January 2025
We received a letter from the Tribunal with its decision. It said, “The Development Tribunal, in accordance with section 252 PA, decides that the Tribunal has no jurisdiction to hear or decide the appeal.” Apparently under “Section 229 and Schedule 1 section 1(1) and Table 1 item 6 PA do allow the decision to give an EN to be appealed to the Planning and Environment Court or the Tribunal, but Schedule 1 section 1(2)(h) limits the the types of EN decisions that can be appealed to the Tribunal.”
With the Tribunal shutting down our appeal, our only option was to appeal to the Planning and Environment Court. This would require substantial money to hire a barrister to represent us and a considerable amount of time, as this could take a couple of years to come to a decision, and there was a risk that we would not win. So the decision was made not to pursue an appeal through the Planning & Environment Court. We now had to follow through on the actions Sunshine Coast Council required on the Enforcement Notice (EN).
Unhappy with the decision, we contacted the media to share our story.
February 2025
To take our story to a wider audience, we created the Tiny Community Living website and started a new petition to Sunshine Coast Council and the Queensland State Government. To date we have raised over 1000 signatures. In time we deliver the signed petitions to Sunshine Coast Council and the Queensland State Government.
To reach a wider audience to share our story and collect signatures for our petition, we started attending local markets. We attended Witta Markets, Eumundi Markets, Yandina Country Markets, Mapleton Country Markets, Kenliworth Markets, and the Terella Twilight Markets each week.
September 2025
We reached out to Paul Slater, President of Northwest Community Group (NWG), to see if he was interested in taking the lead in a petition to the Queensland Government to make housing a human right. At the time, Paul was head-deep in supporting the homeless in Brisbane through their tent program and became well known as the face of the campaign against Moreton Bay Council for demolishing homeless tents in their parks. NWG, with support from Basic Rights Queensland, launched a Supreme Court judicial review challenging the City of Moreton Bay Council’s destruction of homeless camps in Eddie Hyland Park. Following the legal challenge, the council paused demolition efforts and it set a legal precedent to stop similar evictions by other local councils.
We worked with Paul to develop the petition wording to campaign to make housing a human right and launched the petition in September. The petition closed in November and was tabled in December. You can read the Government’s response here.
December 2025
After collecting many signatures on our petitions, we lodged them with Council for Councillor David Law to be tabled at the December ordinary meeting. A total of 7 petitions with a total of 1795 signatures. You can watch Councillor speak to the petitions at the 3.10.00 timestamp on their meeting recording. We were disappointed with how they were tabled; we spent time chatting with David to share that we almost spoke to every person who signed the petitions. Learning about their housing (or lack thereof) story, we asked him to speak to it. He did not. He also did not table all the petitions with the total number of signatures. He only tabled 827 signatures. We followed up but did not receive an explanation for why the other 968 signatures on the petitions were not tabled. Council lost them after we hand-delivered them to Nambour Council chambers.
See above for the wording of our petition.