MASSIVELY INCREASE PUBLIC HOUSING!
SOCIALISTIC CHINA IS DOING THAT
SO LET’S FIGHT FOR THE SAME HERE!
5 June 2012 – More and more of Australia’s poor are skipping meals because they can’t afford to pay for the food. In an annual survey by the Salvation Army of those who have sought its help, more than half the respondents admitted to skipping meals in order to pay for other necessities (ABC News Website, 16 May.) Other startling findings were that a third of those surveyed could not afford heating and a third could not afford medicine prescribed by their doctor.
Charities are reporting that an increasing number of people are seeking their help. Low-income people are being crippled by punishing rents and utility charges. And job slashing by business bosses are hitting working class people hard. The official spin about the supposedly low unemployment rate masks the reality that about 600,000 people are officially unemployed in this country. However, perhaps an even greater number of people are not recorded in official unemployment figures only because long-term lack of success in finding a job has discouraged them from looking for work or because they are a single parent unable to find affordable childcare. Meanwhile, one and a half million people are not able to get as many hours of work as they want to. They are not counted in the deceitful, official unemployment figures as those figures will not classify a person as unemployed if they obtain as little as one hour of work in a week. The drive of the business owners to maximize profits is forcing more and more workers into tenuous, low-wage casual jobs. That is why charities are reporting that an increasing proportion of those seeking help are not unemployed people but the working poor. These are typically people with young children who just can’t get enough hours in part-time jobs to get by or can’t make ends meet on the paltry minimum wage.
How could this be happening in a country that has such spectacular land and mineral resources? The fact is that the wealthy corporate elite who run this country’s economy do not care what happens to the rest of us. Over the last few months, every week seems to bring a new announcement of job losses by major company owners who, having leached billions in profits out of their workers’ toil over the years, do not hesitate to lay off these workers whenever that helps them to maximise profits. Just today, rail freight company QR National announced the axing of 500 jobs even after having gouged a $189 million profit in the last six months of 2011. For its part, the ANZ Bank announced in February that it was axing a 1,000 jobs after having ripped off a spectacular profit of nearly
$3 billion in just half a year.
The capitalist business owners that are slashing jobs are causing misery to working class people but they are obtaining a lavish lifestyle for themselves. They are obtaining incredible wealth for themselves not through their own labour but by grabbing the fruit of their employees labour. And even as working class people do it harder and harder, these exploiters are taking an ever-greater share of national income. The total wealth of the Australia’s five richest people alone is a staggering $54 billion (The Australian, 24 May.) That’s more than 30 times what the federal government spends each year on affordable housing!
Among the richest in this country are property developers. Indeed, of Australia’s 200 richest people, 49 grabbed most of their money from property (BRW Rich 200, 2011.) They have obtained this wealth not from the building of affordable homes for the masses but through selling expensive houses for the affluent section of the middle class and holiday mansions for the multiple-home owning upper class.
Alternatively, they have been chanelling construction resources into erecting shopping complexes dominated by pricey designer clothing and accessory stores. These strategies have maximized profits for the greedy property developers well. However, for low-income people it means that there is so very little housing built that they can actually afford to even rent.
That is why when working class people go to apply to lease accommodation where they can actually afford to pay the rent, there are often dozens and dozens of others seeking to rent the same place. With such a shortage of affordable housing, landlords are able to get away with driving up rents and bullying tenants. Other social problems are also being
exacerbated. Knowing there is little affordable accommodation available, women suffering in violent or abusive relationships with male breadwinners are presented with the agonising choice of either risking homelessness or remaining in the oppressive relationship.
Given this terrible shortage of affordable accommodation, you would expect that if governments served the masses they would strongly build up public rental housing. Yet Australian governments of all stripes have, instead, been eroding public housing. In the decade from 1997 to 2007, the Howard government slashed the number of public housing dwellings by 30,000 even as the population grew. For its part, the Gillard government slashed by a quarter the outlay for social housing in last month’s federal budget.
The ruling class’ undermining of affordable housing is not some exception to their overall stance. It is part of their all-sided attacks on the rights of the working class and poor.
Thus, the latest federal budget saw the government announce that low-income single parents, mostly single mothers, with children older than eight will be moved off receiving the Parenting Payment onto the much lower Newstart Allowance. Even with the much beat up little “benefits for battlers” announced in the budget, low income single parents will end up some $30 to $40 a week worse off.
