LORDIE, WHAT DO WE SEE? IT'S IN NO WAY PLEASANT.

The PR Brigade – and we are NOT referring to Public Responsibility - over at Airbnb have pressed the ‘PANIC’ button and are offering “free smoke-alarms to the first 36,000 hosts” – ‘hosts’ - who apply on a first-come-first-served basis. This follows a fire in a Christchurch Airbnb rental three days ago that saw six out of a family of 10 Malaysian travellers hospitalised when fire gutted the property in which they were staying.

Not only are Airbnb, Expedia/Stayz and Clones having a profound effect on the availability of housing in key areas of our State, they are causing extreme stress and cost to tenants who find themselves evicted to ‘make way’, and neighbours forced to live with the trauma of this stranger danger.

These foreign-owned, multi-billion dollar corporations, who’ve not invested one dollar in bricks-and-mortar infrastructure in NSW, are running foul – and they know it - of National Construction Code criteria, Disability Access and Discrimination Legislation, plus Fire & Rescue benchmarks.

A ‘wake up call to the accommodation industry’? No. One very brutal reminder. The Airbnb Fire this week in Christchurch puts front and centre the 15 young lives lost at Childers, Queensland, Leigh Sinclair and Christopher Giorgi, who died at Brunswick, Victoria, and Sunil Patel, Jignesh Sadhu and Deepak Prajapati, vulnerable Foreign Students, who perished at Footscray. And we won’t forget Connie Zhang and her friend Ginger Jiang at the apartment block fire at Bankstown.

Airbnb: know what you can do with “free smoke-alarms…

on a first-come-first-served basis”?

Homes not Hotels Communities not Transit Zones People before Profits

Neighbours not Strangers