The Right to Housing in Australia
0:02
Welcome everyone, to an evening of deliberative conversation on the topic of the right to housing.
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My name's Jago Dodson.
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I'm the director of the Urban Futures Enabling Impact Platform at RMIT, which is a part of the university that helps researchers connect with folks outside the university, whether they're in business, government or the civil society sector.
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Before we start, I'd like to note that RMIT acknowledges that we're run in Boonerang language groups of the eastern cooler nation on whose lands the university conducts its business.
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The university extends its respects to elders past, present and future.
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I'd also note that the First Nations people of Australia exercise their sovereignty by dwelling on country for thousands of generations and have never ceded that right.
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Before we kick off the substantial conversation, some housekeeping.
0:55
If an alarm sounds, please make your way out the doors and to the left of the exits there.
1:02
There'll probably be some kind of instructions with any alarm that goes off, so follow those.
1:08
And laboratories are available just to the left outside there should you need them.
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So our MIT is pleased to be hosting this event as an institution that has been working on housing issues since construction training was first offered by the original Working Men's College in the late 19th century.
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In the 1920s, RMIT established architecture programmes and in the 1940s began teaching urban planning.
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In the 1990s, RMIT was instrumental in founding the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, an internationally renowned housing research agency which produces large volumes of of work on housing.
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RMIT now hosts one of the world's largest concentrations of housing researchers, working across disciplines of architecture, planning, geography, construction, engineering, business, economics, law, sociology, and media and communications.
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Social science methods and approaches are crucial to addressing housing questions.
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I'm sure they'll be part of the conversation tonight.
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This week is National Social Science Week, which is promoted by the Learned Academy of Social Sciences Australia.
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RMIT is the principal sponsor of Social Science Week, reflecting the university's strong commitment to Social Research.
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I'd like to thank RMI TS Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation, Professor Callum Drummond for his generous support of Social Sciences Week and for tonight's event, and also thank Professor Lisa Given, who chairs RMIT Social Science Week organising committee.
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We're pleased to be hosting this event, considering the question of whether a right to housing is an appropriate and necessary response to our housing challenges.
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This conversation is happening at a time when housing issues are a daily provocation in the public consciousness.
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The format of the event is a panel discussion with our brilliant group of thinkers drawn from academia, policy, law and advocacy.
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We'll start with moderated discussion and then open up the conversation to questions from all of you as participants.
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If you'd like to submit a question, please use the QR link, which is there if your phone can get to that.
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That's the way we're doing questions tonight.
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I think there's another another version down the down the side there if you're closer to that one over there.
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So please use the link in the QR code to to present questions.
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Before starting, I'd like to thank Zara Vakari Cook from the Research Operations team here at RMIT for her coordination of the event and also the venue staff who've helped with the running of the session.
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So now to our speakers.
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Our moderator, Professor Libby Porter is Director of the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT.
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Motivated by social and ecological injustice, her work investigates how urbanisation creates forms of dispossession and displacement and what we might do about it.
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Her research aims to sharpen our understanding about the relationship between land and housing, justice, the displacing effects of urban renewal, critical questions of urban governance and the politics of property.
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In her work and life, Libby attempts to reckon with the politics and practises of learning as a non indigenous person to live lawfully on country.
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We look forward to your expert moderation tonight, Libby Jordan van den Lam.
4:39
I have your hands here Jordan.
4:41
There we go.
4:42
Jordan is an office worker in Melbourne and is known for his reviews of and visits to the worst rental housing in Australia.
4:49
And I think you've become prominent for that, particularly via his large and growing audience on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
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A master of contemporary social media communications, alongside his reviews and advocacy, Jordan also uses his platform to passionately contribute to Australian political discourse, educating his audience on anything and everything that society failed to educate young Australians.
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So we look forward to your contribution tonight, Jordan, Associate Professor Emma Power.
5:24
There we go as a housing researcher and urban geographer at the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University who's ventured South of the border tonight to join us.
5:35
Emma has been researching housing and security and advocating for a fairer and more caring housing system for over a decade.
5:43
Her Cities of Care research programme, Envision, envisions a world of more just and caring cities, with current work focused on older people's housing security and how very low income households are surviving, or not surviving, perhaps in the context of an escalating cost of living crisis.
6:01
Cameron Duff here we go.
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Cameron is professor of social impact at the Centre for Organisations and Social Change in the College of Business and Law at RMIT.
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Cameron's research explores the role of social innovation in responding to complex health and social problems in cities.
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He's explored these themes and studies of precarious urban lives in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, with a focus on problems of housing insecurity, addiction, and mental illness.
6:32
The Honourable Kevin Bill A OK C the man with many acronyms is a baby boomer who grew up in social housing.
6:43
He he wrote this.
6:45
It's, it's not an accusation, It's an, it's, it's, it's an, it's a confession.
6:56
Kevin worked at the Tenants Union of Victoria before practising as a barrister and as a judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria.
7:02
He wrote many influential judgments on human rights, including the right to housing.
7:07
As a professor and director of the Caston Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University, he similarly focused on housing, homelessness and human rights.
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He has also served as a Commissioner of the Europe Justice Commission.
7:20
Kevin is presently an adjunct professor at Monash and patron of the Tenants Union of Victoria.
7:26
He's also recently published a book on the right to housing, which is available for purchase.
7:30
Or it was earlier at the desk at the back there.
7:33
Oh, there it is.
7:34
Yes.
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If you'd like a copy, see Kevin's colleague at the rear.
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And then lastly but not least, Emma Dawson, who is executive Director of the public policy think tank Per Capita.
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Emma has worked as a researcher at Monash University and the University of Melbourne, in policy and public affairs for SBS and Telstra, and as a senior policy advisor in the Rudd and Gillard governments.
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Emma has published reports and articles on a wide range of public policy issues, with specific expertise in gender equality, workplace relations and the care economy.
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She's a regular contributor to The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Gardening Australia, Guardian Australia, Not Gardening Australia I suspect, Excuse me, and various various ABC radio programmes nationally.
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So with the introductions out of the way, I'll now hand over to my colleague Professor Libby Porter to lead our speakers in conversation.
8:35
Thank you, Libby.
8:36
Thanks so much Jaggy.
8:42
Thank you for that lovely introduction and and framing for our conversation this evening.
8:48
I'm Libby, lovely to be with you all this evening.
8:51
Our topic of conversation is framed around the question of rights in housing, which to my reading of our current debate and discourse doesn't come up very often actually.
9:05
So it's, I think it's very useful that we are focused on the question of the rights to housing differently from the supply of housing or any other aspect of housing that we so often talk about within public discourse.
9:21
But just to frame our conversation a little, before we we really get going, we we might want to think carefully about where a rights framing might take us, because it opens up really interesting and important questions well beyond the idea or notion of housing simply as a commodity, as a site of wealth extraction.
9:43
And many of the all of the people here on this panel this evening are keenly focused on unpacking how it is that we have built a system that has LED us there and what we might do to fix that kind of problem.
9:59
And in recognising that framing of rights, I think very importantly speaks to the location of where we are and, and the importance of the acknowledgement that there has always been a housing crisis here in, in this place, this very place where we sit since 1835 when Batman and Wedge and others sailed up what's what was Virung and we now call the Yarra and stopped there and unleashed a housing crisis, a a crisis of dwelling in this place.
10:30
And that has never gone away.
10:32
And so the question of rights and what it means to claim a right in such a context now of this built environment that that we relate to opens up some very important and thorny difficult questions for us.
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And we will, we won't maybe unpack all of those, but we might start to start to unpack a few of them.
10:53
And so with that in mind, I'm going to throw a first question to Kevin to talk to us about, particularly given your extensive work on the question of the right to housing from a legal perspective, and particularly in relation to human rights, Kevin, which you're, you've done so much work in over so many years.
11:16
Talk to us about the, the legal perspective on rights in housing and the relationship between human rights and a right to housing and, and what currently we, we have in place or, or might be for you developing.
11:28
Sure.
11:28
I think I'm being heard, Libby, the the start in Australia has got to be the international framework because we don't have the right to housing here as so many other countries do either in their constitution or in legislative frameworks or in or in like laws.
11:46
So here we have to look to the international framework, and the international framework is very clear.
11:53
Australia is a party to the International Covenant on Civil Political Rights and the Indian National Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
12:01
Both of those covenants have housing elements, but the right to housing specifically is in the latter.
12:07
And it's a right to adequate housing as part of a bundle of rights which is intended to create the circumstances in which the human person can thrive across their life and across generations.
12:23
The, the, the right to housing is, is not just a right to a physical dwelling, and it may not even involve a physical dwelling actually, but in our social context it obviously does.
12:36
It's a a right to live in, in, in a secure place, in a place which is which is safe and in a way which is dignified.
12:54
So you can see immediately that the right to housing in, in human rights terms is perfect, is person centred.
13:03
We immediately see that we're focusing on the circumstances in which the individual can live personally, in a family, in society, in every respect.
