Fair Go. Social Democracy and Housing. The role of government in housing through our history and how the past can guide the future. With Tracey Mackie and Brandon Saul.
I was working in Dubbo one day in 2010 and the sun caught a brass plaque on a block of flats. On it I read that in 1955 Clive Evatt the NSW Labor housing minister - brother of ‘Doc’ Evatt then our federal opposition leader - had travelled to open this humble six apartment building just off the town centre. Why? Because housing was at the heart of our government and democracy at the time. This kind of orange brick building - utterly unremarkable - appeared all over Australia, embodying the humble hope of ordinary people that the problem of shelter would be solved. This was useful good government, offering the residents a stake in our society. Back then we were a country of 9 million, embarking on a great boom in Australia city town and suburban development. A weird mob, running from our past, the spectre of the Cold War hanging over heads, still trying to work out who the hell we were. That plaque opens the story of how far we have strayed from where we need to be today.
The boom of Australian suburbia and our regional towns happens in the second half of the twentieth century. By 1995, the year my son was born, we were a country of 18 million people. We forget how few of our species live here. Even today our population of 26 million is the same as the city of Shanghai and miles below the 37 million who live in the Tokyo metropolis. How can such a small population on a massive land mass struggle to house its own people? It is a question we do not stop to ask properly or think about clearly. Somehow we are stuck with the idea that Bill Shorten mucked up the 2019 election and therefore negative gearing will be with us until the cockroaches inherit a world ruled by Mad Max, or some other nonsense. Australian housing policy and practical government makes no sense and is today Australia at its worst. We fundamentally contradict any claim to egalitarianism in the way we approach housing. Evictions, rental stress, property prices, a broken planning system, skill shortages. It is not a mirror that anyone would want to look into. The state of housing in contemporary Australia is the story of the failure of our democracy.
Before I tell you some stories, here’s a summary of what we should do right now. Australia should remove the 50 per cent discount on capital gains tax for investment properties, perhaps phasing it out over 5 years. Negative gearing should be abolished or limited to one property. Incentives in the tax system should be provided - especially to superannuation funds - for investing in social and affordable housing (rather than, say, shopping centres as many super funds do). The benefits of the current tax system could be directed to a social rather than private purpose, but the owner could still derive a benefit. Tenancy law should be torn up with long term leases institutionalised and rent increases strictly controlled. The planning system should be harmonised nationally and modified to balance the need for development with social outcomes, empowering community based masterplanning, with the public interest at the heart of approvals rather being than a ‘tick-a-box’ marginal consideration. Innovation should be encouraged with community land trusts, intergenerational living and tiny homes promoted in supportive national legislation. Holiday letting should be controlled and regulated as a business. Vacancy taxes should be imposed on absentee owners. Immigration for skilled workers should be targeted to enable the housing development required over the next generation. Enforcement of planning law should prioritise safety and be flexible where housing needs are responsibly met. Emergency housing must evolve from disaster response to long-term structural response - homelessness and climate displacement are not going away, so practical solutions must be found. Housing policy should be declared a national disaster and our response at every level of government should reflect that.
So, in the spirit of this conversation series, let’s now go back to go forward and allow me a little personal reflection along the way. You may remember that ‘Australia’ started as a penal colony. There was little town planning involved and our modern suburbia was far from the minds of Cook and Phillip (or Jeremy Bentham). White Australia was a dumping ground for the poor of Britain and Ireland. People like my grandparents who would move here - and never owned their own home - or even a car. We dispossessed the people of this land to become an agricultural provider and strategic outpost for an empire - thanks to wheat and meat and wool, and a few boats. We had a gold rush that put lipstick on the pig that our rough colony was. Our workers lived in slums. Our young got shipped off to die for ‘our’ empire. We huddled in churches, fearful of masturbation, pregnancy and the judgment of everyone! An odd bloody place. We were utterly in denial about the nature of our own culture let alone the suffering caused to the people living here before ‘Australia’ began, who were colonised, brutalised and somehow survived to begin only recently to hold our history and its makers to account.
