and if you don’t have an entirely flat surface, then you can’t sit a piece of furniture entirely flat on it. It has a wobble to start with, and if it’s top heavy or it has the capacity for things to be put on top of it and thus add to that now the centre of gravity being shifted, it is a real issue. A child would have no chance to respond to or avoid injury in many cases, and the consequences could be very serious.
Furniture and television tip-over incidents are recognised and preventable cause of injury and death in the home. The evidence consistently shows that younger children and older Tasmanians, or older people in general, are the two groups that are most exposed to that risk. Most of us in the Chamber have children, and we know that children come in varieties of adventurous-ness and some kids just love to climb, and I assume most of us have seen them pulling out drawers and use them like steps to climb up, mainly to get to something they shouldn’t be getting to. Or they’ll pull over a smaller piece of equipment to climb up and they’ll pull at things on the top because they want to get to the things they’re not supposed to have. It’s only natural. It’s a child’s curiosity, and we certainly don’t want to knock that out of them. We want them to be safe when they’re exploring their curiosity.
Older people, too, are more likely to be seriously hurt and to not recover well from a fall. The piece of furniture may not land on them, but it might knock them over. If an elderly person ends up with a fractured neck of femur, for example, that is always a bad outcome. Many older people don’t fully recover from those injuries, even with our modern medical treatments. They also may be seriously injured by a piece of furniture falling on them; as members of our community age, and this includes ourselves in here, we do tend to use furniture as support moving around our homes at times. You will lean on a piece of furniture even to put your shoes on. Often where you’re putting your shoes on is also where there are other things like bags and et cetera; or things near the door that may be the sort of furniture used for physical support. Any person in that situation has less strength to react if the furniture starts to fall.
These are exactly the two cohorts that a landlord’s consent process, if it is slow or difficult, puts at the greatest disadvantage because they’re the least able to wait out a dispute. You’ve obviously had adults acting on behalf of children to protect them, but older people often find it difficult to have to fight the system. They have to keep living in that home while the risk persists.
We know that Tasmania does have a higher-than-average share of renting households with children and a growing cohort of older Tasmanians. Some of them are renting privately, while some of them are in public housing where security of tenure and the condition of housing stock is already a live issue for many people, including many in my electorate. They do not have the luxury of saying, ‘Oh well, if I can’t do it here, I’ll move somewhere else’. It is an impossible situation. They’re stuck, which is better than having no home at all. I’m not suggesting there’s another preference, and we should, as a priority, have housing for all, but those who are renting for whatever reason should be able to be safe in their rental property, as they can be safe in their own home, with the right to anchor a wardrobe or a bookcase to a wall. It shouldn’t depend on the goodwill, the availability or the responsiveness of an absent owner, which often they are, or a property manager. The bill removes that dependency for the great majority of cases, and I really welcome that, It’s a really positive step.
There are other safety features that I just wish to speak about, that should be able to be installed similarly. I will give you an example of a case in my electorate, I did mention this case briefly in the briefing we had that came to my attention. This was a young person who had a mobility disability. This young person had not an easy upbringing and had worked really hard to form a life for themselves. They were employed regardless of their physical disability. They’d gone out, got work, managed to find a rental property, and because of the nature of the disability, it means they’re very unstable on their feet. They had been trying for some time to get permission from the landlord to put a safety rail on the outside of the property up to the front door. It’s only a few steps, but there’s no railing around the steps, and there’s nothing to really hold on to. This is a block of four rental units. On the other side is an elderly person who has the same situation. Applications and e-mail requests have been made, the landlords an absent landlord, doesn’t respond. They feel like they’re stuck. It shouldn’t be like that. When this young person came to see me in the office, I really admire them for their willingness to turn their low life around. They said it even looks like there was once a handrail on the house.
I just thought, what do you do here? I did suggest they talk to the tenancy union initially, to see if they could advocate on her behalf, to try and get some progress. Also, I felt that maybe I could just fund one of the friendly builders around town to go and do it, pro-bono. I will just provide the money for the rail, because, probably, no-one would ever know. We don’t want a young person who’s trying to make their way in this world then fall foul of a provision that doesn’t allow them to have a basic safety feature installed in the property that they feel pretty lucky to have, quite frankly, from some of the situations they’ve lived in the past.
There’s other things like windows painted shut, so the bedroom gets really mouldy. To even to unstick the window would damage the paintwork. This young person isn’t able to do that themselves. There probably needs to be a fan installed. That that would be a permanent fixture, but these sort of things that make it really difficult for some of the people who know how tight the rental market is, know how difficult it is to secure a property, and whatever they do, they don’t want to make it worse for themselves and be forced to move, because they know there’s probably nowhere else, they can go.