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Because without housing, you can't work you, you can't really socialise you, you have terrible health prospects.
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So everything that a human person needs is based on housing.
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A lot of other things too, but is based on housing.
13:29
And it's that thing that the right to housing encapsulates.
13:34
Why don't we do this properly here, do you think?
13:40
Well, you, you, you started with the answer because of course the the idea that that land and housing is a site for profit, a commodity for investment was brought by the, by the early settlers.
14:00
That idea that they just didn't colonise the country and take the land.
14:05
They colonised the law and brought a set of ideas being that central idea.
14:12
You know, it was only last week that I was looking at the historical documents in relation to this, this colony right here where we are.
14:19
And I looked at the, the, the, the, the bills of account which were sent back by Lonsdale in those days back to the governor in Sydney.
14:31
And you know, what was growing more quickly than any other form of expenditure was surveying expenses.
14:38
It's amazing to see it there surveying expenses and then just skyrocketing as the as surveyors were sent out to carve up the land so that it could be taken from the traditional owners, monopolised, monetised and then sold if, if if need be.
15:04
So this this idea that land is a commodity is, is absolutely entrenched in in our creation story, not only here but elsewhere.
15:14
And so I really point back to those long historical origins as part of the not the only explanation, but as part of the explanation for the way that we've got where we are.
15:24
Fantastic.
15:26
Thank you.
15:27
We might return to some of those points as well.
15:31
Emma Dawson, I might turn to you.
15:34
You've recently discussed our our current challenges, often framed as the housing crisis, and we will come to that question in a minute too, of delivering a just and fair housing system and describe that as a failure of policy.
15:50
So can you talk to us about your thoughts on the policy dimension of the rights question and how that plays out in your work and where you see policy tools for strengthening those, if they exist at all?
16:01
Sure, thank you.
16:02
So we live in an economic system rather than a social system, and our capitalist economic system gives much more weight to property rights than it does to human rights.
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And when we're talking about property rights, we're not talking about the right to a safe, secure, comfortable, affordable home.
16:21
We're talking about the right to make profit off property.
16:25
It's absolutely true, as Kevin said, that when Australia was invaded, settled, invaded by the white man, many of the people that arrived here, very desperate convicts from the old country, from the UK, had come from a country where the majority of the land was home owned by the crown.
16:42
And so the ability to own a piece of land here became a big part of our foundation story.
16:49
And I think partly because there's an awareness that that land was stolen and that the working man is in the terminology of the time, had access to land here that they wouldn't have had in the Europe that they came from.
17:04
Has has has almost exacerbate, even more so than other developed capitalist societies.
17:09
We are absolutely obsessed with owning property.
17:13
Our public policy settings though have have fluctuated over the years.
17:17
So if you look at the post war years, there was a huge investment in social housing after the Second World War was kicked off by the Chifley Curtin and Chifley government's initially for social for public housing for rental.
17:30
Menzies later made some of that available for sale.
17:32
I think that was a bad idea.
17:34
Some people disagree, but we did build homes and we made them available to people at a reasonable cost and it was not seen as a lesser form of housing.
17:45
It wasn't just a safety net, it was something in which, Kevin, you grew up in social housing, right?
17:50
Yep.
17:51
And mine, my, my parents both grew up in social housing and were able to build good secure lives.
17:57
We have residualised that.
17:58
So to look at what happened, really there was a big Inflexion point about 30 years ago when we really embraced, for the want of a better term, the neoliberal approach to our economy, inflation, targeting more powers for the Reserve Bank, fewer powers for government.
18:13
Funnily enough, the Reserve Bank can't be voted out.
18:17
But at that point, if, if you look back 30 years, at that time, our spending, our federal spending on housing, about 44% of it went to the lowest 20% of people by income and only 9% went to those at the top, in the top income quintile.
18:34
And that was 'cause there was negative gearing, but it wasn't on steroids.
18:37
What we did at the, at that time was we stopped investing in building public housing and social housing and we shifted to a market mechanism in funding Commonwealth rent assistance.
18:47
And we also, we, the Howard and Costello governments in 99 introduced a capital gains tax discount, which interacted with negative gearing to effectively push land prices to the point that completely separated them from wage growth.
19:02
So it became a form of speculative investment.
19:05
And we now have a situation 30 years later where only 23% of our federal, all our federal spending on housing goes to the bottom quintile and 43% goes to the top in the in, in the form of tax concessions.
19:20
And while people will say, well, those tax concessions don't really drive property prices up that much, you know, that's maybe 2 or 4%.
19:28
What they do is force anyone with any additional money, capital, whatever to invest in residential property.
19:36
It's a non productive form of investment.
19:38
It has created a class of landlords in this country that are unable to maintain adequate secure rental properties.
19:46
It has completely distorted the rental market.
19:48
But it's also meant that we have now got a very, we have recreated on almost on almost, you know, Gilded Age society.
19:57
We've we've reversed a lot of those gains after the Second World War.
20:00
To be back in the in the space where you are either a property owner and therefore likely to be a landlord, or you are a tenant and unlikely to own your own home.
20:10
And that is absolutely a feature of deliberate policy decisions that have been taken by successive governments.
20:16
The good news is that the society is waking up to it and when John Howard is to say, I've never met anyone that complained about the value of their house going down, he probably would now, because the average person out there that owns their own home, even if they're feeling relatively comfortable, they're desperately worried about their kids.
20:34
And so our research recently has shown that your so called mum and dad investors, those people that have been almost forced to put any extra money into a rental property that they probably can't maintain adequately and is is a poor quality, are starting to say I'd rather lose that so my kids can buy a house.
20:52
So we're completely out of whack and it's been because we have favoured property rights over the human right to a home.
21:00
Thank you.
21:02
Fantastic.
21:03
And we'll return to many of those points as well.
21:07
Emma Power, I wanna flip to you now and stay with this way of thinking about the housing question, if you like, as a broadly structural one or a sociotechnical one, as perhaps you might say.
21:19
And ask you to talk to us about thinking with the idea of housing as an infrastructure.
21:25
And an infrastructure that patterns the way we relate to each other, the way we care about each other, the way in the the forms in which we're able to undertake our our lives.
21:37
And ask what, how does rights featuring in that work for you and where, where do you come across that in your research?
21:44
Yeah, Thanks, Libby.
21:46
And I think I want to approach the question.
21:48
I think I want to go back a bit further in time even than than the settler colony.
21:52
And I think I want to go back to the sort of enlightenment idea of the rational autonomous man who's become the central figure of liberal thought.
22:01
And that's because I think that these questions of housing, they're also questions, they're questions about the work of housing and what housing does.
22:09
But there are also questions about care and about how we understand that people meet their needs.
22:14
And so this kind of idea of the rational autonomous man, the central figure of of liberal thought, this man is a man who's supposed to meet his care needs autonomously.
22:25
And the way that he does that is in the family and heteronormative family inside the domestic house.
22:32
And so we see that ideas about the role of housing and what housing does and, and ideas about care have actually evolved together.
22:40
So we meet our care needs privately within the domestic home.
22:44
So care becomes kind of invisible as a public and a political concern, right?
22:49
It's not something that the government should touch.
22:51
And, and this enlightenment idea, they had this concern that any form of reliance on someone was a risk to that autonomy that people had.
23:00
And so any kind of care that you were perceived to get from elsewhere was seen to risk your kind of, you know, rational thought, your autonomy, your right to control your own life.
23:10
And so we've got this sort of fundamental problem that starts to set up.
23:14
And then when we move into, you know, the neoliberal era, these kind of this, these ideas start to pop up that the responsibility of the citizen is to have a job.
23:25
That that care is not just something we meet in the private home, you know, through domestic family labour.
23:33
It's something that we can actually buy from the market, and we start to see this also shaping the way that we think about housing.
23:41
So your responsibility as a kind of rational, autonomous man is not just to make sure that you privately meet your care needs within the home, but it's to have a job.
23:50
It's to buy the housing that suits your family and it's to to kind of meet your needs through that housing.
23:57
And so I think what I see in some of these debates is this kind of this fundamental problem of how we understand human beings and how we understand care as a private responsibility within a liberal Western welfare state.
24:12
And so I think that kind of sits under a lot of this.
24:16
So it's a little bit off your question, which was about housing as a care infrastructure, but I think what we need to do is step away from that.
24:23
What all the research shows us, what all our experiences human beings shows us, is that we're not actually caring independently, we're not actually caring privately.
24:33
We're actually caring together and we're caring in the system that we live in.
24:39
And so we start to see that housing is one of the fundamental infrastructures that actually shapes how people are able to meet their needs for care.
24:48
You know, we constructed housing as a sort of private dwellings.
24:55
And that means that, you know, people who live in those houses are all of a sudden responsible for caring privately.
25:00
It's very difficult to collectivise care when all your housing is private.
25:05
But there's also all these other ways that housing acts as an infrastructure that shapes how we care.
