The politics of locksmith businesses

Episode 13. Show notesThe story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. Real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below.REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODEAustraliaThe Residential Tenancies Amendment Act 2018 (Vic), passed by the Victorian Parliament in September 2018, introduced more than 130 reforms to the Residential Tenancies Act 1997, progressively coming into force through to 29 March 2021. The reforms include minimum standards for rental properties, restrictions on rent increases, removal of certain no-reason terminations of tenancy, the right to keep a pet with reasonable consent, the right to make modifications, and specific provisions for tenants who have experienced family violence including the right to end a tenancy without unfair compensation, install security cameras and other safety modifications, and change locks. The Make Renting Fair campaign was led by Tenants Victoria with allied organisations across the legal assistance, housing, homelessness, family violence, and social services sectors, including Justice Connect’s Homeless Law team, Council to Homeless Persons, Victorian Council of Social Service, Domestic Violence Victoria, and Aboriginal Family Violence Prevention and Legal Service Victoria. The campaign worked the Victorian Government’s Fairer Safer Housing review across a four-year process, with more than 4,800 submissions received from across the rental sector. The Victorian Government has since announced further rental reforms including the complete removal of no-reason evictions, tighter rules on bond claims, and a streamlined dispute resolution process, indicating ongoing political contest over the property regime in Victoria.GermanyThe Berlin Mietendeckel (officially the Gesetz zur Mietenbegrenzung im Wohnungswesen in Berlin, or MietenWoG Bln) was passed by the Berlin House of Representatives on 30 January 2020 and came into force on 23 February 2020. The law established a five-year rent cap, freezing rents in approximately 1.5 million Berlin apartments at their 18 June 2019 levels, in a city where around 85 per cent of residents are renters. Germany overall is the European Union member state with the highest proportion of renters in the private sector, at around 55 per cent. On 25 March 2021 the Second Senate of the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) declared the MietenWoG Bln incompatible with the German Basic Law and void in its entirety, with the decision published on 15 April 2021. The Court ruled on the basis of legislative competence, finding that the federal government had conclusively occupied the field of rent regulation through the Mietpreisbremse (federal rent brake), enacted in 2015 under Section 556d of the German Civil Code, and that the State of Berlin therefore lacked the authority to pass the Mietendeckel. The Court explicitly declined to rule on whether rent regulation as such is constitutional. The debate over rent regulation in Germany has since moved back to the federal level, with continuing political contest over the structure and reach of the Mietpreisbremse and the proper role of rent caps in high-pressure urban housing markets.ScotlandThe Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016 received Royal Assent on 22 April 2016 and commenced on 1 December 2017, replacing the previous “short assured tenancy” regime under the Housing (Scotland) Act 1988 with a new “private residential tenancy” (PRT). The PRT is open-ended, with no fixed term and no automatic expiry. Landlords can only end a tenancy through one of 18 specified grounds set out in Schedule 3 of the Act, and the previous Section 21-style “no-fault” eviction is no longer available in Scotland. The campaign that produced the 2016 Act was led by Living Rent, Scotland’s tenants’ union, working a four-year consultation process that included direct action, lobbying, and submissions to politicise tenancy reform as a site of democratic contest rather than a settled question of private law. Scotland’s reform has been the leading Anglophone example of structural tenancy reform of this kind, with England’s parallel attempt under the Renters (Reform) Bill 2023 postponed and watered down in passage. International theoretical tradition The Adelaide-based legal philosopher Margaret Davies has spent over thirty years developing the analytical framework of property as a political relationship between people mediated by the law, against the standard liberal account of property as a relationship between persons and things. Her major works on the subject include Property: Meanings, Histories, Theories (Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007) and Asking the Law Question (4th edition, Sydney: Thomson Reuters, 2017), both of which are foundational texts in Australian critical legal theory. Cheryl Harris’s article “Whiteness as Property,” published in the Harvard Law Review in June 1993, established the foundational analytical frame for property as a racialised political category in the United States. The argument traces how the legal architecture of American property law was constructed around the protection of white settler claims to land taken from Indigenous nations and around the legal exclusion of Black people from property holding under slavery and its aftermath, with continuing structural effects on contemporary property regimes. Larissa Behrendt, a Gomeroi and Eualeyai legal scholar and currently Distinguished Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, has developed the Australian application of critical property theory across decades of scholarship, including Achieving Social Justice: Indigenous Rights and Australia’s Future (Sydney: Federation Press, 2003) and Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2016). Behrendt’s analysis traces the Australian property regime back to its constitutional foundation in the legal fiction of terra nullius, formally overturned in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992) but continuing to structure Indigenous land rights, Native Title, and the contemporary tenancy regime.REFERENCES[1] Margaret Davies, Property: Meanings, Histories, Theories (Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007). Routledge, https://www.routledge.com/Property-Meanings-Histories-Theories/Davies/p/book/9781904385639 (Accessed: 15 May 2026). See also Margaret Davies, Asking the Law Question, 4th edition (Sydney: Thomson Reuters, 2017).[2] Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707-1791, https://doi.org/10.2307/1341787.[3] Larissa Behrendt, Achieving Social Justice: Indigenous Rights and Australia’s Future (Sydney: Federation Press, 2003); Larissa Behrendt, Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2016), https://www.uqp.com.au/books/finding-eliza (Accessed: 15 May 2026).[4] Gesetz zur Mietenbegrenzung im Wohnungswesen in Berlin (MietenWoG Bln), Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development and Housing, in force from 23 February 2020. See “Berlin Rent Cap: Federal Constitutional Court,” Deloitte Legal Germany, https://www2.deloitte.com/dl/en/pages/legal/articles/mietendeckel-bundesverfassungsgericht.html (Accessed: 15 May 2026).