Above: China, May 2013: Prospective tenants visit a new public rental housing complex in Shanghai. In the first nine and a half months of 2015, socialistic China had started construction of almost 7 million public housing units. The Chinese government has planned for 18 million public housing dwellings to be built or rebuilt between 2015 and 2017.

STOP THE SELL-OFF OF PUBLIC HOUSING!
MASSIVELY INCREASE PUBLIC HOUSING JUST LIKE SOCIALISTIC CHINA IS DOING!

On 16 July 2015, a speakout rally was held in the multi-racial working class Sydney suburb of Auburn to oppose the cuts by governments of all stripes to public services. The protest was held under the slogans, Smash the Cuts to Services Working Class People Need the Most! Stop the Sell-Off Public Housing. Massively Increase Public Housing – Just Like China is Doing. No to Abbott’s Squeezing of Public Hospitals and Schools. Rollback the Former ALP Government’s Cut to the Sole Parent Payment.

The demonstration was held because the capitalist big-end of town and the governments that serve them are waging all-sided attacks on the services that working class people need the most. These attacks, alongside bosses’ cuts to workers’ conditions, are making life harder and harder for working class people. Whether we are employed workers, unemployed workers, single mothers, pensioners or students, we are all feeling the pinch.

One of the crucial public services that are under attack is public housing. We need public housing because the greedy private sector developers who determine what is built in the private sector know that they can make a lot more money building expensive homes for the wealthy rather than affordable homes for the masses.

So we need low-rent public housing to alleviate this situation. But what are governments doing? The very opposite! From Millers Point and the Rocks in the inner city to Auburn, Bonyrigg and Claymore in western and south-western Sydney to Bellambi and Wollongong in the Illawara, the authorities are selling off or demolishing public housing. They are also refusing repairs in order to wear down public tenants and force them into leaving “voluntarily.” These are cruel attacks on working class tenants. In Millers Points, many of the public tenants facing eviction are retired wharfies, seamen and ship painters or families of such workers. In the Illawara, among those threatened with eviction are people who have toiled in the mines, steel works and related industries of the area and have suffered many a work injury during their decades of hard labour. Now the state authorities are “rewarding” them by trying to sell off the homes they have lived in for decades.

The speakers at the July 16 rally included representatives of tenants groups opposing the sell-off of public housing in each of the Illawara/Wollongong, Millers Point and Campbelltown areas. They all spoke powerfully of the cruelty of the campaigns to throw them out of their homes. Also addressing the protest was an Auburn working-class resident ground down by the high private rents she is paying and a representative of Trotskyist Platform. The rally was chaired by Trotskyist Platform chairwoman Sarah Fitzenmeyer. Below are excerpts of some of her remarks as well as the speech at the rally by Trotskyist Platform editor, Yuri Gromov (which have been lightly edited for publication).

Sarah Fitzenmeyer (rally chair/Trotskyist Platform chairwoman):

From 2006 to 2013, governments cut the number of public housing dwellings in Australia by 13,000. This is not disputed. These figures come from a Senate inquiry into housing affordability. In other words the very people administering the slashing of public housing are admitting their crime against working class people. And governments of all stripes have been overseeing this – both Liberal and Labor state governments in collaboration with the Howard Liberal government, the Rudd ALP government, the Gillard ALP/Greens government and now another Liberal-National regime.

With so little public housing being made available no wonder, we have the ridiculous situation that some relatively low rent private apartments can have fifty or sixty people applying to rent them. No wonder the private landlords feel confident to raise rents. No wonder many of them feel confident to bully their tenants.

As usual the ruling class is doing to Aboriginal people what they are doing to all working class people in an especially severe way. The WA government is trying to forcibly close hundreds of Aboriginal communities and drive Aboriginal people out of their homes and communities. Everywhere federal and state governments are refusing to fund Aboriginal community affordable housing projects including in Redfern’s historic Block. Meanwhile the puppets of the government and developers that run the Aboriginal Housing Corporation demolished the affordable housing that did exist on The Block and want to put up there commercial projects. That is why Aboriginal people have established a tent embassy in Redfern to stop this atrocity and win back affordable housing for Aboriginal people.

I want to address a claim by governments that things like public housing are outdated, that they are not relevant in today’s world, that all services in the world are either being privatised or are moving towards user pays. There is a huge problem with that argument. And that is the fact that in the world’s most populous country – and Australia’s main source of export dollars – they are doing the very opposite. The Peoples Republic of China is set to exceed its 2011 to 2015 target of providing 36 million additional households with access to public housing! Since 2008, China spectacularly built 45 million new public housing apartments. Additionally, the PRC government having driven down the price of housing through restrictions on the number of homes people can own, have started buying up at low price dwellings from private sector developers and turning them into public housing. That is the very exact opposite of what has been happening here!

As a result, in the Peoples Republic of China, over one in five people are now living in affordable, public housing. Whereas in Australia, just one in 25 people have that access!

