MEDIA RELEASE: Fake Facts, Fake Data - The Award Goes To...

Sydney University’s Festival of Urbanism last night featured speakers Elizabeth Farrelly and Professors Peter Phibbs and Dallas Rogers. On the Agenda: How to navigate the post-truth landscape. Here too a podcast.

Concurrently, residents are being referred to our Parliament’s Options Paper on Short-term Holiday Letting in NSW, with some judging the document a (No)Options Paper for residents wanting to protect their homes and suburbs, and others asking if the document has been ghost written by those in the Short-Term Rental Industry.

One of the ‘facts’ presented in Parliament’s Paper: “The (Parliamentary) Committee did not accept that Short-Term Holiday Letting was incompatible with strata living.” One wonders why then judges of the NSW Land and Environment Court would repeatedly and consistently get things so very wrong – mixing STHL with permanent residents being judged fundamentally incompatible - plus why too would there still be ongoing debate and consideration at Ministerial level of this issue, were there no problem with short-term holiday rentals?

Here too, from Ministers Roberts and Kean’s document: “In Sydney, the majority of Airbnb hosts (landlords) rent their primary residences occasionally 37 nights per year.” And reported by Airbnb last week: An average Airbnb landlord “earns $3,900 a year”. Really? See July Revenue DATA chart.

If Parliament deems STHL ‘complying and exempt development’, how much more must we tolerate in terms of gross intrusion into our home lives? And what disincentive for landlords wanting to flip properties onto short-term booking platforms, guaranteeing still further evictions and displacements and homes lost from our housing supply…and increased rents for those properties still available?

Note also that Google is taking aim at Airbnb; Google too wants our homes for holiday rentals.