‘There’s real powerlessness’: Australian renters at the mercy of no-cause evictions

Six days after Natalie and her household pushed her landlord for a timeline to fix the unusable front stairs on their decaying Queenslander in Brisbane, they were issued an eviction notice. Photograph: David Kelly/The Guardian

It was a tradesperson attending the house for another job who first alerted Natalie to the fact the wooden front stairway of her rental, a decaying Queenslander in an inner Brisbane suburb, was coming away from the wall.

“The thing was cracking and breaking away,” Natalie says. “We alerted the real estate agent, and they came and wrapped warning tape around the stairs and told us not to use them. They said they’d fix it straight away.”