Furniture kits for teacher housing
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 128, 25 August 2023, page no.22
In certain circumstances, the Department of Education (DoE) can provide furniture kits for teacher housing tenants working in rural and remote areas.
These kits are primarily for staff in multi-tenancies and for sole tenants in remote communities with limited uplift tonnage.
The advice to the QTU is that local accommodation committees (LACs) can request furniture kits from the relevant regional infrastructure manager, and that all reasonable requests will be considered.
A potential impediment here is that the committee may not be aware that this is resourcing that can be requested and may not be familiar with what can be provided.
From time to time, the QTU has raised the disparity between what is provided and what the DoE guidelines state should be in a furniture kit. On Thursday 20 July, the QTU was advised by Tenancy and Leasing (central office) that a furniture kit is made up of the items listed (right).
Thank you to the QTU’s State Accommodation Committee (SAC) for requesting that this article be published. The SAC, which meets four times a year to discuss matters related to teacher housing, is chaired by QTU President Cresta Richardson and consists of 13 grassroots teachers living and working in communities with teacher accommodation and the five QTU Regional Organisers.
Kitchen
Refrigerator Kelvinator or Westinghouse 420L frost free fridge/freezer or equal
Chest freezer (remote areas only) Kelvinator H210F chest freezer or equal
Bedroom
Wardrobe (where there are no built-in cupboards), dressing table for each bedroom (where no built-in cupboards are provided), desk and chair for each bedroom. Not provided - bed and mattress
Laundry
Automatic washing machine: Simpson 5.5kg top loading automatic machine or equal
Dining
Dining room table complete with 4-6 chairs (five piece for two multis or seven piece for three+ multis)
General
Bookcase
Lounge
Lounge suite (2x2 seaters – 3+ gets 3+2 seaters) coffee table.
Winning for members
Recently, a tenant in accommodation for which a furniture kit had been supplied was incorrectly informed that they would need to replace the washing machine. The QTU and DoE have the view that, where a kit is supplied and the tenant has been using the kit, damaged or non-functioning items would have to be replaced by DoE. The QTU was able to identify this error to DoE and was successful in ensuring the replacement item was provided to the tenant.