Who wants to be a capitalist?

31 October 2014

Affordable housing ought to be a hot election issue. Ordinary Australians have been taught to be entitled to look to capital growth in bricks and mortar as the best path to financial security.

I still have the shack I bought for $26,000 in 1977. I’m keeping it, partly because it’s capital gains tax free – it’s my super!

But also I can use it to house vulnerable household members in WA. One boy can finally live independently of his long-suffering and affectionate mother; another age pensioner is stuck in the rental market. She has blown her pitifully small super, and more than half her age pension goes to rent. She’s been told she’ll never get public housing.

Two of my friends are still supporting their highly qualified but out of work 29 year olds. This generation is often stuck with parents (who themselves are may be struggling financially, sometimes because they are divorced). The children are unable to separate financially, socially and emotionally from parents and take on adult roles.

There is not enough affordable housing. A third friend – in his late 40s – has been ‘restructured’ and downsized twice, having to pay rent while receiving benefits of about $250 a fortnight . He is staring at the possibility of actual homelessness.

Sadly affordable housing isn’t a government priority. Ideologically it’s left to the vicissitudes of the market. 18 months ago, the Victorian Government announced plans to demolish existing high rise public housing in the inner city Fitzroy and North Richmond estates. It was argued that they would be redeveloped with a mix of public and private housing. God knows where the residents would go!

Kate Borland is a brave public housing advocate who lives nearby. She said at the time that the policy marked the beginning of privatisation by stealth. The ‘redevelopment’ of Carlton public housing had reduced affordable housing, with the collapse of the high-rise towers. It also saw a huge fence built to to separate the public tenant plebs from the private resident landowners, casting out some of our most needy citizens.

The Victorian Housing Minister defended the plan on ABC Radio in January last year. It was ‘meant’ to result in ‘no net loss’ of public housing, but rather ‘more sufficient and sustainable communities’. Some is to be ‘social housing’. This disenfranchisement of public housing tenants is mirrored in Sydney with the selling off of harbour side housing at Miller’s Point

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Who wants to be a capitalist?

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