Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 2. 7th March 1973

Serious Problems

Serious Problems

Some problems are not quite so simple to solve. Some landlords are big enough and rich enough and powerful enough, so they think, to make more serious attacks on tenants. The big landlord is less interested in exercising petty authority on people than in exercising the real power of exploitation. Tenants who suffer from the exercise of this power come to Tenants Protection with really serious problems. At the lower end of the scale is the practice of not returning bonds when tenancy terminates Tenants Protection has recovered bonds by all means from pickets to threats of legal action to the heart felt plea to the better conscience of the Landlord.

Further up the scale is the wilful failure of a landlord to maintain the premises in a decent condition. The usual threat made against the tenant who complains is that he takes it as it is or gets out. Tenant's Protection gets fewer complaints about this sort of situation. All this means is that we are not powerful yet. Tenants are frightened that to bring TPA in will mean that they will have to get out. In fact the threat which is often made is not so often carried out.