That is why the struggle to reverse the attacks on public housing must be combined with a fight to smash the broad ranging attacks on the working class and the poor. To help agitate for such a fight back, Trotskyist Platform has initiated a campaign to demand a massive increase in public housing and to connect this demand with the overall class struggle of the working class against the capitalist exploiters. Given that many despair that the relentless erosion of public housing can ever really be reversed, we have, as a key part of the campaign, pointed to the massive public housing program underway in the Peoples Republic of China. This year alone, China will have 18 million units of public housing under construction. This shows what can be achieved when political power is in the hands – and in China’s case even when only tenuously in the hands – of the working class masses.
We reprint below some of the speeches from the two rallies that have been held thus far as part of the campaign:
“The Housing authorities treat us like dirt”
The following is a write up of points that were fed into the February 16 public housing rally in Sydney from a tenants’ rights activist and Trotskyist Platform supporter living in rural Western NSW. These points focused on the way Housing authorities were ill-treating public housing tenants. This enmeshed with a key fight of the campaign which is not only to win a huge increase in public housing but to demand proper treatment and drastically reduced rents for those who do manage to obtain public housing.
The comrade’s details about how the Department of Housing authorities treat public housing tenants in his town resonated with rally participants who know that similar things go on in Sydney and the rest of Australia too.
Firstly, I want to say that I am in full solidarity with this rally and the campaign for a massive increase in public housing. I completely support the idea of demanding a public housing program like the one that the Peoples Republic of China has instituted for the benefit of its working class people. However, here in this town in rural Western NSW, as elsewhere in Australia, governments are selling off public housing.
An important struggle here is also to win decent treatment for those who are already in public housing. Frankly, public housing tenants in this town are treated like dirt by the Housing authorities. A big problem is that the Department of Housing authorities regularly refuse or delay doing repairs. In one particularly horrific case, the plumbing in a public housing dwelling was so bad that when the person living in it flushed the toilet, faeces went on to the floor of her dwelling. And the tenant who has to put up with this is a woman who has health problems!
Then there is the case of a roof that was so run down that it started to cave in and allowed water to leak in. Often such problems are exacerbated because the authorities engage shonky maintenance contractors.
In the meantime, public housing authorities, instead of honoring their responsibility to renovate dwellings, are demanding that tenants paint their own units themselves. Yet when the Housing authorities want to harass a tenant about an issue they sometimes go and accost them on the street which is illegal even by laws that are themselves biased against tenants.
In summary, public housing tenants in this town in rural Western NSW feel like they are a door mat to be stepped on by the Housing bureaucrats,who look upon them as worthless people.
I wish all the comrades and everyone else who came to support this rally the best in our important struggle.
“The capitalist free market is just not going to
provide enough affordable rental accommodation.”
Here is a transcript of the speeches from the May 7 rally that was held in Parramatta Mall in Western Sydney under the slogans, “Stop Housing Being Built Only for the Rich! Provide Public Housing for the Working Class! China Is Doing That in A Huge Way – We Demand The Same Here!” We begin with the introduction to the demonstration by the rally chair (and also chairman of Trotskyist Platform), Sarah Fitzenmeyer.
The speeches have been lightly edited for publication.
Sarah Fitzenmeyer (rally chair): Sisters and brothers, thanks for coming to support today’s rally. This is an urgent action because today in this country there is a terrible lack of housing that is affordable for working class people. There is also a huge shortage of rental housing that is affordable for people on low incomes.
Why in such a resource rich country like Australia does such a problem exist? Well, around the corner there in Macquarie Street, at the intersection with Marsden Street, the biggest residential project in Parramatta to date is being built. Three hundred and seventy apartments will be built in a 25-storey development dubbed the Vertical Village. It sounds like it will be a great place to live. Except for one big problem! Three bedroom apartments there are going to be selling for over a million dollars. For over a million dollars each! You see this Vertical Village has been billed as a luxury complex for so-called high-end customers. In other words it won’t be affordable for working class people.
Now if the biggest residential development here in the heart of the working class Western suburbs will not provide accommodation that working class people can afford then just imagine what is happening in the rest of Sydney.
