Cruel Summers, Bitter Winters

By Sabrina Clarke

I’m the project officer at Better Renting, a national tenancy advocacy organisation, working together with renters for stable, affordable and healthy homes.

Since starting at Better Renting much of my work has revolved around projects relating to our Healthy Homes for Renters campaign, working to win minimum energy performance standards for rental homes. Renters are often stuck in homes that are less energy efficient, with expensive energy costs and dangerous indoor temperatures which can make renters sick. Through the Healthy Homes for Renters campaign, we are pushing every state and territory to introduce minimum energy performance standards. 

One of the projects we run to support this work is Renter Researchers, a citizen science project we started in 2021 where renters set up their own indoor temperature tracker to record the minute by minute temperature and humidity levels of their home. Along with hard temperature data, we’ve also gathered renters’ stories through surveys and interviews, which together have shown that rental standards in Australia are not up to scratch. By collecting this data, we’ve been able to share these stories and experiences with the media, the community and with politicians who have the power to improve the standards of Australian rental homes.

As a renter myself, I was already familiar with many of the issues that other renters were facing- difficulties sleeping in hot temperatures, high energy costs, struggling with rent increases and being generally afraid of my landlord. Until I did these projects, I had no idea how universal and extreme these issues were for renters all over Australia. By collecting temperature data and hearing their stories, I started to form a more complete picture of how poor rental standards were having severe consequences for renters’ lives. 

During our latest Summer Renter Researchers project, I spoke with renters who had endured some pretty extreme circumstances due to poor rental standards. Since minimum energy performance standards for rentals were lacking, their rental homes tended to lack proper, if any, insulation, shading, ventilation or efficient cooling appliances. The result was that some rental homes in SA, QLD and NSW had indoor temperatures reaching above 40°C. 

We heard from a renting family who had spent the last three summers sleeping in the lounge room together, just to avoid the deadly heat of their own bedrooms. A renter in NSW told us about having to call an ambulance due to heat stroke from the poor conditions inside their own home. There are a huge number of renters who had to choose between buying groceries, medication or using their air conditioner. On top of this, renters were still having to tip-toe around their landlord, never able to ask for improvements or repairs because they were terrified of possible rent increases or evictions. It’s hard to capture the full extent of renters’ experiences here, but you can read more about this in our “Cruel Summers” report. 

There are also happy stories coming out of this project. We heard from renters who had used the temperature data from our project to advocate for better living conditions. Some renters managed to get improved insulation by showing this data to their landlords, and others who had air conditioners installed in their living rooms or bedrooms, making the heat far more tolerable. Renters who had improved energy efficiency standards in their home reported improvements in their health, mental health, sleep, and finances, with more comfortable temperatures and lower energy costs. 

Hearing these stories made our advocacy work around minimum energy efficiency standards all the more important. We want to ensure that rental homes are required to have standards around insulation, efficient cooling, ventilation and shading to prevent homes from reaching these dangerous temperatures. We also want to make sure that renters can feel secure knowing that any home they rent will have safe, healthy temperatures, year-round.