Our governments eventually set about creating a suburban democracy. We had a crack at orderly development here and there, like in Canberra and Adelaide, but we mainly grew chaotically. Our planning system was more like Aussie rules than rugby union from the outset. ‘Australia’ began to change when national government was strengthened by taxation - the great institution for redistributing wealth. So many campaign against the burden of taxation without appreciating the extraordinary institution taxation is - the modern achievements of a functioning public health system, public education, public transport, social security, aged care were and are all impossible without taxation and were not happening 100 years ago. They are new things in human history. Infants! But I digress. Taxation was the tariff paid by companies and prosperous individuals to enjoy their success, an appropriate contribution to the common wealth. Crucially, taxation and the modern social democratic state was also a bet against communism which for decades challenged capitalism as the ‘natural’ model of society. Soviet Russia and Mao’s China offered an alternative vision of how life could be lived and society could be organised on this earth. Western democracies responded, and in Australia housing was fundamental to that response.
From 1945 to 1970, public housing accounted for around 15 per cent of all new residential development and that dropped to 10 per cent during the 1970s and 1980s before falling to around 3 per cent in recent years. We had the right idea once, see, and then bottled it. Of course, Australia invested massively in public housing and the development of communities in the second half of the twentieth century because it could. Land was plentiful and not expensive. Unlike the UK we had ‘space’. Unlike the USA we had a vague idea of socially engaged government. In practical terms, our cities were small and expanded easily into greenfield sites. Our regional towns were tiny and they grew easily enough too. Much of the land was crown land and it was able to be developed directly by government or sold to developers who worked to a plan broadly set by government. Town planning was a thing! And the acronym NIMBY was years from occurring to anyone.
The privatisation of public housing - even in the twentieth century - is a key and old theme. The massive sell off of Millers Point by the NSW state government was no outlier. ‘Build and sell’ was policy for decades, even before the second world war. The idea of a home-owning democracy is a powerful myth in our history. Housing is now the crux of wealth acquisition for middle class Australians and has been since the turn of the century. We are preoccupied with house prices and mortgage rates and negative gearing and capital gains tax deductions. So much economic activity hangs off the renovation and maintenance of property. We now have both a supply problem and a distribution problem. Not enough houses or dwellings across the country - and the wrong types of houses. The privatisation of housing and the process of developing communities - let’s spell that out - means that the commercial priorities of developers - embodied in repetitive larger scale suburban housing developments or massive tower blocks maximising yield - dominate our housing landscape. There is no motivating vision of human needs or a sense the society we are trying to create. We begin with the rights of property owners and town planning or community development is an afterthought, a factor in a broken process. Our planning system across the country creates rules for private owners to comply with, a dysfunctional maze incorporating safety, building standards and a cursory nod to environmental protection. Town planning as it was practised with entire towns or suburbs plotted out like the whole of Canberra or the revival of Albury - or the suburbs of our cities whose names were not in the first edition of the Gregory’s or Melways maps I read as a kid - is a dim memory.
An as aside, we have absurdly large houses and properties in Australia. The space an average property or dwelling takes up is something we rarely reflect on. Visitors from Europe like our family friends from Amsterdam cannot understand why we need so much space for a home and seem to take it for granted. New Yorker friends of mine used to ‘apartment living’ marvel at the grandeur of our suburban blocks and are astonished at how we live blithely unaware of the anomaly of this lifestyle. Who stops to consider the average space taken up - and per capita carbon footprint - for the average resident of Pudong in Shanghai, or the workers of Shenzhen? Australia is a tiny group of people - demographically insignificant - who seem to think that what we ‘enjoy’ here is normal and somehow something like an entitlement. We have always needed a good look in the mirror as Roy & HG might suggest in the ‘spirit of rugby league’ and our approach to housing epitomises that truth. Who do we think we are, especially the wealthy of this country, and especially anyone in regional Australia who lives on a large block or acreage? You, we, are the aristocrats of the modern world, not just Australia but the entire planet.
