Page 777 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 1 May 2007
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residual welfare housing, carrying with it all the stigma and social stresses now experienced in many housing estates.
The simultaneous changes to taxation and capital gains from real estate, the persistence with negative gearing and the licence it gave to the financial institutions has created the madness we now see in house price inflation which further disadvantages low income households.
Proposals to change the rental conditions for those in public housing will not lead to an increase in supply of low income or affordable housing, but will cause more stress and misery. Moreover, it can hardly be seen as a sensible measure for governments concerned to foster a sense of community.
Consequently, to meet the simplistic and populist argument that someone paying market rent for a government house is taking the home from another who needs it is to dodge the reality of how our society handles housing. Increasingly, the focus is on public housing as a charity to be dispensed to those poorest and with the most complex problems. That government policy gives a housing advantage to those well off and better established is entirely ignored. Our goal ought not to be to increasingly tighten the criteria for public housing so that it is accessible to fewer and fewer people; it should be to increase the options for secure and affordable housing for all. We see here such a change in the whole way that public housing has been administered in Australia.
Australia is now retreating from a goal, which it was heading to for many years, under the enthusiastic pressure of property owners, real estate businesses and the conservative side of politics which favours private property ownership as a matter of principle. These people have been looking for a so-called millionaire in government housing for some time, someone that they could drag though the slime mills of Canberra’s shock jocks and blog jocks, and someone found me. It was no secret where I lived. I was lucky to clear $15,000 a year for the 10 years I was there.
Seven months after being elected, the headlines revealed the “pollie living in Yarralumla”—shock-horror—“in a government house” and, in small letters, “paying market rent” but keeping some poor family out of my little wooden guvvie. When I left, it was for someone wealthy enough to pay $640,000 and rebuild. Neither the poor family nor the street benefited.
Politicians are easy to attack, and Greens politicians, due to the moral high ground we are continually accused of claiming, are perhaps more so. If I had immediately accepted judgment of contrived public opinion, my daughter and I would have moved out in a flash. I would thereby have justified the superficial arguments, the hostility and the antagonism being directed at me by the media, by the real estate and property industry and by people in this place, and, worse, lent my support to the eviction of other market renters in Housing ACT.
Instead, I followed the policy which existed then for all public housing tenants, which was to move on if and when I and my family were ready. I did that about a year ago. Now, as it happens, I am doing it again because that is the uncertainty of the private rental market.
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