And what the ruling class is doing to affordable housing in Australia is part of what they are doing to all the services that working class people need the most. Here is a very quick summary of just some of what they have been doing:

• Over the last two budgets, the Liberal/National Coalition has slashed $50 billion from planned spending for public hospitals and another $30 billion from the schools budget.
• Following last year’s budget the Coalition government pushed through a bill that will see the slashing of legal aid services for low income people. The ALP and Greens voted for the bill.
• The NSW conservative government and federal governments have worked together to undermine TAFE. In NSW, 1200 TAFE jobs are being slashed, students have been hit with much greater fees and many courses have been cancelled or reduced in scope. In a practice begun by the Gillard government, money allocated for TAFE started being siphoned off to low-quality, for-profit private vocational schools. In other words vocational training – like almost everything else! – is being privatised.
• At the start of 2013, the Gillard ALP/Greens government axed the sole parenting payment driving tens of thousands of low-income single mothers into abject poverty. The measure threw over 84,000 low-income single parents off the Parenting Payment and on to the much lower Newstart Allowance. If this isn’t bad enough, those single parents who have part-time jobs were hit with even more savage cuts to their income as the Newstart Allowance is more ruthless than the Parenting Payment in cutting payments to those who do manage to find any part-time work.

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This axing of the sole parent payment was perhaps the single most vicious attack on working class people of all. Single parents with children over eight years old who were new applicants for income support were actually first thrown onto the lower unemployment payment back in 2006 by the Howard Liberal government. However, those already receiving payments were allowed to continue to receive the higher Parenting Payment until their child turned 16. When the ALP came into office, it not only maintained the policy of dumping new applicants onto Newstart but in the 2011 budget additionally threw those still receiving the Parenting Payment with children over 12 onto Newstart as well. Then in 2013, it dumped onto Newstart those with children between 8 and 12 who, previously under their old rules, had still been receiving the Parenting Payment.

Around 90% of families affected by the changes are headed by single mothers. Even before the latest burden was heaped on them, many such families were living under conditions of crushing poverty. They often had to skip meals and default on utility payments and many didn’t even dream of going for dental check-ups. Many a low-income single mother had been faced with the choice of either foregoing buying their kids basic clothing or not paying the fee needed to allow their children to participate in a school excursion. Now, on top of all this, the cuts slashed their income by between $60 and $110 a week.

One of the effects of such measures is that it puts women with children suffering abuse from husbands or defactos in a terrible plight. If they leave – as they often need to – and do not have an adequate source of income, they and their children will face starvation poverty. So these cuts to the parenting payment has led to more domestic violence against women.

But then the NSW state government has slashed support for women suffering violence. Last year they closed 80 independent women’s refuges. They transferred some of the refuges to corporate – mostly Christian – NGOs. But some of these are now closed on weekends or in evenings, house women with men and do not have refuge workers experienced in providing support to women escaping domestic violence.

So why are governments doing all this? For the same reason that they are attacking our trade unions. For the reason that while the governments may talk differently to each other they all ultimately serve the corporate elite who own all the industry, finance and mining. The Gina Rineharts, James Packers, Andrew Forrests, Frank Lowys, Kerry Stokes and the rest who really run this country. They are the ones pushing governments to slash social services so that they can pay even lower tax rates and so that they can make workers more fearful about their plight and thus less willing to challenge them at work.

This capitalist ruling class has been cruelly slashing the services that working class people need the most for over the last 30 years and this is happening now at an increasing rate. The result has been more and more unbearable poverty, unemployment and homelessness. Moreover, for every homeless person there are dozens of others who are skipping meals just to be able to get by.

We are not going to stop all this by relying on appealing to and lobbying mainstream politicians. Many people have made some great submissions outlining all the facts on issues like the effects of public housing cuts. But these pro-capitalist politicians actually know all the facts anyway so that is not the problem. The problem is that these politicians are committed to serve the current social order where a class of very rich business owners exploit workers and everything is run for this big end of town. Now, no one here needs to be convinced that the Coalition are right-wing dirtbags savagely hostile to the rights of working class people. However, the ALP and Greens, while they may sound nicer, also accept the current social order and that is why they have also been up to their ears too in all these attacks on public services.

So the only way we are going to be able to start to smash these attacks is through mass action on the streets linked to union industrial action in the workplaces to force and scare the enemy into granting some concessions.

To be able to wage this struggle we must positively resist attempts by the enemy to divert people’s anger onto refugees, overseas workers or people living abroad as a way of getting them – the local exploiting class – off the hook.

To be a powerful force, we have to fight our struggles not as a series of single issues but as one fight. That is what this rally is about. That is why this action has been called on the basis of several different demands that affect the interests of working class people. We need a united movement to demand free quality public health care for all, truly free public school, TAFE and university education; jobs for all; an end to the sell-off of public housing and, in fact, a massive increase in public housing.