25:10
So now Kevin's talked a little bit about the the residential tenancies legislation, Emma's talking about how we invest in housing, these ways of distributing housing, of valuing housing.
25:23
These are all part of the infrastructure that actually patterns and shapes the decisions and everyday care practises that we have in society.
25:32
Thank you so much for tying all of that together so beautifully and fantastic.
25:38
Geordie, I'm going to come to you and ask you about the ways in which you have identified the differential in rights we were talking.
25:48
Emma picked up on this point before between say landlords and tenants and, and have, I would say, rethought a movement through the rentals website and and your social media work.
26:03
That speaks very powerfully, I think to the collective kind of point that Emma Power just made about how we organise that together and how we think about it differently.
26:14
Can you tell us some more about what it is that how it is you've taken that fight to the streets and why you go there and and what that looks like from a rights perspective?
26:26
Absolutely.
26:26
Thanks for the question.
26:28
So Kevin spoke before about the right to the human right of housing being in a number of international covenants and conventions and stuff like that, but the, I can't remember which article it is, Article 13 perhaps of the ICESCR gives us the right to a continually improving standard of housing, not just the right to housing.
26:50
And in Australia, what we're seeing at the moment is renters are paying more for a continually like we're seeing a regression of our human rights because we're paying more for shooter properties and smaller properties and yet properties in worse conditions.
27:07
So our human rights are literally backsliding when it comes to housing here.
27:13
And at the same time, we're seeing this incredible concentration of wealth go to, I guess the landed kind of property investors in Australia.
27:24
And we know that, you know, vacancy rates are 1% at the moment or wherever you are in, in capital cities and stuff like that.
27:33
And we know that there's everything is stacked against kind of a renter in the landlord renter relationship.
27:41
So there's really not much you can do when you know that at the end of the day, you can be evicted and effectively homeless.
27:52
So if we look to the past, if we look to kind of what we did when we were in this situation before we collectivised and we organise and we Brent striked and we did stuff like that.
28:08
We don't do that anymore and that's due to a number of things.
28:11
But partly because, you know, the Tennis Union today is funded by the government and you know, previously we had in the 80s, I think it was, I don't know if you can remind me, but ten 70s.
28:24
Thanks Kevin.
28:26
He was there.
28:26
I was not beautiful like I've seen.
28:32
The post is the Tenants Union of Victoria rent strike.
28:35
Let's go.
28:36
We don't have that anymore at the moment.
28:38
We've got Rahu, which we've got some members present.
28:41
I'm a member as well.
28:42
We've actually got the secretary present, which is very exciting.
28:46
But the fact that Rahu as a union exists while we also have Tenants, Victoria kind of shows us what the problem is here.
28:55
Our needs aren't being met when it comes to housing and we have to fight for them.
29:00
We've got to collectivise, we've got to organise.
29:02
So something that I'm trying to do is help.
29:08
We don't have time anymore to do the organising that we used to do because we are just crushed by capitalism.
29:15
So we have to work two jobs and, you know, we don't have free time.
29:19
So if we're going to organise, we have to do it kind of digitally.
29:24
And that's like not exclusively, but it's a large aspect of, you know, we've got such little time that we can spend doing it.
29:32
So what I do is try and figure out ways that people can digitally organise.
29:38
And one of that, one of those ways is, you know, speaking up so people can review their own rentals on likesheetrentals.org or their real estate agency when previously if you made a post on social media, you could be evicted for it.
29:53
And when we've seen that happen.
29:56
So it's just a way to do that anonymously.
29:58
And then people do that.
30:00
I've asked people to send in addresses of empty properties, and I've got a lot of them kind of all over the country, some in America and stuff like that.
30:10
That.
30:11
That's exciting.
30:12
That's a tough commute.
30:13
Yeah.
30:14
Yeah.
30:14
We'll see.
30:15
We'll see if we get to them.
30:17
But yeah, like, we moved someone in today to one of those properties and it's really exciting.
30:22
Yeah.
30:23
Beautiful home.
30:24
I don't know why it's been empty for so long, but it's.
30:26
Yeah, it's stunning.
30:28
And yeah.
30:29
So it's just a way that people with very little time due to capitalism can kind of help someone in need.
30:36
And it's.
30:36
Yeah.
30:36
Mutual aid.
30:37
Mutual aid.
30:37
Fantastic.
30:40
We'll come back to some of those points about collective organising and so on shortly.
30:45
But Cam, I want to come to you and given that it is Social Sciences Week and that we're in university currently and that you and I are academics in this university, we should probably talk about the role of evidence and knowledge and research and all those things in this broader question.
31:05
Partly because as well, it strikes me that our contemporary housing debate discussion discourse very much on show.
31:15
If anyone watched Q&A last night, I lasted about 3 minutes and then got so angry I wanted to throw the television out the window.
31:24
Is kind of soaked with what Tom Slater, Professor Tom Slater would call the application of agnatology that the the the intentional production of ignorance to hide and obscure what is actually going on.
31:43
And so we're caught in this kind of cycle.
31:45
So I'm wondering if you could talk to us about the role of social science knowledge in all of this, given that context.
31:53
So we've never been more surrounded by information.
31:55
We've never been more immersed in information.
31:56
It's never been more difficult to understand what's actually happening on.
32:00
Yeah.
32:00
So I think that that's a great starting point.
32:02
Emma's done a fantastic job of kind of recounting some of the policy history that's relevant here.
32:07
The key lesson that I've taken from that is, is that, you know, the political systems, the social systems, the economic systems that we currently inhabit have a history that were made in particular kinds of ways.
32:18
And, and I think the role of social science in recounting that history is really important.
32:23
So, so Emma's talked about it, both Emma's, Kevin's talked about it, Geordie's talked about it.
32:26
You know, there's, there's histories of struggle that we can learn from.
32:30
And I'm struck, Geordie, by your, your point that that, you know, we have confronted housing problems like this in different parts of the world in the past, But making sense of those histories, learning those lessons, there is a role for social science in sharing those histories, making them more accessible, making them shareable.
32:44
I think that you've done a fantastic job with social media.
32:47
That's something that we can learn as social scientists, better ways of communicating the things that we know about.
32:52
But I think that the key thing to come back to is that the system that we currently have, as Emma has said, is the result of policy decisions, political decisions, that have a history where we can learn how were those things made, the way they were made.
33:04
And my sense now is that that in the midst of a crisis, we have an opportunity to think about what kinds of alternatives might be possible.
33:12
I've read a great book recently by an English critic, Adam Phillips, who taught his books called On Giving Up.
33:19
And his sense is that we live in crisis times, the Poly crisis that lots of social scientists talk.
33:23
Everything's ****** ** right?
33:24
Everything's ****** ** all the time.
33:25
And this idea of, you know, it's so easy to give up in the face of this crisis.
33:29
It's so easy to give up and to think, I'm going to retreat into this lovely rational, autonomous private stuff.
33:34
I'd love to get some of that somewhere.
33:36
I don't know where that exists, but you know, that that that idea of giving up feels so appealing that I'll just, I'll forget politics.
33:42
Politics is so broken at the moment.
33:43
I'll forget politics.
33:45
I can't do anything about our neoliberal system.
33:47
And and he makes this lovely point where he talks about, you know, the horrible catastrophes that are averted by refusing to give up.
33:54
And that's such a lovely idea.
33:56
You know, things are ****** ** now.
33:57
Part of my language there.
33:58
There are degrees above where we currently sit, right?
34:01
History teaches us that.
34:03
So what the power of not giving up.
34:05
And there's a role for the social scientists in remembering that history.
34:08
So we have together and this lovely collective struggle that we all, we're all engaged in the power of coming together to remember the struggle, to remember why we struggle together, to share our histories with each other, to share our struggles with each other.
34:21
Living in your lovely bio, this idea of living lawfully on country, you know, like seriously, that's, that's, you know, that's the thing that, that, that's the thing that guides us.
34:31
And what I mean by that is that our role in social science is to connect all the pieces of this into a way that makes sense, that is, is more sensible, coherent for others.
34:40
So we connect the problem of white colonial settler politics here in this country was the problem of honouring country here in 2024 with the history of neoliberalism, the history of capitalism.
34:50
That's a really big, powerful story that's difficult to understand.
34:53
You know, my PhDs in political science, a lot of you have PhDs on the panel as well.
34:57
Like we we should be kind of good at this connecting these big powerful stories and trying to say here are how these it's fit together.
35:03
The Inflexion points that Emmett spoke about, the political histories that that Geordie spoke about.
35:08
We should be better at learning those histories and sharing them with each other.
35:11
That's the role for great social science, you know, remembering our histories, but also that powerful message that the systems that we currently have it, I'll say it again, they have a history that were made certain ways.
35:21
At what point do we realise that that we as a society, as we collectivise, as we get organised, then we together struggle to make the system a little bit different.
35:32
That's the power of not giving up.