I grew up in a classic quarter acre block suburban family home in Little Bay, Sydney. Loads of my schoolmates lived in housing commission flats on Anzac Parade or the Soldier’s Settlement area near Malabar or small houses in Philip Bay near our primary school La Perouse. Like the six orange apartments in Dubbo all these people and the families that grew up there had a stake in our society. Like the dock workers who lived at Millers Point. Like the tenants in the projects at Coral Sea Park near Maroubra. This was social security on a massive scale. The problem of shelter was solved. The risk of eviction was beaten into submission by a lumbering but ultimately practical and sensible government - creating way of life based on the simple idea that we should look after each other. The conservatives - including my DLP voting grandad - were happy because this way the commies couldn’t possibly win. Jack Mundey and the BLF could join forces with the well-to-do and save Hunters Hill, Victoria Street, and the Theatre Royal. The rest of us could get on with going to the footy and heading to the south coast for oysters in Ulladulla and a round of golf every Christmas. An alarmingly homogeneous, alarmingly white and alarmingly heteronormative world, largely unaware of the anomaly of the achievement - the envy of the broken Britain that had spawned us - and a moment, a phase in our history rather than its permanent model or destination.
A word on town planning. The epitome of planned Australia is the familiar sign in Canberra that points to ‘The Shops’! What are our suburbs but a bunch of houses connected by roads and drains, hooked up to water and power and tv and the internet, with nature strips and parks, all within a short drive or manageable walk to ‘The Shops’? Canberra with its roundabouts and brittle, overt civic sense - so civic its civic centre is actually called Civic - is a parody of model suburbia. Where are the shops? Follow the sign that says, The Shops! We did not have a sign like that in Little Bay. I remember how excited we were when kerb and guttering arrived in our street in the 70s. Our family home had an ordinary front yard and a pool in the back, a non-committal pool - half in the ground, half reaching up to the house from a shallow rock shelf to our bare concreted patio. That block is now home to two large squeezed in townhouses. The neighbourhood went south in the mid 90s when the first wealthy resident appeared at the corner of Reservoir St and proudly parked a new Porsche out the front of the double brick 4 bedroom home. We had an orange Datsun 180B in the heyday of my childhood. My dad was a teacher, who spoke like a newsreader or someone from a Sunday night drama on the ABC. Our lifestyle was modest but we were the posh people - dad had a degree and did not work at the ICI chemical factory like one neighbour or not at all like the single mum in the fibro house on the other side. Had our life been any more suburban we would have exploded in a sunburst of Cottee’s cordial and Sunnyboys, McCains pizza and chips in front of an episode of the Walton’s and Countdown, spinning into eternity on a hills hoist clothes line. Mum replaced our hills hoist with a sensible clothes line next to the filter box so we could fit the pool in. Mum paid our mortgage off in 10 years by making double the scheduled repayments and eschewed the idea of investing in a flat or holiday home. Too risky she thought. A home was for living in. Again, neither her parents or her husband’s parents owned their own home or even a car. The transformation of Australia - the scale of it, the speed of it, and the history of it - is something we forget too easily or do not even know. All my grandparents lived in fear of eviction. My mothers great achievement as a person was to be able to provide a home for her parents in their retirement - a space to live in, a cape cod extension on top of our house - with a view all the way back to centre point along Anzac Parade, and no rent to pay. That was enough. That was a life. That was democracy wasn’t it? Could life be any better than this?!?
