Open Doors to Renting Reform report published
In 2018, the Queensland community shared their ideas about how to improve renting through the Open Doors for Renting Reform Consultation. We worked with the Queensland Department of Housing and Public Works to analyse all the information they had collected during the public consultation. The reform process was driven by a need to modernise Queensland’s renting laws, spurred on by the death of an infant in 2010 due to rotting floorboards in a rental property. This and other legislative reforms are a key initiative under the Queensland Housing Strategy, Action Plan 2017-2020.
The consultation used an online engagement platform to collect all the feedback in one place, interfacing with social media platforms to maximise ease of response, and providing its own space to easily complete an online survey or upload a written submission.
During the consultation, over 130,000 responses were gathered, meaning there was a huge amount of work required to code, analyse and understand what renters in Queensland wanted from the reformed policy. The consultation asked Queenslanders to respond to polls about specific pieces of possible legislation, as well as open questions about how renting should function to best serve renters in Queensland. To analyse this massive amount of data we developed a new technique of coding and analysing large amounts of unstructured text in a short time frame.
ARTD’s report on the consultation was recently released and is available here.