[5] Bundesverfassungsgericht, decision of 25 March 2021, 2 BvF 1/20, 2 BvL 4/20, 2 BvL 5/20, published 15 April 2021. Federal Constitutional Court press release No. 28/2021, https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/EN/2021/bvg21-028.html (Accessed: 15 May 2026); “Berlin Rent Cap Law Ruled Unlawful by German Constitutional Court,” Housing Rights Watch, https://www.housingrightswatch.org/news/berlin-rent-cap-law-ruled-unlawful-german-constitutional-court (Accessed: 15 May 2026).[6] Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016 (asp 19), https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2016/19/contents (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Scottish Government, “Private Residential Tenancy: Information for Tenants,” https://www.gov.scot/publications/private-residential-tenancies-tenants-guide/ (Accessed: 15 May 2026); on the role of Living Rent in producing the reform, see Douglas Maxwell, “Contesting the Property Paradigm amid ‘Radical’ Constitutional Change: Living Rent and the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016,” Legal Studies (Cambridge Core), https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/legal-studies/article/contesting-the-property-paradigm-amid-radical-constitutional-change-living-rent-and-the-private-residential-tenancies-scotland-act-2016/BEB645ABC0BB30CE4324278278A4D134 (Accessed: 15 May 2026).[7] Residential Tenancies Amendment Act 2018 (Vic), No. 45 of 2018, https://www.legislation.vic.gov.au/in-force/acts/residential-tenancies-amendment-act-2018/021 (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Commissioner for Residential Tenancies Victoria, “Changes to Renting Laws,” https://www.rentingcommissioner.vic.gov.au/the-rental-sector/changes-to-renting-laws (Accessed: 15 May 2026).[8] Tenants Victoria, “Make Renting Fair Campaign,” https://tenantsvic.org.au (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Justice Connect Homeless Law, “Better, Fairer and Safer Renting for All,” https://justiceconnect.org.au/fairmatters/better-fairer-and-safer-renting-for-all/ (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Victorian Government, Fairer Safer Housing Review, https://engage.vic.gov.au/fairer-safer-housing.[9] Australian Human Rights Commission, Wiyi Yani U Thangani (Women’s Voices): Securing Our Rights, Securing Our Future Report (Sydney: AHRC, 2020), https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-social-justice/projects/wiyi-yani-u-thangani-women (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Specialist Homelessness Services Annual Report 2023-24 (Canberra: AIHW, 2024), https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/homelessness-services/specialist-homelessness-services-annual-report (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Productivity Commission, In Need of Repair: The National Housing and Homelessness Agreement (Canberra: Productivity Commission, 2022).[10] State of Victoria, Royal Commission into Family Violence: Report and Recommendations (Melbourne: Victorian Government, March 2016), http://rcfv.archive.royalcommission.vic.gov.au/Report-Recommendations.html (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Safe Steps Family Violence Response Centre and Justice Connect Homeless Law, joint submission to the Residential Tenancies Act review, 2016; Victorian Government, Free from Violence: Victoria’s Strategy to Prevent Family Violence and All Forms of Violence against Women, https://www.vic.gov.au/free-violence-strategy (Accessed: 15 May 2026).[11] Tenants Victoria, https://tenantsvic.org.au (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Tenancy Advice and Advocacy Service (Victoria), funded through Consumer Affairs Victoria, https://www.consumer.vic.gov.au/housing/renting/advice-and-help-with-renting/get-help-with-renting/tenant-advice-and-advocacy-service (Accessed: 15 May 2026).[12] Australian Council of Social Service, Poverty in Australia 2024 (Sydney: ACOSS, 2024), https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/poverty/ (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Hal Pawson, Vivienne Milligan, and Judith Yates, Housing Policy in Australia: A Case for System Reform (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).FURTHER READINGDavies, Margaret. Property: Meanings, Histories, Theories. Abingdon:Routledge-Cavendish, 2007. The foundational text for the analyticalframe used in this episode: property as a political relationshipbetween people mediated by the law.Davies, Margaret. Asking the Law Question. 4th edition. Sydney:Thomson Reuters, 2017. Companion text in critical legal theory,covering feminist, critical race, and post-colonial approaches tothe question of what law is and what it does.Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106,no. 8 (June 1993): 1707-1791. The foundational article on property asa racialised political category in the United States, with continuingrelevance for understanding settler-colonial property regimesincluding the Australian one.Behrendt, Larissa. Achieving Social Justice: Indigenous Rights andAustralia’s Future. Sydney: Federation Press, 2003. Behrendt’saccount of Indigenous legal and political claims in Australia and thepolitical settlement they require.Behrendt, Larissa. Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling.St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2016. Behrendt’s analysisof the political work that colonial storytelling does in maintainingthe Australian property regime.Macpherson, C.B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism:Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Thefoundational text in Anglophone political theory on the politicalconstruction of the property-holding individual.Pawson, Hal, Vivienne Milligan, and Judith Yates. Housing Policy inAustralia: A Case for System Reform. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan,2020. A major recent academic survey of Australianhousing policy and reform options.Maxwell, Douglas. “Contesting the Property Paradigm amid ‘Radical’Constitutional Change: Living Rent and the Private Housing(Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016.” Legal Studies (Cambridge Core).Academic analysis of how Living Rent successfully politicised tenancyreform in Scotland.Wiyi Yani U Thangani (Women’s Voices): Securing Our Rights, SecuringOur Future. Australian Human Rights Commission, 2020. A major recent national survey of Aboriginal and Torres StraitIslander women’s experiences, including in housing and tenancy.All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical eventslisted above are real and citable. For any source intended for formalacademic or professional writing, direct verification against theoriginal publication or institutional record is recommended. This is a public episode. 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