Government divested in public housing from the 1980 onwards. Taxation became less popular. Small government was more popular. Housing commission acquired a stigma. Many Australians became wealthier. More over time began to struggle, and were made to feel it was their fault. The whole world became more commercial, more privatised. Less about ‘us’ and more about ‘I’. The collective vision of life collapsed into a rhetorical idea of ‘family’ - good luck if you had no family or divorced - and the concept of society and planning the nation was kinda jettisoned. The market would solve our problems - it had the skills and it had the money. If we sold off our government owned housing, the thinking was that ‘everyone’ - namely, home owners - had an even greater stake in society. Meanwhile the government got the cash, to balance its budget and spend on other stuff! This revised concept of a home owning democracy now powered the conservative vision of Australia - especially the thinking and policy of John Winston Howard. Not only was Howard prepared to play deathly politics with race, immigration and refugees, Howard took aim at government itself, and the idea of social democracy that smoothed out the lumps of inequality. He took aim and fired. John Howard cannot be held solely responsible for economic rationalism and the fiscal thinking that made policy makers and government bean counters see the sense in flogging off assets but he did pour gallons of two stroke on the cracker night bonfire of our social democracy, and especially housing. How? By introducing not only negative gearing allowing property investment costs to be written off against income tax but by halving the rate of capital gains tax. Coupled with the earlier abolition of inheritance taxes or death duties this was enough to change our society from a wonky egalitarianism to the competitive materialist chaos we have now. Those policy changes - in the tax system, not in housing policy - have directly aggravated the concentration of our wealth, guaranteeing the experience of mortgage and rent stress, and the return of eviction risk and growing homelessness. The tide began to turn nearly 30 years ago and we are still caught in a rip.
Here we are today talking about a ‘cost of living crisis’ as if this social moment is like the weather, arriving like a southerly buster. It is a misnomer. We have deep structural problems with a history and precise causes. We have to understand the background for us to make any headway. The federal government has a grand plan for housing including a measures for affordable housing. We have a network of housing cooperatives and pilots exploring innovative communities and community land trusts. Here is a summary of what the federal government proposes over the next 5 years:
20,000 new social housing homes - 4,000 for women fleeing domestic violence, and older women at risk of homelessness.
10,000 affordable rentals for frontline workers like police, nurses and cleaners who kept us safe during the pandemic.
$200 million to repair, maintain and improve remote Indigenous housing.
$100 million for crisis and transitional housing for women and children leaving or experiencing domestic and family violence, and older women on low incomes who are at risk of homelessness; and
$30 million to build housing and fund specialist services for veterans experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness.
Yet none of it is enough. No way. The gap is so vast. Leading advocacy groups say Australia needs 50,000 social housing properties every year over the next decade to solve the problem. The federal government only plans to build 6,000 per year for 5 years. That looks like a gap of 120,000 dwellings. The $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund would deliver funding to build 30,000 affordable homes within its first five years. We also lack the labour and productive capacity to meet the demand, to solve the problem.
So will we soon see tent villages? How can we respond? What will the impact of climate change be? How do we address the risks of fire, floods and rising sea levels? How do we adapt? How will migration - within our country and to the country - change how we live here? Who will pay for it all? How will we pay?
Can government rediscover its purpose as an orchestrator of social democracy? Do we as a people even see what ‘we’ have done? What is the vision? The housing policies, the planning process, the funding model to move us to higher ground? We need houses on stilts. We need a light on the hill. We need a lighthouse. What will it look like? How bright is its beam?
The change required to address our problems is so much more profound than anything ‘on the table’; it requires such a radical rethink, I wonder if it is possible to get there. Inequality, housing insecurity and homelessness are structurally produced, deeply, and only worsening. Our culture of government is fundamentally risk averse and committed to ‘consultative’ incremental change. Our politics are addicted to short term thinking and the Ouroboros of re-election. Who cares who gets elected in the current policy framework? It matters so little who the representatives are at any level of government. From fossils fuels to housing the problem is structural - there is no ‘conspiracy’ other than what hides in plain sight. My childhood and the social democracy heyday of the 1970s was not normal. It was an aberration. The communists were beaten - in the trade unions of Australia as they were in the Soviets of Russia; the cultural Revolution of Mao gave way to the rampant state capitalism of Deng Xiao Ping - and here the property owners of Australian suburbia won in the real politics of this country.
But to solve a problem you must first understand it and describe it in new words. If Australia is to become a fair social democracy then everyone must join in. We are so far from that seeming anything like real. But it will happen. Can it be imagined or willed, or will it be forced? I don’t know. But next week we can share our ideas on how we might move from the frozen moment of our social democracy and the debacle of housing in Australia. What we have done to housing has put property before people, and anything else. It has changed who we are, and it is time for us to change again. Root and branch. In our marrow.
