Putting Landlords on a “Leash”: The Latest Crazy Idea from the Greens, who Should be Called the “Reds”
The Victorian Greens' proposal to force landlords to hold a licence, with three strikes and you're out of the rental business, is not a serious housing policy. It is an exercise in punitive regulation that will shrink the supply of rental homes, raise costs for the people it claims to help, and further confirm that the party long ago abandoned environmentalism for a brand of socialist control dressed up in green language.
Under the scheme advanced by Gabrielle de Vietri and colleagues, landlords would need a licence to rent out property. An independent regulator would oversee the system, conduct inspections, demand energy-efficiency disclosures and "rent-worthy" certificates, and revoke the right to lease after repeated breaches of standards. The party notes that Victorians already need licences for beekeeping or metal detecting, so why not for owning and letting a house? The estimated setup cost is $50 million. The political pitch is that this will crack down on "dodgy landlords" and make rentals more affordable.
Economics is not complicated here. Every new compliance cost, inspection regime, and threat of licence loss is ultimately paid by someone. In a tight rental market, that someone is the renter. Landlords who face higher regulatory risk will either raise rents to cover the burden, exit the market, or stop investing in maintenance and upgrades. Reduced supply of private rental stock tightens the market further. Properties that fail new standards or whose owners decide the hassle is no longer worth it leave the pool. The Macrobusiness observation is correct: renters pay for the licensing bureaucracy, renters pay for the upgrades, and renters pay when the stock shrinks. The same party that supports high levels of immigration, itself a major driver of rental demand, then proposes to punish the private owners who currently house much of that demand.
This is consistent with the broader Greens rental platform: rent freezes and caps, guaranteed lease renewals, limits on no-grounds terminations, and an expanded National Renters Protection Authority with fining powers. These measures treat private property rights as the problem and administrative control as the solution. Historical and international experience with strict rent controls and heavy landlord regulation shows the predictable results: reduced investment, deferred maintenance, black markets or informal arrangements, and greater pressure on public housing waiting lists. Victoria already has minimum standards and tenancy laws; the claim that the only missing piece is a licensing scheme that can effectively ban owners from the market is not evidence-based policy. It is an ideological preference for state permission over voluntary exchange.
The environmental pretence has worn thin. Genuine environmental concern would prioritise limiting population growth that consumes land, water, and energy, preserving green space, and maintaining reliable low-emission energy rather than intermittent sources that raise system costs. The modern Greens have subordinated those priorities to open-border advocacy, identity politics, and a redistributive agenda that treats private landlords as a class enemy. The colour has shifted from green to red. Housing policy has become another front in a larger project of centralised control: licences, regulators, strike systems, and caps that expand the role of the state while ignoring the supply constraints created by planning rules, high immigration, and tax settings that discourage new construction.
A party that once focused on conservation and pollution now spends more political capital on landlord licensing, rent freezes, and cultural causes than on measurable environmental outcomes. The Victorian proposal is a clear example. It will not produce more affordable, well-maintained rental homes. It will produce fewer of them, higher costs for remaining tenants, and another layer of bureaucracy. For a genuine environmental party, the obvious route to lower rental pressure would include lower population growth and more housing supply. The Greens have chosen the opposite path. That choice is not green. It is the predictable endpoint of a party that stopped prioritising the environment years ago.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2026/10/greens-weirdos-propose-rental-wreckage/
