Renters In Obnoxious Tenancies

It was a breezy day in autumn, and Natalia was cycling home full of hope for a sunny future, when she first saw the sign. A yellow rectangle, stapled neatly to a frame outside a suburban house, it brightly informed her:

HIGHER LAND TAX = HIGHER RENT. MAKE LAND TAX FAIR

“Did you see that sign?” She asked her housemates when she got home, dragging her bike through the door of their share-house. “What do they mean about land tax?”

“Yeah, dunno”, said her first housemate, Lisa, who is a scientist and not a very good resource for political information.

“It’s a complaint about increases on land ownership taxes, which are based on the value of property and only apply to properties which the owner is not living in.” said her second housemate, Mitch, who is a union lawyer and much more useful in these kinds of discussions. “Landlords pay land tax on their rental properties, and when the value of the property increases, so does the tax.”

“Oh yeah, that’s what I meant,” said Lisa, helpfully. “Land tax.”

“Okay,” said Natalia. “Hang on, they don’t even need to pay it if they live in the house? Only if they have more than one house?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“So…we pay their entire mortgage, and they pay a small amount of tax, and they’re the ones who are mad about this??”

Natalia was slowly moving from confusion to annoyance. This was dangerous, because an annoyed Natalia is a force to be reckoned with.

She continued, “We do pay their entire mortgage, right?”

“Yeah, usually”, said Mitch. “But if we don’t it’s all good, they can claim it back in their tax return.”

“WHAT??” cried Natalia. “What are these people complaining about? Are you kidding? Is this one of your pranks?”

“The biggest prank of all is capitalism.” Said Lisa, who often says unhelpful things like this.

This is the origin story of the Renters In Obnoxious Tenancies (RIOT) Collective, a half joking, half deadly serious project spearheaded by Lisa and Natalia, with the help of their legal advisor/housemate Mitch. The two PhD students, who moved in together as strangers when they arrived in Hobart in 2018, have bonded over their despair at years of increasing rents eating into their barely-increasing student stipends.

Both women admit that even as highly educated and privileged individuals, the chances of either of them saving enough for a house deposit in Hobart in the next twenty years are laughably small. But they have a good rental and consistent incomes.

For those worse off, the housing situation in Tasmania is debilitating. Not only that, it’s humiliating.

For those who can’t afford obscene rental prices – who have watched the values of property in their city double, triple, and quadruple over the last decades, and who then see the owners of those properties complaining about paying taxes on their surplus houses – it’s a kick in the teeth when they are already on the ground.

The RIOT exists for two reasons: firstly, to publicly oppose the voices of multiple-home-owners who claim to be hard done-by because their properties have increased in value.

It will surprise nobody that renters are generally prohibited according to their leases from ‘putting up any placard, sign, board or advertisement’. Instead, the RIOT have designed bumper stickers, which are for sale via their Etsy store (link below), with profits to be donated to local shelters. They humbly suggest that their graphic design skills are a little better than some of the other signs around Hobart (but readers can make this assessment themselves).

Secondly, they aim to empower those left desperate by the state of the Tasmanian property market. They embrace what they call ‘the power of shitposting’: using humour and irreverence to inform and unite followers of their Instagram page (link below). By mocking those with the most power, they hope to demonstrate to those without it that this debilitating housing situation is not their fault, and that we are all allowed to complain and advocate for ourselves.

Follow the RIOT on Instagram at @riothobart, and support their cause by buying a bumper sticker at etsy.com/shop/riothobart.