The draft of proposed amendments to the Retirement Villages Act bill fails to address many concerns raised by and on behalf of residents, in particular around management standards and fairer fees. The bill allows the most exploitative and predatory operators to continue to operate according to ‘churn’ business models where they are incentivised to maintain high turnover rates by systematically pressuring residents to leave once their exit fees reach their maximum value. The bill abandons the concept of a rights-based framework in favour of vague unenforceable ‘principles’. Overall, the bill simply fails to address serious public concerns about exploitative business practices in the retirement village industry, much less the concerns expressed by the many residents who have made submissions to this review.
In August, HAAG and the Office of the Commissioner for Residential Tenancies co-hosted a roundtable for residential park residents. We wanted to bring residents from many different parks together to compare their experiences and see what is working and what isn’t for them, and what issues do they have in common.
Do you live in a residential park in Victoria? We want to hear from you! What needs to change to make residential parks work better for older renters? This will be an opportunity for the Commissioner for Residential Tenancies and other policy-makers to hear directly from residents about the good and bad in this type of housing.
Information session for all residents of retirement housing types including retirement villages, residential parks, lifestyle villages, rental villages, independent living units about the need for a specific, timely, free, accessible and binding dispute resolution service for all retirement housing residents, as well as other information on fair fees, management training and simplified contracting.
Jennie was referred to our Retirement Housing Advice Service, as she had had huge crowds of ants crawling into her unit for almost 12 months and the village where she lived had consistently been unresponsive to this pest infestation.
Cat’s family approached us some time ago, after she had moved to an aged care facility from a retirement village. Cat had moved to the retirement village in 2005, prior to the current regulations coming into force.
Across sectors, much of the legislation and policies that are meant to monitor or regulate the services provided to older people living in retirement housing options do not offer clear or adequate protections or enforcements. Given this, HAAG is in support of the Panel’s vision to provide consumers of Embedded (electricity) Networks equal protections, market access and treatment to on-market customers.
Sue presented to our service with various different problems. She had a medical issue which was causing her to be in financial distress. Her car had recently been stolen and burnt and was also fighting with her insurance company to pay her out the cost of her car.
The options set out in this paper show a serious lack of understanding of the issues raised by residents and other stakeholder about retirement village residencies. Retirement villages are too often unfair and exploitative. The Options Paper proceeds as if the problems were only that residents mistakenly perceived villages to be unfair and exploitative, or as if more information would resolve resident concerns. This is not the case. Again and again, the options paper proposes more information rather than increased protections for residents. This is a persistent failure of the options paper, and if the government proceeds on this basis the reform process will fail current and future retirement village residents.
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