Coda. Local thoughts.
Near the Byron Shire Council offices in Mullum there is a small affordable housing development that houses maybe a few dozen people. It’s a model for the kind of housing we could have across the shire to address the needs of our community especially key workers and lower income people. It was finished in 2021 around the time our current council was elected. I am unaware of any other similar project being completed anywhere across the shire since. We have talked a good game on housing with the best intentions but what is the actual achievement of the three levels of government in our communities over the last three years? Not much or non-existent.
Our council finally approved its residential strategy in 2024. Our communities argued over its details. Particular properties were included or excluded. The broader issues of infrastructure or climate risk were not integrated. It was ultimately a housekeeping exercise producing a list of locations where housing might happen. More of an inventory or stocktaking exercise than what I would call a strategy. Who knows what the outcome would be on each plot of land - with a fair wind after surviving the endurance event of development application and execution we would get some kind of housing of different ‘modalities’.
Actually building things remains the province of property owners - companies and households. It is a call and response system. Owners propose and council or some other consent authority accepts or rejects. For all the heat (and so little light) of that debate not a single building is produced by the residential strategy, not a single house is raised from the flood plain and all future development will be done by property owners. Whatever vision we have of the future is in practice outsourced to owners, with government playing referee blowing the whistle every few seconds to ensure the rules of the game come first as if that were the point of the exercise.
In Marvell Street Byron Bay we have 40 residential units in 4 cottages that are homes to elders in our community. The operator of that site in February 2023 proposed to close the village and evict the residents. Lest we forget, each layer of government thought that was ok at first because the aged care regulator saw no reason to stop an aged care provider from closing an aged care home and starting something new. It’s all on the record. The sole reason the village remains open, is filling up, and will soon be home again to 40 oldies is that the residents, supported by their families, refused to go. The real lesson of that dispute is that the system was ok with what the operator proposed and that the solution to the dispute came not from good policy centred on aged care needs but from the archaic and arcane rules of crown land property management. The welfare of old people and decent care was not what carried the day but compliance with a gazetted government decision years ago that this piece of dirt had to be used for an old people’s home! It is staggering when you reflect on it. This dispute was another dimension of our perverse approach to housing.
Meanwhile in the wake of the floods we had pod villages crop up on government owned land. Hundreds of demountable modular dwellings - identical - whose aesthetics echo detention centres or the migrant camps that dotted suburbia in my childhood. The modest gesture to provide shelter attracted inevitable criticism but at least homes were provided. People have somewhere to be people. That means all the benefits and the problems of any community. The lived experience for many especially the extra vulnerable like the mentally ill or women living with violence has been fraught. But the villages are still there. Are they likely to be dismantled? Not just yet. Are they likely to be required again after another emergency? Yes, almost certainly. Are we talking much about the villages and what we have learnt from them? Not really. Could we use those villages as a starting point, a template, a launch pad for a longer term solution to our housing needs? Especially for lower income people, women escaping violence, the disabled and unwell, and key workers? Absolutely and we should get on with that. We should refine the model, learn the lessons and provide longer term solutions - more places for people to be people in.
Our approach to housing is inside out. We have surrendered control of our community development to property owners, big and small. The balance is all wrong and needs to be corrected. We need to put the needs of people first or one day - sooner than we think - our communities will fall apart. And if our communities fall part there will be no chance of acting together as we must to protect and enhance our ecosystems in this immediate community and all over our suffering planet.
Mark Swivel
15 June 2024
For more on the history of housing:
https://innersydneyvoice.org.au/magazine/public-housing-new-south-wales-brief-history/
https://shelternsw.org.au/news_items/getting-our-facts-and-housing-history-in-order/
https://northsidelivingnews.com.au/the-history-of-housing/?amp=1
For more on the current housing crisis:
https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2023/11/the-great-divide