Everyone has the right to a home: the everyday practices and experiences of renting within the private rental sector in Australi

Abstract

This thesis examines the everyday practices and experiences of renting within the private rental sector in Australia. It recognises home as a right and argues that everyone has the right to a home, a place where they feel safe, secure and can stay for as long as they like. Dominant ideology inherent within Australia and other homeowner markets promotes the ‘dream’ of homeownership through state-led housing policy, while treating renting as a temporary housing solution (Gurney, 1999; Power 2017; Ronald, 2008). This thesis argues that failing to account for the normative connections between the cultural and institutional ideals of home and homeownership acts as a barrier to developing urgently needed legislative changes. At the same time there is a need to better understand how tenants actively negotiate this institutional context. This integrated knowledge should underpin future rental reform. These reforms are required by an increasing proportion of Australians for whom renting is not, nor is it ever likely to be, the temporary, ‘stepping-stone’ to homeownership that it might have been in previous eras of Australian housing history. This thesis develops this argument and advances home and homemaking literature by exploring the ways private rental tenants make home and make home meaningful. Further, it expands understandings of private rental security through an exploration of the micro-level interactions and processes that shape tenants’ experiences and practices of living in the private rental sector. Previous research addressing these questions has been limited by a focus on either micro (individual level) and macro (institutional level) rental processes. This thesis argues the need to bring these approaches together. In doing so the thesis develops new knowledge of how macro-level social, cultural and institutional processes extend to the confines of the home to shape tenants’ micro-level practices and experiences of renting; and also, the ways that tenants actively respond to macro-level processes as they make home. To achieve these outcomes, a qualitative mixed-methods approach drawing on media analysis and in-depth interviews with tenants was used.

Date of Thesis submission	2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	Emma Power (Supervisor), Rae Dufty-Jones (Supervisor) & Andrew Gorman-Murray (Supervisor)