Ms Rebecca Keatinge:

In respect of Covid-19, we have seen that both our individual and our collective well-being depend on people having secure and safe homes, so it has brought this issue into a sharp focus. We see the referendum as being future-looking. It is to provide that floor of protection against recurring crises looking forward, as the Senator commented.

In other jurisdictions, there are 83 constitutions that protect the right to housing across the world. This is constituted in a whole range of different wordings, and as a sub-group, we have looked at many of those wordings. As an organisation, the Mercy Law Resource Centre produced a report on the protection of the right in other jurisdictions in Europe, including Finland, and the statutory protections that exist in France and Scotland. That details how, in those legal frameworks, the protections exist and the impact they have had. The overall conclusions I would draw from that report and from our own research is that to introduce the protection we would not be an outlier. It is a common protection that exists in modern, well-functioning democracies. The other comment I would make is a bit of a caveat and while Ms Hennigan and Professor Whyte will be able to speak to some of the specific examples, we have a very specific legal framework. It is difficult to import how some things operate in other jurisdictions. For example, Finland has a protection in relation to housing but its laws operate and are formed through a very different process. There is pre-legislative scrutiny to make sure that things are constitution-proofed, and there are other interventions, but we have quite a unique system. We have looked at the South African example, which is obviously a very different context, but that does have some comparators with our own legal system. The committee will see in our note that we have commented on how that example can be used. I will defer now to Professor Whyte and Ms Hennigan might add some further comments.