Rules & compliance

WA tells landlords securing blind cords is part of rental law. The obligation is real, and it is not in the tenancy rules

Consumer Protection WA tells renters plainly: ask your landlord to secure the cords, because landlords have an obligation to make them safe as a part of WA rental laws. Western Australia has no window-covering standard in its tenancy law at all. The obligation is still real, but it comes from three other places, and one of them stops at products supplied after January 2004.

1 August 2026 Both Consumer Protection WA pages read on 1 August 2026

If you rent in Victoria, the rule is easy to state: since 1 December 2025 corded internal coverings in rentals need an anchor so no loose loop can form, written into the residential tenancies regulations. Western Australia has nothing equivalent. There is no minimum standard for window coverings in WA tenancy law, for cord safety or for anything else.

That is not the same as a landlord owing nothing. It means what they owe is assembled from other law, and a renter or a landlord trying to work out where they stand will not find it by reading the tenancy rules.

Where the duty actually comes from

Product safety law, since January 2004. This is the substantial one, and WA was early. Consumer Protection WA states that product safety laws for internal window coverings have applied in Western Australia since January 2004, so landlords need to ensure blind and curtain cords and chains supplied after that date meet the national product safety requirements. For context, the national supply instrument dates from 2010 and the installation one from 2015, so WA was acting on this some years before the Commonwealth instruments this masthead has written about existed.

The date is a real boundary, not a formality. For coverings bought before January 2004, the regulator's language changes: landlords are “strongly encouraged” to make them safe. Encouraged is not required. A house fitted out in the 1990s and never redone sits outside the part of this that has teeth.

The general lessor duty. Consumer Protection WA's landlord guidance points to the lessor's obligation that the premises comply with laws relating to buildings, health and safety. That is a general provision doing specific work here, which is exactly why it is hard for a renter to find.

Negligence, which the regulator spells out itself. This is the sharpest paragraph in the guidance and it is worth quoting closely. If a child dies or is injured on the rental premises as a result of a blind or curtain cord or chain injury, the landlord may be sued for negligence. And the regulator goes further: even if the tenants do not have children, a court could consider it reasonably foreseeable that the tenants may have children visiting the home from time to time.

What a WA landlord should actually do

The regulator's own test is the same one the national instruments use, so there is no ambiguity about the physical standard even though there is ambiguity about the instrument. Secure loose cords and chains with either tie-downs or cleats fixed 1,600 mm above the ground, or tension devices that cannot form a loop of more than 220 mm. Fix them firmly enough to the wall or window frame that a child cannot pull them off. Where a blind can work without a looped cord, the guidance suggests removing the loop by cutting the cord and fitting tassels.

Our view, labelled as such

The layered position is defensible. Product safety law reaches the thing that actually causes harm, which is the covering, and it reaches it at the point of supply where it can be enforced against a manufacturer or retailer rather than a landlord. Adding a tenancy standard is not the only way to protect a child.

What is harder to defend is the gap between how the duty is described and where it lives. A renter reading landlords have an obligation to make them safe as a part of WA rental laws will reasonably assume there is a rental law that says so, and there is not. If the landlord disagrees, the renter has no clause to point at. They have a product safety regime that depends on when the blind was bought, a general duty about buildings and health and safety, and a negligence warning that only matters after something has happened.

The pre-2004 carve-out is the part we would watch. The coverings most likely to have an unsecured loop are the oldest ones, and those are precisely the ones the product safety route does not require anything about.

One caution on the source

The detailed landlord guidance page carries a last-updated date of 9 August 2016. The cord safety page was last updated on 21 November 2024. Nothing in the older page contradicts the newer one, but a decade-old guidance document is worth treating as a starting point rather than a current statement of the law, and anyone relying on it for a decision should check the position with Consumer Protection WA directly.

Sources

1. Consumer Protection WA, Blind and curtain cord safety (last updated 21 November 2024, read 1 August 2026): the statement that landlords have an obligation to make cords safe as part of WA rental laws, the advice to renters, the 1,600 mm and 220 mm tests, and the guidance on removing loops.
2. Consumer Protection WA, Obligations of landlords - corded internal window coverings (last updated 9 August 2016, read 1 August 2026): that product safety laws have applied in WA since January 2004 and attach to coverings supplied after that date, that landlords are strongly encouraged to act on earlier coverings, the lessor obligation regarding laws relating to buildings, health and safety, and the negligence and foreseeable-visiting-children reasoning.
3. The Window Standard, the 220 mm rule: our reading of the national supply and installation instruments this guidance refers to.
4. The Window Standard, Australia has eight rental rule books: where WA sits against the other states and territories.

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