Page 1593 - Week 05 - Thursday, 2 June 2022
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What we are talking about when we talk about waiving this debt is not an act of charity; it is an act of social justice. Buying and building public housing and ensuring housing security for people desperately waiting for safe accommodation is an absolute, bottom line, basic requirement of government. The Housing First approach on which the Greens’ housing policy is based tells us that providing safe and secure housing to people facing complex challenges is the best way of helping the most vulnerable.
The Prime Minister’s trajectory from public housing to the prime ministership is now well known. This is part of his story and has been a key narrative in the post-election commentary and analysis, and I am grateful for the platform that his election has given to representing the lives and opportunities afforded to those of us who are provided with secure public housing.
It is, however, very important for us to take stock of the fact that the Prime Minister’s childhood story would have been very different, should it have unfolded in the present moment and not in the sixties and seventies. As Kate Colvin, national spokesperson for the Everybody’s Home campaign, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald this week:
The PM is right to hope his story inspires others. But we should also recognise that story is less likely today. Right now, only 4 per cent of our national housing stock is social housing, compared with 6 per cent when Anthony Albanese was a child.
A case in point: to prepare for the new government, the National Council of Single Mothers and their Children conducted a survey of over 300 single mothers. Of these families, close to 80 per cent live with housing issues such as constant housing stress, sleeping rough or homelessness. Thanks to the safety net of public housing, this is not something that the Prime Minister’s single-parent family experienced.
At a high level, housing policy has significantly shifted over the last 40 to 50 years. Over this time we have seen the corrosive impacts of the neoliberalisation of public housing and of government-funded social services at large. While we hold ourselves out to be the most progressive jurisdiction in the country, we are not immune here to the so-called rationalisation of government services and assets and must fight against these trends to ensure that housing is considered a fundamental right and that the provision of housing is understood by every decision-maker to be the core work of good, progressive government.
It is time for us to work together with our new federal government to boost the supply of public housing here in Canberra through forgiving the historical housing debt and then guaranteeing the investment, dollar for dollar, of that money back into sorely needed public housing across our city.
As discussed yesterday in my response to Mr Hanson’s motion on education, I am highly optimistic that a change of federal government, a change for the better, will see a much more reasonable approach to the range of social, legal and economic issues that the ACT is facing over which the commonwealth government has significant influence. The historic debt that is owed to the commonwealth by the ACT is one such example.
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