Brisbane City Council lord mayor hopeful Jonathan Sriranganathan wants to hike struggling homeowners’ rates by 650% and freeze rents… but he won’t pay a cent because of his unique housing situation

A Greens candidate hoping to become mayor of Brisbane is promising to increase rental rates by 650 per cent, but this will not affect his hip pocket.

Jonathan Sriranganathan has promised to ‘freeze rents in Brisbane’ and punish landlords who resist with crippling interest rate hikes.

Such a move would have no personal impact as he lives on a houseboat called ‘Afterglow’ on Brisbane’s Norman Creek and pays no mooring fees.

He also owns a 4WD and a caravan, and keeps them parked on the street next to his boat.

Mr Sriranganathan told Daily Mail Australia he and his partner “moved into a leaky old houseboat mainly because it was too expensive to buy anywhere on land.”

He said the experience makes him “well qualified to advocate for changes in housing policy, as I am one of thousands of Brisbanenis who have been locked out of the housing market”.

“I’d like to own a house, but (Prime Minister) Steven Miles seems to have bought them all,” he said.

Mr Sriranganathan earned up to $160,000 annually as a councilor for seven years but has never bought a property.

Instead, he lives in the houseboat, which requires a kayak to access.

According to Domain, he bought the houseboat in March 2017 for about $30,000. At the time, he donated half his salary to charity, in protest at the much higher wages politicians receive compared to ordinary Australians.

“If I kept that, I could afford to live in a much nicer place,” he said.

‘Until ordinary workers are paid better and Centrelink is much more reasonable, I don’t think it’s fair for politicians to get much higher wages.

“It’s about practicing what I preach.”

Since quitting his job as a councilor to run for mayor, he no longer earns an income, but before that he said he specifically donated to registered housing and environmental charities, while also giving to “local community projects and to individuals who’I have fallen on hard times’.

As part of his housing policy, Mr Sriranganathan has pledged to hit homeowners – many of whom are struggling with rising cost of living pressures and rising interest rate hikes – with huge extra costs if he is to be elected.

His plan is built around a commitment to a two-year rent freeze to “catch up on wages and provide relief to tenants.”

But he offered assurances to owner-occupiers that they are not the target of the plan.

“Owner-occupiers can be assured that we do not want to increase their rates. We only want to focus on mega-rich speculators with multiple real estate investments who leave them vacant for long periods of time, or who systematically defraud tenants.’

He even said that homeowners have just as much of a reason to vote Green as renters.

“We are the only party that is serious about reducing homelessness and preventing big developers from manipulating our democracy,” he said.

“City governments and parliaments are already full of real estate investors, so having someone with a different financial background will help bring much-needed balance to housing policy conversations.”

To enforce his rent freeze, Sriranganathan says he would charge “significantly higher rates to any real estate investor who raises rent above January 2023 levels.”

Furthermore, the rent freeze would be linked to the property, rather than the lease, meaning landlords would be tied to the rent even if their tenants move out and the property is put back on the market.

Mr Sriranganathan has described his policy idea as one that would “make it extremely expensive for property investors to raise rents by charging much higher rates if they do so.”

While the council does not have the power to change state rental laws, he has argued that he could create a new rate category, described as the “unrestricted rental property,” where properties would be placed if landlords raised rents.

“In practice, almost no investors would raise rents because they would lose money by doing so,” he said.

His long-term goal is to eliminate the desire among Australians to treat housing as a financial asset.

And Mr Sriranganathan claims that his policy proposal is actually proving to be hugely popular among the electorate.

He noted that “some investors have been concerned about the rent freeze,” but there are many more “who say that if a landlord has managed his finances so poorly that he can’t cover his costs without robbing his tenants, he probably just have to sell. upwards’.

‘Tenants and owner-occupiers are very enthusiastic about our proposal for a two-year freeze on rent increases. Even people who own their own homes can see that we urgently need to do something to prevent more people from becoming homeless.”

However, it will be an uphill battle to oust LNP mayor Adrian Schrinner, who currently holds the highest office of a Liberal politician outside Tasmania.

By the time the election rolls around in March, the LNP will have held the mayoralty in Brisbane for 20 years.

In 2020, then Greens candidate Kath Angus achieved a five percent swing, but Mr Schrinner still won 56 percent of two-party preferential votes and is still considered a popular leader.

“We are definitely still the underdogs in the race for mayor, but I predict we will beat the LNP on several counts,” he said.

“Support for the Greens has increased dramatically in Brisbane over the past eight years and almost 50% of Brisbane voters already have a federal Greens MP.”

He believes at least 10 council areas are within reasonable reach in the upcoming 2024 council elections, following strong results in the 2022 federal election in and around Brisbane.

Labor has put forward local lawyer and mother, Tracey Price, as its candidate for mayor, campaigning on policies to ‘make our suburbs safer’ and ‘transform Brisbane into a 24-hour city’.

She also claims that the LNP – after being in power for so long – and Mr Schrinner have ‘run out of ideas, money and time’.