35:33
And that feels like the most powerful thing I can share today is that that it's, you know, it's easy to give up.
35:38
Sometimes there's a kind of sense of relief in giving up.
35:41
But but the power of not giving up feels really important to me.
35:45
Fantastic, excellent words and call to action.
35:49
Thank you, Cam.
35:51
So staying with that, but coming at it from another angle and I'll, I might just rest this one still with you, Cam, and then open it out to everybody else.
36:00
Weasel words that we use and the slipperiness of language and and so on.
36:06
Given the importance of bringing exactly what you just said to to those things.
36:11
And let's talk about the the one that dominates the most at the moment.
36:16
And that is of course, the word crisis for framing a particular moment and experience is is in my view anyway, a weasel word.
36:26
And just this afternoon, shout out to my research team here at the Centre for Urban Research did a very quick but accurate count of the number of times that the term housing crisis has appeared in Commonwealth Hansard since 1945.
36:46
And it is, it's a lot of counting, right?
36:48
And it is 1642 odd times that the the term housing crisis, those two words together have appeared and 842 of those times have occurred this year and last year.
37:03
So we are in this incredible intensification of describing this thing as a crisis linked to, of course, multiple other cascading kinds of crises like climate crisis and economic crisis and cost of living crisis.
37:18
Everything's a crisis.
37:19
And that is of course, because everything is ****** **.
37:22
However, there's a kind of political usefulness to crisis.
37:27
Never let a good crisis go to waste, I believe is the terms that the capitalists use.
37:32
So let's talk about weasel words and how how we might deal with the one in housing.
37:39
And I'll start with you and then I'll open up to everybody else.
37:42
I think I think you're right that there are there are different balances in which that term carries meaning for us.
37:47
So, so sometimes it feels like that's that's a that's a great language for capturing the intensity of what we're experiencing.
37:52
And I think that's probably why it's used a lot of the time.
37:55
Got a great colleague here, Janet Roitman, who's written a fantastic book.
37:58
It's old now called Anti Crisis.
37:59
And she makes the point that the trouble with crisis is that it implies a glitch in the system in an otherwise well functioning system, as if the thing's supposed to be functioning as normal.
38:08
And then there's a crisis.
38:09
So the crisis becomes the thing that's abnormal.
38:13
And her point is that most of the time crises are produced and they're actually the things like neoliberalism is great than she uses in in her book the US subprime mortgage thing as as an example of crisis where her point is, no, that's the system working exactly as it was intended to work.
38:28
It's just it went a bit off track.
38:31
And I think, you know, Emma tell tells the story as well that that really the, the the property valleys we have at the moment indications of the system working exactly as it was designed to work.
38:41
And so in some respects, calling it a crisis obscures that part of it that actually know this was deliberate and it was intentional.
38:47
And that that part feels that's the weasel work, right?
38:49
That feels like, oh, we're calling it a crisis now, actually, this is business as usual, right?
38:53
So that's the that's the dishonest part of it.
38:55
But I still feel like, you know, calling it a crisis does it, it does galvanised people, right?
39:01
I feel like it does give us this sense that that climate is the other one, right, But that when we talk about global warming and climate change, calling calling it a climate crisis does feel different and urgent than necessary.
39:12
As Weasley as that might be.
39:13
Sometimes I feel like there are instances in which it does feel like, no, like a ****** ** is a great, you know, like I'm ******* things is a is a good thing to try and do.
39:21
And I feel like this is a this is a really I've got an 11 year old who's super sweary.
39:24
And the trouble is that that like why?
39:27
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
39:28
But it's like, you know, it's that that realisation that that sometimes there's a kind of vehemence and language that feels like it carries an emotional balance and and the crisis, you know, doesn't have enough of that gut punch to it that, you know, like, no, it doesn't, does it?
39:40
And so I feel like we need This is why sweary Cameron is it kind of feels like that's the like we want to convey the sense of intensity of that feeling about this.
39:48
And I don't know if there are there are lots of other elegant $0.50 words that one can use to to describe it, but they're not as good, right?
39:53
These are good words.
39:54
We should reclaim them in academic discourse.
39:57
So I can't I can't swear jar at home.
39:58
Right.
39:59
So that's, that's the superannuation fund right there.
40:01
Who who wants to come in?
40:04
I can see microphones jump.
40:05
I wouldn't mind yes, I I, I think it is a politically useful adage.
40:10
Never waste of crisis because you'd rarely get.
40:14
The opportunity to really remake things.
40:16
And the Second World War was a great example of that.
40:19
And it led to the creation of the welfare state.
40:22
And the beverage report made the point at the time I'm gazumping my upcoming book here that times of crisis call for revolution, not for patching, not for patching broken systems.
40:33
And that's what we're doing.
40:34
We the our economy, the global economy has been in crisis for 15 years.
40:39
More neoliberalism hit a brick wall with the GFC and it got bailed out.
40:43
The state.
40:45
The COVID pandemic was not just something that happened, you know, it was it was part of cities encroaching on nature.
40:54
We're going to see more of this.
40:55
These are cycles that repeat through history.
40:58
So if you've read Pelagni, if you've read Gramsci, you understand that every eighty to 100 years, what happens in a capitalist society is capitalism gets out of control and many people that are in power are benefiting from that, so they don't want to reset it.
41:12
And then there's a revolution.
41:14
We don't have revolutions with blood on the street anymore because of the way that we've structured our society.
41:19
But we're in the same Inflexion point.
41:23
The systems we've relied on or that certain people have relied on are now failing the vast majority of people.
41:30
And I do think there's an extent to which, yes, systems do, you know, systems do what they're designed to do.
41:36
I think there's probably a very, a few people that were very aware when they introduced the capital gains tax discount that this is exactly what was going to happen, most likely including the treasurer at the time.
41:46
But I think there are a lot of other people that didn't anticipate where we are now and are now going, oh, hang on, look, I've built some really good wealth, but I've got 4 kids and I can't buy them all a house.
41:55
So a crisis is something that in one sense, it is something that seems extraordinary.
42:02
And do we really need to worry about that?
42:04
Because crises pass.
42:05
But this is a manufactured crisis.
42:07
This is the result of years of decisions that have not been in the interest of the majority of people or in the interest of a good society or a fair society, but increasingly in the interests of people that are stripping all of the value they they're rent seekers.
42:25
And this is not new.
42:26
It happens every eighty to 100 years.
42:28
And unless we act collectively to correct it, it is how greed operates.
42:33
So we are at a point I think and and what I'm seeing now, what's so distressing for me now, I got a little bit optimistic.
42:40
I'm a relentless optimist or I would not do what I do and published a book of essays in 2020, book called What Happens Next, Rebuilding Australia after COVID-19 2020.
42:50
I was a little bit ahead of myself.
42:52
But the sense then that OK, this is a real crisis, we're pulling together here.
42:56
We've not seen anything like this.
42:57
The economy is shut down.
42:58
We're all trapped at home.
42:59
People are dying.
43:01
If we don't change society, and we saw through that, who can and count go to work, The essential workers that had to risk their lives every day to deliver food, to care for children, to work in hospitals.
43:12
And those of us with nice white collar jobs at home during Zoom meetings and feeling, you know, and saving lots of money while people delivered food to indoors, we never saw, we have not seen such a stark reminder of the divisions we have allowed to develop in our society.
43:27
And yet 3-4 years later, we're going, oh, we'll just snap back to the way it was.
43:30
No, that was our crisis.
43:33
We do not let it go.
43:34
We do not say things are OK because they're not.
43:37
It showed us that they're not.
43:38
And most people that the changing attitudes out there, the number of people that responded to Q&A's poll last night and said actually no change, negative gearing now much higher than it was even when we polled them two years ago.
43:50
Society, people get it, but the people that are benefiting, that run the country, that run the economy, they don't want it to change.
43:57
So it absolutely has to come from collective action from the ground up.
44:04
Yeah, I think though, the risk with crisis Libby is that, and you know, as everyone on the panel would be well aware, is that capital is incredibly ingenious and incredibly creative.
44:15
And so out of many of these crises, we've seen the justification of the extension of the way that the system is running at the moment.
44:22
You know, so global financial crisis in the US, we see 7 million households dispossessed of their houses.
44:29
But we see tonnes of those swept up by huge institutional investors who have just kind of perpetuated the system that actually led to that crisis in the 1st place and have made it worse for renters, have made it easier to evict renters, have turned back some of the labour of, you know, managing properties onto renters themselves.
44:54
Desiree Fields, a geographer in the US, has done some work around this, looking at the kind of apps and technologies that those investors are using to make this system work for them.
45:03
I think in Australia, the US and the UK, you know, we're seeing build to rent housing pop up.
45:09
Build to rent housing can be great if it's run by a Community Housing provider who's got that social ethic at their heart.
45:16
But but in my very unscientific survey of build to rent housing in Sydney, what I see is that build to rent properties are renting out at 20 to 30% more than equivalent properties because what they're actually commodifying is rental security.
