The chief executive of Scentre Group, which owns Australia’s Westfield mall empire, has been left reeling by the Victorian government’s announcement – made on the day the state came out of its latest short lockdown – that landlords will be forced to again defer and forgive rent for struggling smaller retailers until January 2022.

This is bad policy, Peter Allen tells Chanticleer. While the rent relief measures broadly mirror those extended last year by the national cabinet at the height of Australia’s COVID-19 crisis, Allen questions why landlords should be mandated to provide ongoing support to tenants, and under circumstances where a government is effectively seeking to unilaterally change the terms of contracts struck in good faith.