An important test case will begin at the Magistrates Court in Tom Price on Tuesday morning, with Ms Jacobs, a First Nations public housing tenant in the remote Pilbara town of Wakathuni, taking on the WA Housing Authority over alleged failure to address poor housing conditions and illegal rent increases.
The case is a Western Australian first, and like the recent Northern Territory remote housing case, could have implications across the country.
Ms Jacobs is taking the Housing Authority, her state landlord, to court over its alleged ongoing failures to repair her home, leaving her to live in unsafe conditions which fall short of local health law standards.
Ms Jacobs is also challenging the WA Housing Authority's many attempts to increase her rent. She is arguing that the rent increases were unlawful, not in line with her tenancy agreement, and also excessive, particularly in light of the government's alleged neglect of the property, and the median rent in surrounding areas.
Her legal team is arguing the Authority breached its obligations to repair and maintain her home under national consumer laws, not only the state tenancy laws.
They will argue that the Authority, as a landlord and provider of housing, owes a consumer guarantee to tenants to maintain rental properties so that they are reasonably fit for use as a home and place of residence.
The case follows the success of the remote community in Ltyentye Apurte (Santa Teresa) in the NT, which won historic rights to habitable homes in the NT Supreme Court and to compensation for disappointment and distress in the High Court of Australia in November last year.
Ms Jacobs, is represented by the same team that successfully backed the NT community of Ltyentye Apurte - Australian Lawyers for Remote Aboriginal Rights and barrister Matthew Albert - at no cost to her, as Grata Fund has provided Ms Jacobs with the support and financial backing she needed to bring her case to court.
Australian Lawyers for Remote Aboriginal Rights said on Tuesday before proceedings began that this is the first time the question of whether a tenant-landlord relationship is a consumer-supplier relationship has been tested, and if won, "could open up a new legal pathway for renters living in rental homes neglected by their landlords, providing stronger legal protections for renters nation-wide facing an increasingly hostile rental market".
Ms Jacobs alleges she has experienced many issues with her house, including malfunctioning stove, septic blockages, faulty shower facilities, faulty exhaust fans, and insect infestations.
Her lawyers note that the lack of air conditioning also means that in the soaring temperatures, reaching the high 40s in the Pilbara, her house is often uninhabitable during the summer months.
Australian Lawyers for Remote Aboriginal Rights said its survey of remote communities in WA consistently found that the WA government's method for calculating rent "lacked transparency, leaving tenants unable to determine the rent they should be paying, and allowing the Housing Authority to freely adjust rent amounts without a clear limit". They also found that the maintenance neglect faced by Ms Jacobs are commonly experienced by Aboriginal tenants in remote WA.
The WA Housing Authority provides housing in 111 remote Aboriginal communities.
National Indigenous Times has contacted the WA government for comment.
More to come.
