Overshadowed by better-known missions, NASA has devised a lesson plan for school students which lists four basic needs for human survival – food, water, air and shelter. The last of these is vitally important in a country like Canada or Australia that is prone to weather extremes. This decade began with a sudden reminder that danger can descend on us out of a clear blue sky (bushfires one month, an airborne virus the next) and now, nearly halfway through its course, is concentrating our minds on the personal challenge of assuring for each and every one of us a sanctuary from the unforgiving elements.
Of course, the importance to our physical and psychological welfare of having a home is not a recent discovery: it’s no accident that 1948’s UN Declaration of Human Rights – which Australian jurist and politician ‘Doc’ Evatt was instrumental in drafting – states: ‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including … housing.’
That proclamation was itself a waypoint on the path to a more explicit imperative spelt out two decades later in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Australia is a party. In that global mission statement, Article 11 recognises the right of all people to adequate housing and obligates member states of the international community to take ‘appropriate steps to ensure the realisation of this right’.
It’s fair to observe that in most democratic states, most elections take place with little or no attention being paid to such lofty concerns. What do we have to thank for the fact that at the last federal election, just over two years ago now, housing was very much part of the national debate? Was it the rate of homelessness over the previous decade? While the absolute number of homeless Australians – estimated at 122,000 on census night 2021 – was not much changed from the rate a decade before, the increased difficulty of securing a roof over one’s head was undeniable: the number of boarding-house residents rose by almost 50 per cent over the previous decade, while the number in other temporary lodgings skyrocketed fivefold. If not homelessness, was the sudden access of political-party interest across the spectrum due to mounting alarm at financial insecurity, mortgage stress and rental arrears emerging as the first signs of a general systemic breakdown?
Whatever the causes, 2022 saw Labor commit to set up a $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund, dedicated to building 30,000 affordable homes within five years. During the campaign, and more recently in power, Labor’s plan has come under sustained attack from the left – the Greens party railing against its fund as offering hope for too few over too long a timeframe.
Over on the right, the Liberals are throwing stones at Labor’s housing policy edifice, in the belief (hope?) its walls are made of glass. Instead it offers an assortment of policies, including incentives for 10,000 home-buyers a year to move to regional areas. Ominously, that means both main parties would assist 30,000 Australians over a three-year term of government to find a roof over their head. You’ve got to admit our politicians don’t do things by halves – 30,000 off that 2021 homeless list and the ‘big boys’ share the palm for doing them by quarters.
Step up, the Independents. In the last week of June, Independent Senator David Pocock and fellow Independent Kylea Tink jointly introduced a Bill into Parliament that would treat the national homelessness crisis with the urgency that the major parties profess to have but on a scale that their policies fail to grapple with. Supported by the independent member for Indi, Helen Haines, their vision is to implement a ten-year National Housing and Homelessness Plan which would legislate for increased housing supply and affordability.
'Housing affordability has surged to ‘impossible’ levels. Unaffordability and seething resentment between an older, home-owning cohort and a younger generation permanently relegated to the lowest rung of a broken ‘housing ladder’ ought to be ringing alarm bells in the biggest house of all, the one on Capital Hill.'
One of the plan’s great appeals to someone like me – who after half a century of renting recently faced unlawful eviction notices from a ‘cowboy’ estate agency that failed to put me out on the streets only because, like the ‘gang that couldn’t shoot straight’, its avarice was equally only by its incompetence – is that it proposes to do away with the severe power imbalance between landlords and renters that has long consigned the latter to second-class-citizen status. (Take the corporate tower in which I live: half of the ninety or so residents on these five floors rent their apartments, half own them – yet only the owners get to meet and decide the ‘house rules’ for us all.)
The Bill would establish a National Housing Consumer Council to represent both kinds of resident. As Tink pointed out to the House of Representatives, housing affordability has surged to ‘impossible’ levels. Unaffordability and seething resentment between an older, home-owning cohort and a younger generation permanently relegated to the lowest rung of a broken ‘housing ladder’ ought to be ringing alarm bells in the biggest house of all, the one on Capital Hill.
We humans are a resilient lot. But we have our limits. Three minutes without breathable air, three days without water, two months – give or take – without food. We can go without shelter for longer, but the body will rebel before continued neglect brings us to the inevitable outcome.
The Independents’ Bill asserts that a space of one’s own is not just the epitome of the Australian Dream but should be treated as a fundamental human right throughout this 8-million-sq-km owner-occupied plot. As a private member’s Bill, the Pocock-Tink initiative is refreshingly daring. It can only become law with enough votes from the major parties, which have no interest in folding their own tents to make way for a sturdier structure. Theirs is a grand design (to crib a phrase) aimed at ensuring no one is left out in the cold. Given the desperation facing so many of us, isn’t that just what the situation calls for?
Ken Haley, Melbourne-based journalist, editor and author, writes from personal experience as the survivor of a nine-month battle to achieve housing security.