45:32
And so I think, you know, crisis can be really mobilised in this really problematic way as as well.
45:38
So we need to be really sharp to what's happening and how it's being used.
45:42
But at the same time, it's really dangerous to move away from the idea of crisis because there's many people whose lives are in crisis right now because of this.
45:50
So I think it's a really, it's why it's a weasel word.
45:53
It's a really thorny 1.
45:55
Jordy, do you want to comment on that?
45:56
Oh, yeah, definitely.
45:58
Yeah.
45:59
Like, it's, it's not a it's, we've had a crisis in this country for hundreds of years.
46:04
Charles Darwin, when he came to Sydney, I was like, I can't believe the amount of, you know, new buildings that have just been finished, as well as people complaining about high rents.
46:14
Yeah.
46:14
So ever, ever since we colonised this country, Aboriginal people have been displaced.
46:20
But now it's starting to affect white people.
46:23
So now we can call it a crisis, which is a bit ridiculous, but I have the white people on board.
46:32
We can probably do something about it, which is also ridiculous.
46:35
I hate that that's a thing that we get to do.
46:40
But yeah, like, the discontent is there.
46:43
People are angry.
46:44
And, you know, white middle class people are also angry.
46:48
And if you look to like the civil rights movement in America and stuff like that, when the white middle class people are angry, unfortunately that's when things get done, which is, yeah, ridiculous state of events, but it is what it is.
47:04
And yeah, also you mentioned Community Housing before.
47:08
I don't like Community Housing.
47:11
Like I feel like Community Housing in that way to neoliberalize public housing.
47:17
And it's very rarely done well.
47:19
The literally the only times I've seen good examples when it is Aboriginal owned and run Community Housing for Aboriginal people.
47:29
Everything else is just like, there are just so many bad examples of it and I hate it.
47:34
And it feels really weird to say that because that's, you know, social housing now includes that and it should just be public housing.
47:41
And yeah, sorry, that's an entirely separate rant.
47:44
Excellent.
47:45
But yeah, thank you.
47:49
Yeah.
47:49
Like it's, let's call it a crisis now because because the whites are affected and and and lots of the intersections between these things and how they get used and and taken up in discourse is I think what you're partly what you're referring to.
48:03
Geordie, before I ask Kevin another question, just a reminder to submit your questions, which I'm sure are coming through Zara.
48:12
Maybe put the the there we are the thing you back up in case you have had missed it or or forgotten.
48:19
And we'll come to those questions in just a moment.
48:23
And I want to come back to the question of the right to housing and how we might think about that in our contemporary legal and political system.
48:34
And I know that there is a, or current bill being discussed or about to appear in in federal Parliament about creating the right to housing.
48:46
Talk to us about what such a thing could deliver.
48:50
And then maybe we'll we'll riff off that and see how other people see that in their own work.
48:54
Could a, a, a right to housing enshrined in legislation in Australia help us with some of these issues?
49:01
Would it work?
49:01
Yeah, alright.
49:02
Can I thank you for that question.
49:04
Can I connect the answer to what, to the the question you started off with just you're a panellist, you can do anything you like.
49:11
OK, so you said that that weasel words are being used in order to cover the problem to to disguise the nature of the problem and to allow people to think that something's being done about it when it isn't.
49:30
That's what I think is happening at the moment.
49:33
And I don't I reject the the use of the word crisis because I think it falls into that category.
49:40
It's a way of pretending that something's being done about the system when it isn't.
49:46
The system is non functioning.
49:48
We had moved way beyond crisis.
49:51
Now human, human rights are completely opposed to that way of thinking about about about housing.
49:59
And one of the reasons that that that this approach of pretending that something is being done when it isn't is that leaves a whole lot of people behind.
50:10
Now take take the idea of, of building 1.2 million homes within the outlook.
50:17
As you know of six to 10 years.
50:19
Take the idea of, of spending $34 billion doing so.
50:26
Look at what the the Full Housing Affordability Advisory Council says about that.
50:34
That won't meet the need for housing in that outlook.
50:39
That we already know about.
50:40
It will do absolutely nothing for housing affordability.
50:44
It will not reduce homelessness.
50:48
Now, human rights is completely opposed to that kind of approach because the first principle is that everybody has a human right to housing and nobody can be left behind.
50:59
So it's completely unacceptable that that we will leave literally millions of people in in mortgage stress, literally millions of people in in rental housing stress because our rents are so high.
51:16
I had an upsetting conversation with a relative yesterday, a lovely man in his early 50s, You know, he works in a low paid job.
51:32
And I rang him to see how it was going and he said, well, I've had a, a shocking day as a matter of fact, because I got noticed today that my rent was going up from $450 per week to $600.00 per week.
51:47
And I could hear him crying on the phone and he said that's my food bill, just in case you're wondering.
51:54
And so you know, nothing's going to be done by the current words being spoken about addressing the disaster that we currently have and have and human rights is completely opposed to that.
52:05
Incidentally, on the subject of care and collectivising care, he he lives with his two adult children, one of them disabled and physical physically disabled.
52:17
And so he cares for him and the other one works as a Packer in the local supermarket and they are a functioning social unit.
52:27
And the way that they will get through this total disaster is together.
52:31
So I absolutely so, so, so much enjoyed the way that you brought back to collective families and communities this, this power of this resilience, this power to, to, to hold together in the face of this situation.
52:48
Now I want to connect all of that with with the with what human rights says about resolving big, big systemic problems like this.
52:57
And what human rights says is that is that the responsibility is, is government's only government can Marshall the resources that are necessary in order to ensure that everybody is encompassed within the solution that can be achieved over time.
53:14
The solution, of course, to these big problems has to be done progressively over time.
53:19
It's not as if we can sprinkle magic dust on a whole country and and have houses and and the solution materialise out of nothing.
53:30
So it needs planning over time.
53:32
It needs to be comprehensive, it needs to be participatory, it needs to be empowering.
53:39
Incidentally, the idea that we can resolve problems by turning up at at housing towers just down the road and tell 3000 people that there to be the victims of the solution is totally wrong.
53:49
It it contradicts human rights in in in, in several in several particulars.
53:56
And yes, there is a bill before federal Parliament and two independents placed it there.
54:04
That bill will do a number of things.
54:06
It will create it will recognise the right to housing in Australian law.
54:12
It will require the government to formulate a legislative housing and homelessness plan for the resolution for addressing this problem systematically over over time.
54:22
It will create a housing advocate to do the kind of work that's that we have seen here is just so it's just so important to the problem.
54:34
Grassroots empowering advocacy through through organisations that have been mentioned and many others, but having government backing with power so that they can participate in, in, in resolving the problem.
54:52
So that's that's one way that human rights says we we we can address the problem by by imposing upon government through legislation the responsibility to have a plan which is transparent through which the entire citizenry can see that there's something that's being done in a way which encompasses everybody and leaves nobody behind.
55:19
Fantastic does that there's some questions coming through about exactly that yes, one of which is is that right already covered in the UN Charter of human Rights and can are we is that being leveraged through this?
55:34
Yes, it is right.
55:35
Yes, it is.
55:36
Tell us more about that.
55:37
Yes, it is.
55:38
So the, the, the right is the one that I mentioned.
55:40
It's in Isiska, the covenant, the economic, social and cultural rights covenant.
55:45
It is the right to adequate housing.
55:46
And it does involve a number of elements.
55:49
I mean, one of one of the elements is affordability.
55:52
Now it's perfectly obvious that Australia is going through its, its, its, its worst period of affordability in relation to housing that it's ever had.
56:03
That it's, it's, it's very, it's, it's obvious that we are, we, we as a nation are not, we are not complying with our obligation to create a system within which people can affordably can access affordable housing, whether that's to buy a house, to rent a house or through other means.
56:26
That's not happening.
56:27
So that's one element.
56:29
The other element of course is is is is safety Geordie's?
56:36
I thought Geordie had only invented 1 adjective in relation to rentals being **** but now I see these in fact invented 2 being ******* rentals.
56:46
And I completely agree with you.
56:48
I've seen both **** and ******* rentals and, and, and rentals which are mouldy, which have a poor, poor ventilation, where windows don't fit properly and all the other kinds of things which is so common in the community.
57:08
This is a a clear violation of the of the safety element of, of the right to housing.
57:17
So the right to housing is not just a right to have a roof over your head.
57:20
It involves certain things which you might say are necessary to lead a dignified life.
57:30
It's a bit hard to be dignified when you're living with mould because it's the threat to your health it's and so on and so forth.
57:38
I don't think I need to develop that any further.
57:40
So the, the right to housing has, has various indices of adequacy, which which operate like standards, which are capable of being legally rendered, specified and can be the subject of, of, of inspectorate regimes and are being the subject of inspectorate regimes in Victoria.
58:07
And I applaud the Victorian government for going down this path, although it's, it's very, very early days.
58:14
Thank you for scoping that out a little more for us.
