New South Wales’ peak advocate for housing justice, Shelter, held a conference in Sydney on April 18 to look at the challenges in housing assistance facing policymakers and decide what key steps need to be taken to improve housing outcomes for disadvantaged people.
NSW Minister for Community Services Pru Goward opened the conference.
She said the housing situation in NSW is grim due to housing being more expensive, less plentiful and inadequately funded. People who require housing also have more needs, she said.
“Your responsibility is to house the needy until they are no longer in need,” she said. “And also to break the cycle of disadvantage they find themselves in. However, if anyone can deal with these problems then it is the people I am addressing in this room.”
Other speakers and audience members delved deeper into the housing crisis. Most said housing affordability and housing insecurity were the biggest problems.
A tenant from Bega spoke about the need to change a system that produces a scarcity of housing, most of which is out of the price range of ordinary Australians, not only the poor.
It is a system that serves the rich and was the cause of the financial crisis that brought on much suffering.
Ben Spies-Butcher, a lecturer in sociology at Macquarie University, spoke about how in the past the system in Australia was set up that enabled more people to have jobs and therefore the ability to buy a home.
The neoliberal assault has stripped all of these supports away, therefore leaving more people in need of housing.
He also spoke about how the rich are supported by the government through so-called tax welfare. He said this is done through the tax system because it is less visible and therefore less able to be criticised.