The fact is that right across Australia developers are building expensive homes for the affluent instead of providing rental accommodation that is affordable for working class people. Why? Because they all have the same mentality as the multi-millionaire boss of that Crown Group that is developing that complex in Macquarie Street. They are all driven purely by the quest for profits. And they know that they can make a lot more money building expensive homes for the wealthy even if a proportion of these remain vacant.
The capitalist free market is just not going to provide enough affordable rental accommodation. That is why the state must step in and build low rent, good quality public housing for working class people and people on low incomes. However, governments here are doing the exact opposite. Whether it’s a Liberal government or a Labor government, or as the case federally now, a Labor/Greens government, the governments are selling off public housing.
We desperately need to stop them. The ever-growing shortage of public housing means that many working class people are struggling to get a roof over their heads and homelessness is rising. Meanwhile, private landlords are able to jack rents up and up because they know that people have nowhere else to go. As a result the median rent for houses in Sydney is now a whopping $500 a week. That means if you are a family paying the average rent for a house in Sydney and relying solely on the minimum wage of one family member, you would only have $89 a week left over for all other expenses.
Yet a different reality is possible. Look at what is going on in the world’s most populous country, China. China has pulled itself up from the terrible poverty of its pre-1949 days when it was a neocolony. However, because its available natural resources have to be divided between 1.3 billion people, the GDP per person for China is still twelve times less than Australia’s. Yet unlike here, the Peoples Republic of China is making spectacular progress in providing low rent public housing for its masses. Last year alone, China started building well over ten million affordable housing units. In China’s biggest city, Chongqing, where the public housing campaign has been very strong, one in three people will be living in public housing by the end of this year. Yet, here in fabulously resource-rich Australia with such a relatively small population, only one in 25 people get access to public housing.
Sisters and brothers, governments in Australia are failing to provide public housing for working class people because the governments here all serve just the big end of town – the very wealthy bank bosses, factory owners, property developers and mining tycoons. So the only way we are going to get the public housing that we need is … if we fight for it! And that is exactly what we are here to do today. We are here to help build a struggle that will fight for a massive increase in low-rent public housing as part of the overall working class movement against exploitation.
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So I will now hand over to our first speaker, Yuri Gromov. Yuri is the editor of Trotskyist Platform, the group that has initiated today’s action. Yuri has worked very hard to help organize this rally.
“We need strong contingents of workers to join us in this battle for more public housing. What Gillard and Abbott and O’Farrell and the rest of them fear most of all is when workers, united together in a strong union, are prepared to strike. Workers together create all the wonders of this world but they can also threaten to shut down production and harm the profits of their capitalist bosses, the fat cats who all these roosters crowing in the farmyard of Australian politics really serve.”
Yuri Gromov (Trotskyist Platform editor): There are about 250,000 households on the waiting list for social housing in Australia. One family told us they’d been waiting seven years for public housing. Twelve years, others said, fifteen years for one woman. The queue for housing would be even longer if the eligibility criteria for it hadn’t been so cruelly restricted. In NSW, a single person can’t even get on the waiting list if their weekly income is more than $525 a week and that’s less than the minimum wage for a fulltime worker!
So the poor are forced to have to deal with the sharks of the private rental market. If you look at the people in the bottom 40% income bracket who are renting privately in Sydney, nearly three out of every five are paying more than 30% of their income on rents. Many are actually paying more than half of their income. Hundreds of thousands of people are just one income cheque away from being thrown out into the street. Just one redundancy announcement from a greedy boss and they’ll be joining the other 100,000 plus people who are homeless in this country.
What we need now is good quality, low rent public housing to be provided on a huge scale. What we see instead is governments in Australia selling off public housing. Governments of all stripes are neglecting the public services that working class people most rely on. Public hospitals are badly under-funded. Public schools aren’t allocated enough teachers. The ALP/Greens federal government has so shamefully, so shamelessly slashed welfare payments to single mothers and attacked the rights of disability support pensioners.
Only mass action can turn things around. We need strong contingents of workers to join us in this battle for more public housing. What Gillard and Abbott and O’Farrell and the rest of them fear most of all is when workers, united together in a strong union, are prepared to strike. Workers together create all the wonders of this world but they can also threaten to shut down production and harm the profits of their capitalist bosses, the fat cats who all these roosters crowing in the farmyard of Australian politics really serve.