58:18
I actually want to pick up on that point around the question of adequacy.
58:21
And, and someone has asked about the role of location, infrastructure, amenities and design quality, yes.
58:28
And the right of housing, yes.
58:30
And how we can make that much more a feature of yes.
58:34
Well, I think this is where our MOT comes in very, very clearly.
58:39
So RMIT is a very special university because of it's, it's, it's reached from really across the whole of the housing discipline, from the, from the, the physical side to the planning side, to the social side.
58:54
It's actually absolutely unique.
58:56
And I'd love to see some powerful human rights expertise set right there in the middle.
59:01
I think the job.
59:01
Well, no, but but the so I've forgotten your question.
59:11
The the adequacy, the adequacy question.
59:13
OK, but and and in a part you, you've kind of answered it.
59:17
So I think I have actually.
59:18
So that's fine.
59:19
But what?
59:19
Yeah.
59:20
But what I might do is bring Geordie in because I think what you're doing in part Geordie is shining a light on the adequacy question, not just a, a differential in rights question, but on the, the point about there is perfectly good housing stock out there.
59:37
The stuff that's available to people on lower incomes or who are struggling are in the, the **** stuff with really poor rights and entitlements.
59:46
But some, there's some good stuff out there and you're trying to redistribute that in, in different ways outside formal institutions and outside the state.
59:56
So do you want to talk to us a little bit about how you see questions of adequacy?
1:00:00
And I know you've mentioned the story of moving someone into a a very adequate home today.
1:00:06
Talk to us more about that, what that looks like.
1:00:09
Yeah, well, it's like Victoria specifically is probably the best jurisdiction in terms of the the minimum rental standards, at least as they're legislated in Australia.
1:00:21
And those are objectively very minimum standards.
1:00:27
They're like, the house shouldn't fall over and it shouldn't have mould and yeah, be structurally sound, all that kind of stuff.
1:00:36
And what we're saying is that that just is not the case.
1:00:40
We are paying for houses that literally like the amount of ceilings I've seen falling on tenants is is ridiculous like that should that should be one time maybe happened to me in 1998 should not be happening in 24.
1:00:55
Like it happened like it's fairly regular, which is wild.
1:00:59
But like the minimum standard being that the house is structurally sound is just like that.
1:01:05
That on its own is not being met.
1:01:07
And that's that's the law.
1:01:10
That is the law and that's until now just being completely unenforced because it relies on a rental at the bottom end of the power balance imbalance kind of thing to enforce their own rights.
1:01:22
And yeah, I guess Consumer Affairs is at the at least they've hired a, you know, a rental task force after a lot of push for that.
1:01:34
But at the same time, you know, we've got 100,000, almost 100,000 vacant homes in Melbourne.
1:01:41
And a lot of these like one, almost one in 10 in, in the city of Melbourne where we are at the moment vacant.
1:01:48
And these are lovely apartments, like quite expensive apartments.
1:01:53
And then we've got Brunswick Ace, which is one in 10 as well.
1:01:56
And some of them are pretty **** Yeah, like they're also falling apart.
1:02:01
But at the moment renters are paying for the pleasure of living in a house where that already happens, like people living in mould ridden homes, asbestos ridden ridden homes, all that kind of stuff.
1:02:13
So yeah, like let's like you might as like if you, if you're faced, if your two options are no house or **** ***** like it's, it's not a it's not a difficult choice.
1:02:25
So yeah, let's redistribute some of those ones.
1:02:27
Absolutely.
1:02:29
And I think this, you pointed this really important tension and dynamic that we have built into the system, which is that if you as a tenant want to draw attention to the inadequate conditions in which you are being asked to dwell, you have to do so through a system that asks you to like front up to it and become immediately vulnerable to a power relation that you are right at the bottom of.
1:02:58
So kind of back to this rights question of exactly and, and the, and even though we've made some steps towards that, we, we still have that very long way to go absolutely baked into the, to the system.
1:03:10
This is the neoliberal care thing as well, right?
1:03:12
So the idea that we're all free and autonomous in the market.
1:03:16
I mean, now in, in Australia, the residential tenancies Act pretty much position every tenant as a consumer, like, you know, as though they're buying a radio, not that we buy radios these days, but some other kind of consumer good.
1:03:28
It, it assumes that you can front up and that you're not actually going to lose something fundamental if you highlight this.
1:03:34
And I think that's where regulation becomes really important.
1:03:37
Don't think there's been much research yet about the New Zealand Healthy Home Standards, but I find them really compelling because they're set up quite differently to what we have in Australia.
1:03:46
They're a very rigorous set of standards.
1:03:49
You know, landlords have to, there's a kind of a certification process for properties, but there's also a set of guidelines that can help tenants to understand the property and how they stack up against the right.
1:04:02
So things like the draught standard, for instance, it says, you know, that there should be a space no bigger than a New Zealand $2.00 coin at the bottom of the door.
1:04:11
Now I find that fairly big still, but at least it's a measure that tenants can use to be able to say, well actually my house objectively does or does not make that standard.
1:04:21
And here's something that I can do about that.
1:04:23
There's regulations around that are level of insulation that should be in the ceiling.
1:04:28
And there's a document that explains to tenants how they can actually check that insulation and whether it meets the standards.
1:04:34
There are also supposed to receive documentation when they're signing the lease that shows that the property has that level of insulation.
1:04:41
And, you know, so I don't think they're perfect.
1:04:43
I think they're a long way from that.
1:04:45
But I think it's really interesting to think about how you can have very objective, you know, settings like this, and you can play them out in a very clear way for each actor that's in the housing system.
1:04:59
That's a very important point.
1:05:03
It brings us to another important point on the question of adequacy and and someone has asked about the question of public housing a very live and important conversation.
1:05:14
Certainly especially here in Victoria where we're in the midst of you referred to it before Kevin of a Major renewal.
1:05:23
I need my fingers to scare quotes renewal programme of of public housing based on a claim about adequacy.
1:05:31
A very reasonable claim by the way, because we have run down public housing and failed to invest in it.
1:05:35
We're, we are a failed land social landlord in that regard.
1:05:40
We collectively have decided that that is going to be so.
1:05:45
So we, we use this in, in this way.
1:05:47
So I just wanted to flag the, the question of public housing because it's such an important one, and the question of rights in public housing because there was a time, it's a fading time, but there was a time when public housing in Australia was the most secure tenure in Australia.
1:06:05
You generally had tenure for life and it was it was something, a place where you could grow up in and and you know, raise your family or whatever and grow old in.
1:06:16
Perhaps it doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
1:06:19
So I wondered if we might just talk about the role of public housing in the rights question.
1:06:26
Can I handle can I handle that one please, Kevin?
1:06:28
Now, now firstly, it is the, IT is the public conception that that public housing post war was a very secure form of tenure.
1:06:38
In fact it wasn't.
1:06:39
OK, OK, Yep.
1:06:41
And one of the reasons that many people took up the Menzian option of buying their home was to escape the the authoritarian Housing Commission.
1:06:52
And in Victoria the housing Commission was very authoritarian.
1:06:56
And there are some pretty scary stories I could tell you about the power that was exercised ruthlessly by by the housing Commission, but the pub.
1:07:04
But that that's the exception rather than the rule.
1:07:07
The legal fact is insecurity of tenure, but the but the the way it act, the way it actually worked out was OK foremost.
1:07:16
Now human rights have not in my entire experience of, of nearly 50 years as as a lawyer, human rights advocate, judge and now what I am being the the centre of the public housing system in in this country.
1:07:42
No, no Housing Act in Australia creating a public housing system specifies that the people have the right to housing and that we exist the Housing Authority in order to fulfil that right.
1:07:59
None.
1:08:00
And it should, that should be Section 1 of, of every Housing Act in this in this country.
1:08:06
And it's, it's not the way that things are organised.
1:08:09
When I, when I was the president of VCAT, which I was, and when I was a judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria, which I was the director of housing regularly came in in cases and argued that they were not bound by human rights at all.
1:08:25
And they were just like the landlord, like everybody else.
1:08:29
And that they were entitled to use private landlord property powers in order to evict tenants, to exercise all manner of legal rights towards tenants as if they were ordinary tenants, which plainly they were not.
1:08:48
So the, the, the one of the things that hats that has to happen as part of, as part of bringing dignity and and human rights to the status of being a tenant is for the provider, whether it be a public provider or a private provider to be required to treat the the tenant as a, as a human rights bearer towards I as the provider of that of that, of that, of that housing have responsibilities.
1:09:27
Now, of course, in the context of of private tenancy, that's not a government person, that's a private person.
1:09:33
But the government needs to create the rules, the rules of the game of a kind which protects the human rights of the tenants through legislation that's effective.
1:09:45
For example, the one that you just mentioned, ensuring that the that the the housing satisfies certain minimum standards.
1:09:52
Absolutely.
1:09:53
That's the government's responsibility.
