Katerina Pavlidis

Regulation can often seem remote from everyday life — setting the price of a service, the wording of a contract, a product standard. Housing regulation, however, is deeply personal, determining how someone lives in their home and, for shared housing, how they live alongside others.

My career has included telecommunications, privacy and housing regulation, but the connecting thread is consumer protection and an endlessly interesting question: when should government step in? This is particularly difficult to answer for shared living, where the law isn’t always regulating a business, but human behaviour.

As Policy Director at NSW Fair Trading, I’ve worked closely with Ministers to lead reforms through Parliament that affect how millions of people live, and I get to see their impact quickly and directly. I also spend time responding to members of the public about problems in their own homes — a pensioner hit with a levy he can’t pay, or a resident told they can’t do something as simple as installing curtains when their strata committee actually has no power to prevent it. It’s a window into people’s lives, and it’s shown me that getting rules right matters enormously, even when people never think about them until something goes wrong.

More and more Australians are turning to shared living — apartments, residential parks and boarding houses, for example. I want to shift some of the public debate from how to get people into homes to what happens once they’re in: sharing walls, facilities and financial obligations with strangers.

My Fellowship will examine effective shared housing models overseas, what regulation works, and how people come to understand their rights and obligations.

My vision is for shared living to be not only a viable alternative to owning a freestanding home, but somewhere people genuinely want to live.