Australia’s richest person, mining heiress, Gina Rinehart, has alone hoarded 17.1 billion dollars. If we left her say a cool couple of million and took the rest and used it for public housing, 190,000 dwellings could be built – enough to end homelessness in this country. And if we did the same to the wealth of the other 200 richest tycoons in Australia, nearly two million public housing dwellings could be built and that would really hit the rental crisis for six.
We must never forget this. Because governments and talkback radio hosts have created a myth that the affordable housing crisis and other social problems are caused by too much immigration. They push racist lies that resources are being drained into “special benefits” for Aboriginal people even as Aboriginal people suffer terrible racist discrimination and horrendous police violence. There’s a reason why the powers that be spread such utter racist rubbish. It’s to divert anger on to migrants and Aboriginal people so that we don’t realize that the real cause of the affordable housing crisis and the crazily long public hospital waiting times is that so much of this country’s wealth is hoarded by a few, ultra-rich, capitalist exploiters.
We must not let them divert people away from our struggle. We need to destroy these racist myths by positively mobilising to defend migrants, refugees and Aboriginal people from racist attacks. We need to take the economy out of the greedy hands of the Gina Rineharts and the Andrew Forrest’s and put it under the collective control of the masses led by the working class.
The potential of such a system can be partly seen in the Peoples Republic of China. Although the workers state in China is deformed and has allowed too much capitalism in, the key sectors of China’s economy still remain under socialistic state ownership. This has enabled China to sail through the global economic crisis and allowed it to embark on a spectacular public housing program. In one province alone, called Heilongjiang in North East China, they started building over 900,000 new public housing dwellings last year. That province has a population just 1.7 times that of Australia. So, in proportionate terms, what they’ve done in this one Chinese province is the equivalent of providing 530,000 new public housing dwellings here. That’s approaching doubling Australia’s entire public housing stock and that province in socialistic China has achieved it in just one year!
Today we’re using China’s gigantic public housing drive to strengthen and inspire our own struggle for more public housing in Australia. The ruling class of capitalist countries like the U.S. and Australia hate this. They fear that the existence of a workers state in China, however tenuous, encourages the masses in their own countries to demand more. That’s why they’ve mobilized their World Bank, assisted by more right-wing factions of the Chinese bureaucracy itself, to try and foist upon China a plan to privatize her booming, socialistic state-owned enterprises. We must stand by those within China seeking to oppose all these moves to drown the workers state in capitalist restoration. Preserving a socialistic system in China can only continue to inspire our own struggles for justice here at home.
But there are, of course, obstacles to implementing a China-style public housing program here at home. China’s program is partly financed by its banks. And even though such social housing is not particularly profitable, their banks still lend for it because all of China’s major banks are state-owned. And the state’s telling them they must lend for this program. But Australia’s banks are capitalist-owned and absolutely obsessed with ensuring fat profits for their shareholders. They won’t be told to lend for public housing, not by the likes of Gillard or Swan, that’s for sure.
Secondly, the greedy developers who’d be contracted to build public housing in Australia would inevitably charge rip-off prices. Remember all the corruption around the school buildings program? The developers and their cronies in government would get rich out of it but too few homes would get built. But in China the major developers are, once again, state-owned. They’re building public housing at low prices, even when they barely break even on it, because their managers’ careers depend not just on profits but on meeting social goals too like affordable housing. So if we’re going to win the type of public housing we need here at home in Australia we’ve also got to fight to rip the banks and construction firms out of the hands of the rich, exploiting class and ultimately bring the whole economy into the hands of a workers state.
When we succeed in achieving this workers’ revolution then we’ll no longer have public housing authorities like the ones today who stall on urgent plumbing repairs and afterwards threaten to kick you out if you even get the tiniest bit behind on water charge payments. Working class people will be the authorities. And in power workers will build a socialist society that guarantees jobs, free housing and dignity for all.
“In the Peoples Republic of China … there are restrictions discouraging wealthy families from buying even a second home. As a result in China, housing speculation has been almost totally killed off.”