1:09:55
And it should be exactly the same whether it's a Community Housing provider or whether it's a whether it's direct public provision or, or, or whatever.
1:10:05
Thank you.
1:10:06
Emma Dawson, can I ask you to comment on public housing and then Geordie, you want to chime in?
1:10:10
Yeah, yes.
1:10:12
You'll see public housing in this well, the best form of rent control is public housing.
1:10:18
If you want to ensure that we have a market that meets the needs of people in, you know, different socioeconomic groups and backgrounds, you absolutely have to have a non market provider of housing.
1:10:30
And we have retreated from that quite deliberately over the last 30 to 40 years.
1:10:35
We're seeing some, you know, some comeback.
1:10:38
I mean, let's give some credit to the current federal and some of the state governments for saying, OK, we'll get back into it, but it's it's too little too late.
1:10:48
I like Geordie have look, I think that social housing, community social housing has both public and community.
1:10:54
Community Housing has a place and it'd be very difficult, almost it would be impossible to replace it all with public housing tomorrow.
1:11:01
It would also be if we introduced laws that gave those kinds of rights to tenants.
1:11:07
The short term disruption in our because of the structure of our current market would be devastating.
1:11:12
A lot of landlords will go on out, you know, and, and so we'd have a huge disruption.
1:11:16
So it would have to be managed quite carefully because we have put ourselves into such a mess.
1:11:22
But I think that my both my so I was born in the north of England in the 1970s.
1:11:29
My parents were both born during the Second World War into working class families.
1:11:35
Their, my parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents, including the women, worked in cotton mills from the age of 12 and they lived in some housing until the Attlee government built council houses in the UK and then in the night in 1948, in my mum's case in 1950 and my dad's, they were moved into new council estates and my grandparents died there.
1:11:55
My dad's parents came here but my they lived there for 50 years.
1:11:58
My parents grew up there.
1:11:59
They went through a grammar school system, they got opportunities and they were able to build a very good life out of that.
1:12:04
It was not seen as residual housing just for people that the private landlords don't want.
1:12:11
Working families went into those homes and they stayed in those homes and they built communities.
1:12:16
And then of course Thatcher blew it all apart.
1:12:18
But that that role of public housing was not stigmatised.
1:12:24
It was something that was available to a wide variety of people as it still is in parts of Europe.
1:12:31
It was secure compared to the Australian model.
1:12:34
Certainly it was the certainly less draconian and more secure and it provided them with the kind of opportunity that they otherwise would not have had.
1:12:44
And it was housing was the big difference.
1:12:46
What we have now, because we have said the market can fix everything and the and, and, and even our approach to public housing now is slightly marketized in that it's through social housing providers or the big failure.
1:12:59
We now spend 3 1/2 billion dollars on Commonwealth rent assistance and we don't build any more public homes and that a lot of that is subsidising private landlords.
1:13:08
That is a market mechanism we must return to having a significant proportion.
1:13:13
It's only around 2 to 3% of our stock now is social housing.
1:13:18
In the post war years it was 910% right through to the 1990s.
1:13:23
And in my view, it should be more, it should be close to 20 to 25% of the market.
1:13:27
If we do that, then people will.
1:13:31
And we also need to do things like our negative gearing regime is completely insane.
1:13:35
You know, you can, you can offset losses from any part of your from, from your property, any other part of your income.
1:13:41
That doesn't happen anywhere else in the world.
1:13:43
So we would then get to a point where, sure, there would still be some people that wanted to be landlords and invest in property, but it would only make sense to do them if it was positively geared and they could afford to maintain that property and to meet those requirements under a Human Rights Act.
1:13:56
We all of those things are possible.
1:13:59
Controlling rents more capping rents is possible.
1:14:02
Having a having a right to certain standards of housing is possible, but only after we get to a certain amount of our market being publicly provided.
1:14:12
Because until that point the market won't stand for those for those changes and and what who will suffer will be tenants.
1:14:18
So the number one thing we need to do, I want to look at the tax concessions.
1:14:22
It's a wicked problem.
1:14:23
Yes, we need more supply.
1:14:24
I'm not saying we don't need more supply, but all of these things looking at but need looking at, but the number one thing we need is much, much more public housing, social housing, but a bigger proportion of public within it.
1:14:35
Thanks.
1:14:37
Fantastic.
1:14:37
Geordie, would you try me on that one?
1:14:39
Yeah, absolutely.
1:14:40
So I wanted to say that when I refer to public housing, I mean abundant public housing and accessible public housing that anyone, if they wanted to, could be able to access, regardless of what you earn.
1:14:52
I'd love to see like that much public housing being available as well as secure, secure housing.
1:14:59
So what Kevin spoke to before, like we still see that today, we're still seeing in WA, the Housing Authority, the public Housing Authority still uses no grounds eviction on public housing tenants and they evict to homelessness, which is like, that's just like, what is that?
1:15:19
What if you're the public housing provider, what messages that tell a, a private landlord?
1:15:24
It's genuinely insane.
1:15:27
But yeah, I intentionally, when I do my stories, I'll intentionally never do a, you know, a bad public housing, a **** rental of a public housing story because it's, it's, it's so important.
1:15:38
We need it.
1:15:39
But yeah, we can also do it better.
1:15:42
And yeah, we just need to build more.
1:15:45
I, I reckon like, you know, we, we always talk about mandatory inclusionary zoning and all that kind of stuff.
1:15:51
Mandatory inclusionary zoning, but with public housing, like make private developers build public housing for the government.
1:15:57
If you're going to make a massive profit on your investment, like this block of land and build like billion dollar units and, you know, sell them to rich folk, build some public housing for the government.
1:16:08
And yeah, give it back to us.
1:16:11
It's like it's, it's our money that you're profiting from.
1:16:13
So let us re socialise that a little bit, I reckon.
1:16:17
Yeah, let's make the developers pay for it.
1:16:19
Yeah, absolutely fantastic.
1:16:25
I'm conscious of the time partly we have a little bit longer to go.
1:16:30
I'm going to throw kind of opening out question into to each to all of you and to the whole panel and then kind of draw us to a closer that we've got a little bit of time to just talk to each other and and so on after the event before we get chucked out of the building.
1:16:47
And so I'm, and, and I wanted to say that before I go to that, that there are lots of excellent questions here.
1:16:55
And I'm now the most hated person in the world because, because I'm going to draw it to a close without having attended to all of the questions.
1:17:03
But I, I just wanted to, to flag some really important themes that I think are coming up before we go to this, this sort of last one that I'll figure out in a minute once I've stopped talking.
1:17:14
And they are questions around how we shift that, that there are lots of how questions, how we shift the system, how we communicate to people generally and to policymakers and decision makers, how we challenge dominant ways of framing things with better evidence and and so on.
1:17:37
What we can learn from places elsewhere, what we can learn from history, what we can learn from people who don't look like us and are from a much wider and, and more diverse set of histories and contexts that bring different approaches and, and so on.
1:17:57
There's questions about the kind of racial element of, of the housing question, the class element of the housing question, gender aspects of the housing questions, all of which we've sort of skated around but haven't quite nailed, nailed this evening.
1:18:13
But nonetheless, they're tremendously important.
1:18:15
And so I, I just wanted to shout out some of those to thank you for really important contributions to a conversation that that we we all need to continue over the next ever over the next forever of our lives.
1:18:32
But on that point and to start drawing us to a close, I want to ask each of you, what's the thing that you're now working on and looking to in the next whenever short while to focus your attention on, to try, try and make some kind of transformative change, whatever that might be, small, large, whatever.
1:18:57
What's the thing you're focusing on that that might help all of us see some insight into places where you see the possibility for change or the possibility for collective action or whatever it might be.
1:19:12
Wherever you want.
1:19:13
You've spoken 1st and my power, so over to you.
1:19:16
I mean, it's a huge question, but for me, I think it comes down to the values piece and changing and starting to have different conversations around how we value housing and what housing does.
1:19:28
And for me, that's thinking about housing in terms of care and having conversations about what it means to understand that housing is a fundamental care infrastructure, that it's a care infrastructure that's working in profoundly unequal ways at the moment.
1:19:44
That what we need to do is put the kind of dwelling values like the idea that the house is a home, that it's something that we live in, that that's the core value of housing.
1:19:53
And I think it's something that we need to do through collective action.
1:19:56
But I also think it's something that people can do everyday through the way that they think about housing.
1:20:02
Working with a PhD student Therese Hall at the moment.
1:20:05
Who's.
1:20:05
Working with older women who are insecurely housed.
1:20:08
And a lot of those women are involved in all sorts of collection, collective action.
1:20:12
But one thing that they also keep talking about is the importance of telling their story and talking about the importance of home as a place to live in and how hard it is to do in the house that they're in at the moment.
1:20:22
So, yeah, I think changing the conversation at an everyday level, I do think you can build some kind of political change from that if we all commit to it.
1:20:31
Perfect.
