By Susan Barley
SYDNEY — The Coalition government's proposed changes to public housing policy will be a disaster for this country's 370,000 public housing tenants (some 115,000 in NSW).
Public tenants are some of the most vulnerable people in Australia. They are elderly, disabled, non-Anglo, unemployed, young, female, Aboriginal or just plain poor.
At present, public housing rents are pegged to incomes (no tenant pays more than 25% of total adult household income), and public housing tenancy agreements have no fixed length, so tenants can plan their lives. Unlike private renters, they cannot be forced to move at the end of a three- or six-month lease, disrupting their work, their children's schooling, their social networks and stable communities.
The Coalition plans to change all that, depriving public tenants of the one security in their lives: decent, affordable accommodation. The fear is palpable on Sydney public housing estates, with reports that some tenants have already received letters explaining that their tenancies will end in July 1997.
The Commonwealth and state governments currently spend $1.5 billion per year for public housing construction and maintenance. This is claimed to be an "average effective subsidy" of $4000 per year to each public tenant, although the tenants don't actually receive the money — most of it is meant to be used by the states to build housing for the hundreds of thousands on the waiting lists.
As well, the federal government currently pays $1.35 billion in rental subsidies to private low-income renters. The maximum payment is $75 per week for a family, but the average payment is less than $30. Some 900,000 tenants currently qualify for some rental assistance.
The difference between the public tenant's "effective" subsidy of $4000 per year and the private tenant's $1600 per year is deemed "inequitable" by the federal government, which proposes to pay rent assistance to all low-income renters — public and private.
In regional centres, the market rent of a Department of Housing three-bedroom house might be as low as $100 per week, whereas in inner Sydney the same house would rent for over $320 a week. Under the Coalition's proposals, regional and city tenants will receive the same amount of rental assistance, despite the different market rents.
The NSW Department of Housing says that "only" 14,000 tenancies in the state will face rent rises of $40 a week. But this analysis assumed that the $4000 "effective subsidy" would continue. At a meeting of federal and state ministers in Darwin on September 20, however, the federal government indicated that only $1.5 billion extra will be allocated to rental cash payments, for more than triple the number of assisted tenants.
The Coalition's policy is being sold by the establishment media as a long-overdue "equity" reform as epitomised in the Sydney Morning Herald's flippant September 3 headline, "Rent revolution will end the $40 harbour view". The Herald interviewed two elderly public tenants of the Rocks, a premier tourist destination in Sydney, stating that the changes spelled "the end of the Australian tradition of bringing low-income public tenants into affluent areas".
What the article did not say was that low-income people have always lived in areas like the Rocks, Millers Point, Woolloomooloo, Surry Hills, Redfern and Waterloo. In the post-World War II period, these areas were deemed "slums" as the real estate industry and governments encouraged people to move out of the cities and onto quarter-acre suburban blocks.
In some of these areas — Surry Hills for example — the residents' homes were resumed and demolished to allow construction of public housing which then rehoused (some of) the original poor residents.
In other cases, like the Rocks and Woolloomooloo, the residents fought long, hard campaigns to save their suburbs from being gentrified or completely commercialised. In all these areas, and many others throughout Australia, the poor were there first. Public housing tenants have never been accommodated in the truly affluent areas like Vaucluse or Bellevue Hill.
To make up the lost federal revenue, the NSW government says it will be "forced" to sell off some existing housing stock. In the highly desirable inner Sydney suburbs, publicly owned dwellings would fetch very high prices if sold on the private market.
But privatising the public housing in just the Sydney and South Sydney Council areas alone would displace some 8000 tenants and their families. Many public tenants have lived in these areas all their lives. Now, as elderly tenants, they face the prospect of being forced out of communities they helped to build.
The Coalition government, in concert with the states, is trying to divide public and private tenants, setting up the straw figure of "greedy" public tenants living in luxury at taxpayers' expense. People fortunate enough to be buying their own home are given the impression that public tenants are bludging off hard-working taxpayers, even though public tenants also pay taxes.
This demonising of public housing is intended to drive a wedge between public tenants and their potential allies in a campaign which could stop the government from increasing the number of people forced into housing-related poverty.
Public tenants around the country have launched a campaign for decent, affordable accommodation for all who need it. But this campaign must involve, not just the tenants themselves, but all other organisations that support the simple, just principle of affordable and appropriate accommodation for all.
Given the Labor Party's complicity in initiating these savage attacks more than a year ago, a Senate inquiry is not likely to stop the cuts. Only a sustained, broad-based campaign, which unites all of the local community campaigns already under way, will be successful. The campaign must demand: Stop the cuts! Defend and extend public housing!