Sarah Fitzenmeyer (rally chair): When developers are building expensive homes for the affluent, they are not rich people’s first homes. The super rich are buying multiple houses. Often this is for making money on rising house prices. At other times it is for pure leisure so that they have holiday homes to use whenever they feel like it. The late Melbourne- based tycoon Dick Pratt famously had a penthouse pad in a plush Circular Quay development just so that he could cheat on his wife in secret and then a separate 2.5 million dollar mansion in Centennial Park to secretly hide away with his mistress.
The result of all this is that there are a large number of houses in this country that may be occupied for only a few days in a year. Indeed, at any one time more than 122,000 dwellings in Sydney are unoccupied. All this is made worse by government tax policies that encourage the well-off to buy multiples homes to avoid tax. This is very different to what the state in the Peoples Republic of China is doing. There in the big cities, any family who owns two homes anywhere within China is simply banned from buying a third home. What is more, there are restrictions discouraging wealthy families from buying even a second home. For example, they are not able to buy a second home in key cities like Beijing unless they live there. Furthermore, even those who do buy a second home are only allowed to get a loan for 40% of the price. As a result in China, housing speculation has been almost totally killed off.
Last year, more than nine out of ten homes sold in the private market in China were bought by first-home buyers. The Peoples Republic of China’s restrictions on housing speculation and its massive public housing program meant that last year it actually built more public housing dwellings than private ones.
Here, however, the authorities are doing the very opposite. The problem is that in Australia, unlike in the Peoples Republic of China, the state authorities are only interested in serving the wealthy capitalist exploiters. That is why if we are going to get affordable housing for working class people here, we are going to have fight for it.
Our next speaker is someone who has worked harder than anyone to spread the message of this rally. He is Samuel Kim, a Trotskyist Platform comrade activist.
“The erosion of public housing is happening whether it’s the right-wing Liberals in office or as we have now federally, a defacto Labor/Green coalition. Even when the ALP or Greens promise measures benefiting the masses, they never deliver. For these supposedly left-wing politicians, they are all still committed to running a system dominated by the bankers, factory bosses and mining magnates who are forever trying to squeeze every last penny out of the masses that they exploit. The ALP or Greens politicians may here and there criticize a tycoon or billionaire, maybe even take a bit of tax off them like scraps off a table for the people but they never question, never threaten a tycoon’s or billionaire’s, the Elite’s, bourgeois scum’s mode of exploitation.”
Samuel Kim (Trotskyist Platform activist): In Claymore, near Campbelltown, Sydney’s biggest public housing area, governments are slashing the public housing. The number of public housing units will be cut from 1,151 to just 447. And they are not just slashing public housing in Claymore but are also selling off public housing in Glebe, Millers Point and in many other suburbs by stealth. The homeless, the poor and working class people are, no wonder, waiting 5 to 20 years for public housing.
The shortage of affordable rental accommodation allows private landlords to have a strategic edge over the housing market scramble of the working class, and to get away with exorbitant rents enforced on working people. In Sydney a one-bedroom apartment has a median rent of $420 a week. Imagine if a young struggling couple happens to rely on unemployment benefits: even with rent assistance they would together have around $50 a week left over after rent, hardly enough for food, bills and proper integration into society.
Since there are so many people trying to obtain the relatively few affordable rental places available, private landlords think they can get away with not only increasing rents but with discriminating against people when choosing tenants. That is why the disabled, the old, the poor, single mothers, non-white ethnic people, Aboriginal people, the unemployed all have the hardest time finding a place to rent.
The erosion of public housing is happening whether it’s the right-wing Liberals in office or as we have now federally, a defacto Labor/Green coalition. Even when the ALP or Greens promise measures benefiting the masses, they never deliver. For these supposedly left-wing politicians, they are all still committed to running a system dominated by the bankers, factory bosses and mining magnates who are forever trying to squeeze every last penny out of the masses that they exploit. The ALP or Greens politicians may here and there criticize a tycoon or billionaire, maybe even take a bit of tax off them like scraps off a table for the people but they never question, never threaten a tycoon’s or billionaire’s, the Elite’s, bourgeois scum’s mode of exploitation.
That’s why we are not going to get more public housing by making submissions to governments. It’s not that these governments don’t know the facts. They do! The problem is that under Australia’s current political structure, whoever is elected to office administers a state that ultimately only serves the interests of the ruling capitalist class.
