Caxton Legal Centre lawyer Brittany Smeed has recently argued in favour of greater involvement of the federal government in the regulation of retirement villages in her paper ‘Retirement villages in Australia: The case for Commonwealth intervention’, published in Western Sydney University’s Elder Law Review journal.
The paper suggests that the retirement village industry has now reached a stage where it would be better regulated at a national level by increasing the scope of existing financial services regulations to include retirement village contracts.
This would allow for the Australian Securities and Investment Commission and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to act as the regulatory bodies and investigate systemic issues in retirement villages that exist across Australia.
Brittany Smeed is a lawyer with Caxton’s Park and Village Information Link, a legal service for existing and prospective residents of retirement villages and manufactured home parks in Queensland.