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[Jimmy-T]

Worried about what’s happening regarding the impending short-term holiday letting legislation? You should be.

Right now, it sounds like the NSW government could be going down the Victorian route which is basically, forget your residential-only zoning, all apartment blocks will be open slather for holiday renters and you can chase the landlords AFTER the problems inevitably arise.

So what can we do about it? For a start, you and your neighbours could sign Sydney MP Alex Greenwich’s petition (below) to make sure that at least the whole issue of turning residential-only properties into holiday lets is properly debated in parliament.

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You can download
Alex’s petition HERE.

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The Airbnb’s recent ‘astroturfing’ (fake grassroots) campaign saw thousands of identical ‘copy and paste’ letters sent to the government inquiry, all repeating the fundamental lie that online holiday letting is all about people sharing a room in their homes.

By the way, we have no problem with that.  It’s a great concept and we love the idea of foreign tourists sharing a home with local people.

However, as we know, the vast majority of Airbnb’s income from rentals in Sydney is from whole homes, mostly apartments, with strangers “sharing” the facilities you pay for and “hosts” often not even meeting their guests.

The stakes are high. The Airbnb support company MadeComfy – who clean your flat, change the sheets and hand over and collect the keys – blithely said recently that landlords are making more money off holiday rentals than residential lets.

Now our MPs are now being threatened by Airbnb supporters that their seats may be in danger at the next election if they don’t vote to protect the global corporation’s expansion plans.

 

And the majority of those MPs, whose constituents live in places that are almost untouched by short-term holiday letting, have no reason not to support them.  It doesn’t affect them or their constituents.

Report after study after analysis shows that short-term holiday rentals are pushing up rents and forcing tenants out of inner-city areas … just like in Barcelona, Lisbon, Berlin, Amsterdam and New York.

But the Airbnb spin-doctoring machine is powerful, slick and incredibly well-funded. They even persuaded residential tenants – who suffer most when Airbnb invades an area – to support them through a highly dubious survey.

So here’s what you need to do to defend the existing residential-only status of our homes.

Just download the petition form from the link below, get as many people as you can to sign it  and either hand it in or post it to Alex Greenwich’s office. The address is on the form.

Unlike Airbnb’s astroturf email campaign, you need to hand in physical petitions. It’s a minor hassle but you need to get involved because no one else is going to do this for you.

These are our homes – they have to be worth fighting for. And their status certainly deserves to be properly debated in Parliament

You can download Alex’s petition HERE.

 

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