I will listen very intently to the debate during the committee stage on the amendments, because I think there is a degree of merit in that. It’s just a bit of a shame, in many respects, that the government haven’t taken the opportunity to do some of these other sensible changes. The member for Nelson, or Hobart, said that we may be told that there’s a bigger review going on. Well, here we are, with a very similar mechanism that I find it interesting that we’ve made it so narrow, when safety is not just in your own home, is not just whether a piece of furniture falls on you or not, it could be whether you can get safely in your front door. Or safely through your house for other reasons.
Back to the bill, it does insert a new pathway for what it defines as a safety modification. I’ve described a safety modification that’s not anchoring something to a wall, but this one is limited to wall anchors, and similar means affixing furniture to prevent injury or death, from that furniture moving. It sits outside the general alterations, editions and fixtures regime in section 54 that continues to apply to modifications generally. In my view, the structure is sensible and proportionate, however, as I say, the bill could, and perhaps should, include other safety features.
Mr President, I note the tenant’s existing obligations under section 53 – Directed by damage and to return the premises to its original condition. Fair wear and tear accepted, of course. That comes to the question the member for Nelson or Mersey, asked about what happens if you want to leave like a TV bracket on the wall because to remove that and then make good that area is a much bigger body of work when the next tenant might actually want a TV bracket. Gone are the days, Mr President, we used to have these big boxes that sat on cabinets. Generally, they are all a lot larger and very thin and easily knocked over. I look forward to the Leader’s response with regard to that matter. What is the onus? Is it something that’s up for negotiation or how does that actually work? If it truly is a make good, leave it as it was, that means you have to remove it and then fix up the holes, repaint, and do all of that.
I also note that this is not a mechanism or suggestion for tenants to alter the property with no consequence. It is a mechanism to remove an unnecessary barrier to a genuine safety concern while preserving the owners underlying interest in the condition of their asset. We do need to make sure that balance is there. We don’t want property owners having their properties damaged.
I do note and welcome the explicit carve out for premises for historic cultural heritage significance. Mr President, we have no shortage of rental stock that is old. Some of it would be of heritage value. I think it is important that there is a pathway. I imagine that if you’ve got a heritage listed property that has say a very old lathe and plaster wall or a stonewall or something like that. Say it is bedroom, also in that room on the other side, there’s been some internal modifications whereby there’s been just a regular plaster wall put up. There may be some negotiation. Well, don’t put it there, put it here, in terms of say securing a chest of drawers, for example. I hope those sorts of considerations are given. It’s important that the tenants are aware of what they can and can’t do, and that’s part of this, if you’re renting these sorts of properties.
Mr President, as with other legislation, I approach this by asking whether it strikes a fair balance between parties affected and where the process it establishes is workable and dispute resistant in practice. On both counts, I believe it is. The 14-day response window and the standard that consent must not be unreasonably refused does give an owner a genuine and time limited say in modifications that could permanently affect their property while ensuring they cannot simply be excised by silence. This does deal with those landlords who just don’t respond, and so it leaves that tenant in a quandary.
Mr President, the commissioner and tribunal pathways provide a proper avenue for resolving disagreement rather than leaving the tenant with no options but to either live with the danger or install a modification unlawfully, and they shouldn’t be put in that position.
I understand the Department of Justice undertook targeted consultation on these provisions when they formed part of the 2024 bill; the Pets in Rentals Bill, which was then split out, and they received 16 submissions from a range of stakeholder bodies. I know the member for Hobart readout, particularly the views, that I want to consider her comment in the Committee stage on, TasCOSS’s submission about other safety modifications, but also the important views of the Tenant’s Union and the Commissioner for Children and Young People.
Mr President, this bill, as it is, and I will support it with or without the amendment to make that clear, removes a real and unnecessary obstacle to a safety measure that costs little, has minimal impact on rental properties and materially reduces the risk of serious injury and death to some of the most vulnerable people in a household, those being children and older people in particular, but it does so while retaining sensible safeguards for owners, including heritage protections and a functioning dispute pathway.
Mr President, I do support the bill. I will fully consider the member of Hobart’s amendments, quite a few of them, when she brings them forward, but I think it’ll be pretty much one substantive debate. In any event, I think it’s a really worthwhile discussion to have, whether or not it’s supported. I’m very inclined to use this opportunity to actually fix up some very real issues that I’ve had come through my door in my office.