1:20:33
Thank you, Pam.
1:20:33
Yeah, sure.
1:20:35
Look, I, I don't know this would be helpful to anyone, but it, it seems really crucial to me.
1:20:39
And we've talked about it a lot tonight, you know, connecting these big themes, neoliberalism, the nature of the welfare state, questions of sovereignty, post colonial settler relations in this country.
1:20:49
It feels to me like like housing eventually gets to those big questions.
1:20:53
If you start asking questions about housing, if you start asking the how did we get here?
1:20:57
What could we do next?
1:20:58
You start asking those questions and eventually you do get to some pretty big deep problems.
1:21:02
So I'm, I'm feeling like I want to return to political theory where I started my intellectual life, if you like, and, and ask those big questions about sovereignty.
1:21:10
So Jagger, you mentioned it right at the outset.
1:21:12
You know, this question of sovereignty is at the heart of the problem of race and culture in this country.
1:21:17
You know, this question of, you know, how we make claims about land, how we make claims about human rights, you know, that that eventually boils down to a question about sovereignty and the immense problem that sovereignty brings in this country.
1:21:29
And, and so I'm returning to questions of political theory to try and link these things together a bit.
1:21:33
Now, I, my sense is that that's of interest to very few people in the universe, but it feels like kind of making sense of it does feel like worthwhile work that connecting all these big questions.
1:21:41
Because otherwise we do feel like, well, there's this housing bit and then there's neoliberalism and then there's the question of, you know, what we do next.
1:21:48
And I feel like, I mean, your point about, you know, kind of direct action & to get organised.
1:21:52
It feels like, how do you connect all these things up?
1:21:55
How do you give people a sense that it is important to keep going?
1:21:58
And I don't know that that's a problem that anyone individual can solve, but it feels like it's worth working on.
1:22:03
And I hope that I have 50 years to do it, mate.
1:22:04
So good on you.
1:22:06
Perfect.
1:22:07
Which reminds me at this very nice way of saying, I think, Cam, I'm constantly struck by this, that the housing question may not in fact be a question of housing.
1:22:17
It might in fact be a social question that we need to resolve.
1:22:22
Not it's not a housing question.
1:22:24
So well said on that, Geordie, what's where, what are you working on?
1:22:27
I mean, we kind of yeah, tell us more.
1:22:29
Couple, couple of things.
1:22:30
Also angles, angles on the housing question.
1:22:34
Just like this is just as a symptom of our of our cancer.
1:22:37
That is capitalism.
1:22:38
So yeah, let's talk about housing for a bit.
1:22:41
But then we're going to have another problem in a couple seconds if we just do it.
1:22:44
Put a band aid here.
1:22:45
Exactly.
1:22:47
But yeah, like I'm a big fan of civil disobedience.
1:22:51
Big, big old fan of that.
1:22:54
And yeah, like there's a lot of things that we can do.
1:22:59
We're Rahu and myself and a bunch of other people working on doing a bit, but it's quite clear that the the message of hope isn't working for us anymore.
1:23:13
So and we're angry.
1:23:16
So something that we want to make people know is how angry we are.
1:23:22
And also it's a, it's a better motivator than hope in some cases because if you've got nothing to lose, like what are you going to, What are you going to do?
1:23:31
But also, yeah, like we can we can do something about it collectively and we are doing that.
1:23:38
I won't get too much into it because I don't want anyone here to be arrested.
1:23:42
OK.
1:23:43
But the call to collective action is super important.
1:23:46
Join Rahu and find out.
1:23:47
Thank you, Rahu, for being here.
1:23:52
Emma, What what are you working on and what's your focus?
1:23:55
I'm I'm too old and too tired for civil disobedience these days.
1:23:59
I've done my time.
1:24:01
No, all power to your arm.
1:24:03
I of course, for my sins, work within the systems that we've got currently, which can be thoroughly depressing.
1:24:13
My, my focus really is on is on that bigger picture, like the, the housing crisis is a symptom of a much greater malaise, which is that we no longer have a society or an economy, if we ever had.
1:24:26
We no longer have have a body politic that is striving for a society that helps everyone or that serves everyone.
1:24:34
We have, like the frog in the boiling water, so suddenly woken up and gone.
1:24:38
Hang on, what?
1:24:40
How come everything's everything's for those top 20% of people?
1:24:44
What happened, right?
1:24:45
I know what happened.
1:24:47
I saw it happening.
1:24:48
And it's amusing to me that some people now think I'm conservative.
1:24:52
When my 20s, I was too radical for anyone to talk to.
1:24:56
But that's because I, I, I do see yes on the term, we need bigger, more radical shifts.
1:25:02
And we should never, we should never shy away from that.
1:25:04
But we have to change what we can change within the system now.
1:25:08
Because if every 5 or 10 or 15 years it takes to remake society, you've got another generation of kids that are ******.
1:25:15
And so my focus at the moment, some of the things that we're doing, we're looking at different, different financial models, so financing for different models of housing.
1:25:24
So at the moment, if you're in a cooperative and you want to build cooperative housing, you can't get a mortgage.
1:25:28
It doesn't matter if you've got five people with $100,000 each, they won't give you a mortgage because you're not related to one another or you're an older woman that's no longer in the workforce.
1:25:36
So looking at different models for how we can finance different kinds of housing, making that argument all the time around social and public housing being something that should be for everybody tackling tax reform in this country.
1:25:48
And I'm going to disappoint some people in that.
1:25:51
I don't think that the current government, no, the current government is not going to just change property tax investment concessions because they have to do a deal in the Senate with someone.
1:26:01
And nor should they actually, because the entire tax system needs reform.
1:26:05
And we need to to look at a whole heap of, of basically taxing people's wealth a lot more.
1:26:12
But we don't tax wealth in this country.
1:26:14
People are allowed to hoard wealth and sit on wealth.
1:26:16
And yet we tax the income from people that are on, you know, $35,000 a year and working 50 hours a week.
1:26:22
So tax reform is going to be a big one and governments will be shy of that.
1:26:28
And we live in a country where, I would say more so than any other country in the developed world, our economic debate is ******* hopeless.
1:26:36
Sorry.
1:26:36
But it is absolutely pathetic when I am seen as too radical for some of these conversations because all I'm saying is maybe there are other ways to control inflation than just whacking, you know, interest rates.
1:26:48
Maybe we should get back into fiscal policy.
1:26:51
So yeah, our focus is on changing what we can change now within the system that we've got, but also constantly telling that story about we it.
1:26:59
It hasn't always been like this.
1:27:01
It doesn't have to be like this.
1:27:02
This is not a natural way.
1:27:04
This is just a cultural hegemony that we've come to accept and to challenge that constantly.
1:27:10
I think that the idea of housing as a human rights really fundamental and really important, but our focus is going to be on very pragmatic steps that we can take to make rentals more secure, to increase the amount of social housing, to lift the standards of rental properties, to make it to bring house prices down.
1:27:29
That's, you know, you're not meant to say that, but to bring house prices down and wages up so that people can afford to buy.
1:27:35
And to continue to bash my head against the brick wall that is our current government and parliamentary system.
1:27:41
Amazing.
1:27:42
Thank you.
1:27:43
Kevin, bring us home.
1:27:44
What are you?
1:27:44
I can be I can.
1:27:45
What are you fighting?
1:27:46
No.
1:27:46
Well, I think it's obvious.
1:27:48
It's it's to, it's, it's to persuade that human rights provides a way of understanding what is happening, which is different, which is powerful, and which is connected with solutions that will matter to people.
1:28:09
Beautifully said.
1:28:11
Brought us home, I think very nicely.
1:28:13
I'm gonna throw to Jago to close us out formally and and then we can do all of the things that we do at the end of such things as this.
1:28:30
Well, thank you, Livi.
1:28:31
And to all of our panellists, Emma Power, Cameron Duff, Jordan van der Lam, Emma Dawson, and Kevin Bill for what was a really sparkly and scintillating conversation.
1:28:43
I was reflecting on the fact that unfortunately, Social Science Week only happens once every year.
1:28:48
So we're going to have to wait another year before we can extend this conversation because it was really fascinating and insightful.
1:28:56
And I and you did a great deal.
1:28:58
Even though I've had a role in organising it, I don't really have much more to say other than to just thank our presenters.
1:29:06
But also I'd just like to thank you, the audience.
1:29:10
You know, a civil society that is capable of deliberating on questions like a housing crisis and the right to housing depends not just on experts who come and sit at the front and talk about these issues, but also on the audience who comes out on a Tuesday night to come and hear what what the conversation has to say.
1:29:31
So thank you for taking your time to be part of this importance of deliberation.
1:29:36
I'd just like to thank once again, Zara Vakari cook from the operations team from for a very smooth events management and also to the venue management folks who provided the audio and the visual and everything.
1:29:50
And it's run very well from what I can tell.
1:29:53
So stick around for a further conversation if you can, but otherwise I declare the panel closed.
