The latest action from the short-term rental accommodation (STRA) campaigners is an alarmist email exhorting recipients to ‘Join the fight to protect your right to stay in a holiday home in Byron Bay’.

Staff are recommending councillors write again to the planning minister seeking an urgent meeting to request deferral of the Shire from new planning rules that are set to come into affect in January 2019.

With nearly 20 per cent of all homes in Byron Shire now being holiday let, Council has announced it will start fining unauthorised owners. It will place a particular focus on people renting out secondary dwellings on their proprerty.

Next time you blow a tyre on a pothole in our Shire, don’t curse Council, curse your neighbours who live in Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane and rent their house out on Airbnb or Booking.com. It’s their greed that put it there.

‘Council is not commencing any new legal actions with respect to short-term holiday letting until the NSW government finalises its reforms in this area,’ staff said.

A new law passed in NSW parliament last week that aims to regulate the holiday letting industry. Yet it comes incomplete, with major elements such as proposed changes to the SEPP and a code of conduct still to be finalised. 

The state government's holiday letting bill is expected to pass parliament this week, yet critics say it is unworkable and vague. And those operators who have DA approvals say it will decimate their industry and leave Council with less revenue.

Angered by the state's proposed new holiday-letting laws, a large group of Byron Shire’s approved accommodation operators are set to meet Ballina MP Tamara Smith (Greens) this Thursday to discuss stopping them in their tracks.

Byron Shire Council is seeking an exemption from the state government’s new short-term holiday-letting laws in a last ditch bid to preserve its policy of restricting short-term letting in residential areas.

New state government restrictions on short-term holiday letting will not apply locally unless councils directly act to implement them and there is no room to vary the 180-day period.