by Nick G.
Working people dependent on rental accommodation are under increasing
stress. According to the Australian Council Of Social Services (ACOSS) over a
million lower income households are paying household costs which exceed the
commonly-used affordability benchmark of 25% of household income.
The majority of these households are in the private
rental sector. For example, Australians for Affordable Housing in Queensland
estimates that 14,318 people in Brisbane suffered mortgage stress but more than
twice that number, 34,818 people or nearly 30% of households, were under rent
stress.
Around Australia over 150,000 people in private rental
are paying more than 50% of their income on housing costs, even after receiving
rent assistance. In the last five years capital city rents have risen at twice
the rate of inflation.
There are 173,000 Australians on public housing waiting
lists and yet State and Territory public housing authorities are selling off
public housing to boost government revenue and toady up to property developers,
thus handing over the most vulnerable to the vagaries of the market.
Those who fall through the rental gap end up swelling the
numbers of homeless. More than 105,000 Australians sleep rough every night. Crisis
accommodation services are turning away more than half of all those seeking
assistance.
Investors buying up former public housing are mainly
interested in the value of the land underneath the house. Often the house in
rented out in a deplorable condition. It is not just that basic maintenance is
ignored by speculator owners – families have complained of having to scrape
faeces off the walls of their newly rented properties before being able to move
in.
The Brisbane Times
recently reported on seven-week old baby Isabella who died after falling from
her father’s arms when his foot went through a rotten verandah. A friend in
Brisbane tells me that a child belonging to the previous renters fell through
the verandah of the house which he now rents.
As houses slowly deteriorate, property investors knock
down the old properties and replace them with cheap units – sometimes two to
three on a block which once housed a single family.
We are seeing the nature of suburbs changing due to these
developments. We are seeing a generation of children never knowing stability, a
place where they can say “I grew up in that house”.
“No,” they say, “I lived in that house for six months,
that house for two years and that house for one year…” Educators grapple with the problem of
continuity of learning for increasing numbers of transient children.
Most first home buyers are increasingly being forced
further out from the CBD in order to enter the property market in areas that
have poor infrastructure, far from family and friends and their place of
employment. Those that try to buy closer to the CBD have to compete with local
and overseas speculators who can leverage off their existing property
portfolios to purchase even more properties.
Demand a revival of public housing
Just after World War 2 State and Territory governments
went into debt to fund public housing. They weren’t spooked by neoliberal
demands for “small government’, nor did they have credit rating agencies
(themselves huge private multinational corporations) threatening them with
reduced ratings unless they cut back on public spending.
Driven by the need to “settle” European migrants around
the big tariff-protected whitegoods and car industries, to provide housing for
the post-war baby boom, and to keep wages down by controlling rents in public
housing, it fell more often than not to conservative governments to spearhead
“socialist” public housing programs.
There was no stigma attached to such housing. Many baby
boomers grew up in the equivalent of South Australia’s Housing Trust homes. In
my street we had three families of Woodville GM-H workers, a company secretary,
another white collar worker and a police prosecutor!
The same governments have since pared public housing back
to the level of emergency accommodation. This is not good enough.
As an advanced capitalist country, we are not lacking in
money. There’s plenty of it, but it’s all in the wrong hands. Taxes need to be
raised on wealthy individuals and corporations. There needs to be a genuine tax
on mining superprofits and financial transactions.
Focus on need, not productivity
Productivity is a neoliberal buzzword that implies depressed
wages and increased profitability. Regrettably, the 7th National
Housing Conference opening in Brisbane on October 30 has adopted the theme
“People-Place-Productivity” and participants will “explore the essential
connections between affordable housing and productivity”. This is a connection
that we strongly reject.
There needs to be a revival of public housing provision,
and a cap on rents to a maximum of 25% of a household’s income. People’s needs,
not productivity, must drive this agenda.
These are demands that should be forced, as far as they
can be achieved, on an unwilling capitalist system. This will not eliminate the
parasitic nature of the private housing industry nor deliver on the human right
to be housed and accommodated. Only a socialist system in a genuinely
independent Australia can plan for and deliver on public housing for all who
need it. But we do need to raise demands to ameliorate rental stress where that
can be achieved.
For more and better public housing!
For enforceable rental controls!
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