‘Nothing exploitative’: Caleb Bond defends Hobart landlord who listed $125 tent for rent

Aussies lost it when a brazen landlord listed a humble tent in his backyard for rent at $125 a week recently – but who is really to blame?

No good deed goes unpunished – especially in the time of social media.

Spare a thought for the poor bugger in Hobart who offered a tent for rent in his backyard at $125 per week.

A friend posted the listing on Facebook over the weekend – everything included except food – and it quickly drew criticism from keyboard warriors branding the man a “f***wit” and “shameful”.

Tasmanian Opposition Leader Dean Winter described it as “disgraceful conduct” that was “not the way that Tasmanians should be behaving”.

“We shouldn’t be exploiting people who are desperate and ads like that have no place in Tasmania,” Mr Winter said.

The listing was shared on social media. Picture: Reddit

The landlord in question, for want of a better word, was himself a renter on the disability pension.

He has offered rooms in his home and space in his backyard to people in need for years – charging them a minimal fee, or sometimes nothing at all, for somewhere to stay.

There was nothing exploitative about it. Homeless people are generally not broke – they receive welfare payments like anyone else – and it was offered at a much lower rate than you’d be charged to pitch your own tent on an unpowered site at a caravan park.

You can’t blame the bloke for trying to turn a buck. People need somewhere to live and he’s a disability pensioner who needs money.

He’s clearly meeting a demand in the market because people have been living on his property for years.

It sparked fierce backlash. Picture: Facebook

Notwithstanding all of that, it is cooked that someone would even have to consider living in a tent in someone’s backyard – but that is not the fault of the man offering the tent.

The anger and invective directed towards him is a misplaced distraction from the real problem.

It is the people who have made the policy decisions that led to a tent in a Hobart backyard being someone’s only option for housing who should be slammed.

They are the shameful f***wits, to borrow from the social media monsters.

Mr Winter is right that ads for tents in backyards should have no place in Tasmania – but it is his mob, politicians, who have caused it to happen.

We are in a housing crisis and a cost of living crisis. The two are intrinsically linked.

It is a simple matter of supply and demand – the most basic of economic principles.

Caleb Bond says you can’t blame the landlord for trying to make a buck. Picture: Tricia Watkinson

Hobart’s rental market is in crisis. Picture: Richard Jupe

The cost of building houses boomed during the period of Covid lockdowns and restrictions because it first ground worksites to a halt and later all those rules made it hard to find labour and materials, thus increasing the price of both.

It sent builders, who had sold customers fixed-priced contracts, to the wall in every corner of the country and hampered the construction of new housing.

Then, after international borders reopened, the Albanese government opened the migration floodgates. The number of migrants entering the country increased by 73 per cent in the 2022-23 financial year alone to 737,000.

That’s 737,000 new people who need somewhere to live – and there have been hundreds of thousands per month since.

What do you think happens when you have more and more people pouring into the country vying for a pool of properties that isn’t growing with the population?

You know what happens, because you’re paying for it – property values go up and so does rent, because more people are competing for fewer homes.

Add to that high interest rates – in part caused by high housing costs – that are also passed on to renters, and you have a recipe for people living in a tent in someone’s backyard for $125 a week.

What else are they supposed to do?

The politicians and bureaucrats who made these decisions would much rather you get angry at some disability pensioner in Hobart, but it’s not really his fault that the tent was put up for rent – it’s theirs.

Get angry at the decision makers, not those responding to the market.

Originally published as ‘Nothing exploitative’: Caleb Bond defends Hobart landlord who listed $125 tent for rent