A former Greens councillor who once ran for lord mayor of Brisbane has released a song that claims tenants could burn down the offices of their real estate agents if their rent is hiked.
Jonathan Sriranganathan served on Brisbane City Council from 2016 to 2023 before a bid for the city’s top public office in 2024, where he finished third behind Labor’s Tracey Price and current lord mayor, the LNP’s Adrian Schrinner.
Brisbane-born-and-raised Sriranganathan now devotes his time to being a writer, musician, beat-poet and community events organiser – with the latest song from his band Rivermouth, titled ‘Notice to Leave’, taking aim at landlords and real estate agents.
‘Better cut the rent soon cos we ain’t gonna riot gently,’ Sriranganathan’s rapped lyrics warn.
‘Real estate parasites like a bit of homelessness. If everyone had housing, they would have to charge us less.’
Sriranganathan claimed those who own properties ‘don’t want solutions’ because ‘the problem makes them rich’ before delivering the ominous line that ‘nothing’s gonna change until we flick a bigger switch’.
The song’s repeated chorus declares: ‘If you keep jacking up the rent, we’re gonna burn down the real estate agency’.
He acknowledges in the song, the lyrics could be called incitement before justifying them as ‘just calling what the mood’s like’ and stating: ‘You can’t ignore a message if it’s in the fire’.
According to a report, by housing affordability advocacy group Everybody’s Home released in October, ns spent on average almost $15,000 more a year to rent a home this year compared to January 2020.
For people living in Sydney and Perth that amount was in excess of $18,000 more a year.
In an introduction essay to the song he explained the lyrics were formed over a number of years ‘in response to Queensland’s worsening rental crisis’.
Sriranganathan himself lives on a houseboat named ‘Afterglow’ on a creek off the Brisbane River, which he purchased in March 2017 for about $30,000, and doesn’t pay mooring fees.
He also owns a 4WD and a caravan, and keeps those parked on the street adjacent to his boat.
‘Among other things, the lyrics speak to the frustrations of gentrification, and the nagging sense that the unpaid or underpaid work so many of us do to make our communities more creatively vibrant and socially connected can end up working against us’.
He said the the second verse of Notice to Leave – named after the eviction notice landlord send to tenants in Queensland – draws a link ‘between colonialism and the treatment of housing as a commodity, parcelling up land in order to sell or lease it for profit.’
One of the Green’s policies at the Brisbane council elections last year was a two year rent freeze to ‘wages to catch up, and give renters relief’.
This would have been enforced by charging significantly higher council rates on any property investor who raised the rent above January 2023 levels.
‘Some investors have had concerns about the rent freeze’, but there are many others who say that if a landlord has managed their finances so poorly that they can’t cover their costs without gouging their tenants, they should probably just sell up,’ he said at the time.
‘Tenants and owner-occupiers really love our proposal for a 2-year freeze on rent increases. Even people who own their own homes can see we urgently need to do something to stop more people becoming homeless.’
The federal government is attempting to tackle the rental shortage by adding tens of thousands of extra rental properties.
The changes, which cleared the Senate last week, pave the way for more build-to-rent housing, a model involving developers and financiers holding onto larger-scale housing developments to rent homes out long term.
In , most housing developments are built with the intention to sell each dwelling.
Housing Minister Clare O’Neil said build-to-rent was no ‘silver bullet’ solution to the housing crisis but was expected to produce 80,000 new rental homes over 10 years.
‘I’m confident that this is a really important part of the answer to our housing problems in this country, not perfect, because nothing in life ever is but a good step forward for us,’ she told reporters in Canberra on Thursday.
For build-to-rent operators to be granted concessions, they will need to offer five-year minimum leases and no-cause evictions will not be allowed.
Representatives from both the property industry and community housing sector welcomed the changes.
Property Council chief executive Mike Zorbas said the build-to-rent concessions were game-changing.
‘Eighty-thousand new homes over 10 years is more significant than any other effort made by a federal government to address the rental deficit in this country,’ he told reporters on Thursday.
Community Housing Industry Association chief executive Wendy Hayhurst highlighted the stipulation that 10 per cent of all homes built under the rules would need to meet definitions of affordability.
‘It will create, over a longer period, a pipeline of genuinely affordable housing as well, something we haven’t had in this country for a long time,’ she said.
The federal housing policy struggled to gain the political support needed to pass parliament but earlier in the week, the Greens chose to back the bill and forged a pathway through the Senate.
Michael Fotheringham from the n Housing and Urban Research Centre said built-to-rent was no panacea to the country’s housing woes but a good policy to pursue if the goal was to improve urban density with more townhouses and apartments.
Corporate landlords tend to behave differently to small scale investors, he further explained.
‘They’re less likely to be thinking about flipping the property for capital gain and more likely to be thinking about long-term stability and rental yield as their income driver,’ he said.
Daily Mail has contacted Jonathan Sriranganathan, Brisbane City Council and the Real Estate Institute of Queensland for comment.