What we need to do is organize the struggle of the working class through the unions which are the organized organs of the working class to fight against capitalist exploitation of all working people. We need to fight for massively increased public housing and properly funded public schools and hospitals as part of the working class union movement. However, winning an increase in public housing is only part of the struggle. We also need to ensure that people once in public housing are treated properly. The draconian water charges that they face must be abolished. The rents that people pay in public housing in Australia are far too high for low-income people. People have to pay 25% of income they receive as rent. Yet in the capital city of socialistic China, Beijing, low income people pay at most 10% of their income in rent and as little as half a percent!
Here in Australia, the Housing authorities not only delay repairs but treat tenants with much disrespect. It’s because the housing authorities are thugs of the State we live in, the thuggish nature of the capitalist State’s enforcers treats the people and poor with such hatred. Look at the way the police shot Aboriginal children in Kings Cross and then brutally bashed the youth afterwards as the teenagers bled to the verge of death from the gunshots. Now, would a rich, white, middle aged corporate executive be treated by the police thugs in the same way?
That is why Trotskyist Platform insists that we eventually will need to sweep away this state that serves only the capitalist exploiters. After the capitalist state is swept away we should construct a state that serves working class people, the working class who are the glorious engine of society. Such a state we propose would rip the factories, mines, banks, commercial buildings and productive land out of the hands of the exploiters and bring them into the collective hands of the masses. Then finally the resources needed to provide free quality public housing, public health care and public schools will be available.
We desperately need such a socialist solution because capitalism and its ongoing economic crisis and past crises is bringing and has brought so much misery worldwide. Look at the failure of capitalism in Spain where half of Spain’s youth are unemployed. Greece, Japan, the USA all face similar crises with no real signs of a proper solution. When the same capitalist economic crisis hits here, the capitalists and reactionary politicians will attack the weakest and the poor working classes, slashing public housing and welfare.
That’s why class struggle must be unleashed to defend our rights. In Portugal, Greece, Italy, India, worldwide, workers are waging major battles. When such struggles break out in Australia (and it’s inevitable)we must ensure that these struggles do not get diverted into the traps of the parliamentary capitalist games but instead rely only on the united power of working class people. The powerful working class, when united and fully conscious, will organize to take political power. Such struggle beckons. A society that will end homelessness, inequality, racism, wars and poverty. Towards socialism, towards communism. Down with the capitalists. Victory to the working class. Victory to the Revolution.
“In the end we will only stop this situation for good when we get a state structure that actually serves working class people. In China, such a state, despite it’s inconsistencies and fragility, is spectacularly building affordable public housing for its masses. Here what we have instead are authorities who only serve the big end of town – who only serve the Gina Rineharts, the Clive Palmers, the Andrew Forrests and the rest of the capitalist factory bosses, bank executives and greedy developers. We cannot tolerate this situation anymore – we need to have a state that serves us.”
Sarah Fitzenmeyer (rally chair): Greedy landlords know that there are shortages of affordable accommodation, they know that they can get away with not only driving up rents but with bullying tenants. However it is not only private tenants who are being treated badly. The public housing authorities’ “solution” to deal with the huge waiting lists is to constantly find excuses to boot people out of their homes. The housing departments treat public tenants with contempt, with the same contempt that Alan Jones and other shock jocks show to those doing it hard. Working class people have all got to unite to stop this. In the end we will only stop this situation for good when we get a state structure that actually serves working class people. In China, such a state, despite its inconsistencies and fragility, is spectacularly building affordable public housing for its masses. Here what we have instead are authorities who only serve the big end of town – who only serve the Gina Rineharts, the Clive Palmers, the Andrew Forests and the rest of the capitalist factory bosses, bank executives and greedy developers. We cannot tolerate this situation anymore – we need to have a state that serves us.
Yet we know that the exploiting elite are not just going to hand over their power to the masses. We are going to have fight for it. Our advantage is that it is the working class that makes the wheels of industry, mining, construction and transport turn. United together, the working class can defeat the exploiters through industrial action and then more. We need to organize to unleash that power right now to demand a massive increase in public housing as well as better resourced public schools and public hospitals and free childcare.
We must ensure that today’s action becomes just the start of an urgent struggle for lower public housing rents and a massive increase in public housing.