We should be encouraged by the spectacular advances in public housing that are being made each day in the Peoples Republic of China. We should remember that China is still per person much poorer than Australia – it is catching up from its pre-1949 days when it was terribly ground down as a neocolony.

So if China can make such advances in public housing there is no technical reason why it cannot be made here. But there is a big political reason – the social system here and the state power here are committed only to serve the wealthy business bosses.

So we need to stand against that system and fight for a system based on working class rule and public ownership of the industry, mines, banks and productive land. The capitalist exploiting class and the governments that serve them are waging class war on us – it is time to unleash working class power to wage class war on them.

Yuri Gromov, Editor, Trotskyist Platform:

When they want to attack countries abroad, governments here like to talk about “human rights.” Of course, one of the most basic rights of all is the right to shelter. And that right is under threat for more and more people in this country. The capitalist free market system ensures that while there’s a glut of high-end housing, there is a terrible shortage of affordable housing. A snapshot survey by Anglicare found that of the properties listed as available for rent in metropolitan areas, less than 1% was affordable to a single person on the minimum wage!

Yet the response by governments to all this is to make the situation even worse by selling off public housing. Even the NSW government’s own website shows that the expected waiting time for public housing in Fairfield, Parramatta and Bankstown is always more than ten years. They don’t actually tell you how much over ten years the waiting time is – it could really be over 20 years!

Governments of all stripes have been complicit in selling off public housing. People rightly hate the openly anti-working class bullies in the Coalition government but it was NSW Labor Opposition leader, Luke Foley, who last month shockingly called for all public housing to be transferred to private control.

Although the ALP and Greens would like to satisfy their supporters by making some improvements, ultimately they accept the current capitalist order. And that’s an order where economic power lies with a small class of ultra-rich big business owners. The mainstream political parties all support a state machine that has been constructed to defend the interests of the exploiting class. And it is not a matter of making the ALP and Greens better either. Indeed, as the shocking acceptance of a brutal anti-working class austerity package by the far-left Syriza government in Greece proved, any party, no matter how left-wing, running the  current political system will always, by definition, betray working class people.

Alongside all the attacks on working class people, we are seeing vicious campaigns to vilify those that are the targets of these campaigns. The Coalition regime has put unemployed people under the Gestapo-like control of greedy private contractors in the latest so-called employment scheme called Job Active. These contractors send people out on pointless interviews and if they miss these pointless interviews they get fined or worse lose their benefit payments for some time. In the worst case scenario, this could lead to falling behind in rent and eviction. The tent cities that have started to recently pop up in the very heart of Sydney in places like Belmore Park beside Central Station are a tragic testament to the cruel failure of these heartless government policies.

The notion behind schemes like Job Active is that the unemployed are lazy and need to be brought to heel. The reality for those of us who don’t live in some kind of post-Calvinist dystopia is that there are not enough jobs available because greedy company owners keep on slashing jobs to boost profits. For example, a year and a half ago the Seven Media Group owned by billionaire tycoon Kerry Stokes retrenched 630 workers at its Westrac subsidiary even after having made a nearly $500 million profit that year.

Not coincidentally, Kerry Stokes’ Channel 7 has been at the forefront of vilifying public housing tenants. It has also been part of a mainstream media that has attacked refugees, insulted Aboriginal people and demonised Muslims. They’ve created hysteria about foreign investment and try to blame Chinese buyers for the housing affordability crisis. Yet Chinese investors spend only 2% of all the money spent on purchasing residential property in Australia.

We can see why Stokes’ media outlet would want to do all this. He doesn’t want working class people to see him as the real enemy who has slashed hundreds of workers jobs. He wants to divert our attention toward other targets – both targets abroad and oppressed communities at home. As part of the working class fightback that we so badly need, the workers movement must positively oppose all the schemes to divide its ranks and divert its fire. The workers movement must take up the fight to oppose the forced closure of Aboriginal communities, to defend the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy, free the refugees and thoroughly crush the growing far-right racist groups and their absurdly named “Reclaim Australia” movement.

One of the aims of the ruling class’ campaign to vilify public housing tenants is to isolate them from other sections of the working class. Yet the attacks on public housing, like the attacks on public hospitals and single mothers are actually an attack on all working class people. The sell-off of public housing not only affects people in public housing and those on the waiting list. It drives up rents in the private rental markets. That is why here in Auburn, nearly 30% of residents are in housing stress – that means they are paying more than three out of every ten dollars earned in rent or mortgage while being in the bottom 40% income bracket.

Like the Job Active scheme and the slashing of the single parenting payment, the attacks on public housing and public hospitals are aimed in part at making life so miserable for the unemployed that people will accept jobs with terrible working conditions and below award pay.  They also aim to make those who do have jobs so intimidated by the prospect of unemployment that they will not get involved in union organising and struggles for workers’ rights. That is why the attacks on public services are very much part of the broader attacks on workers’ rights: from the union-busting Royal Commission to the plans to introduce yet more anti-strike laws to the plans to cut penalty rates for shift and weekend work.

That’s why we need a united fight to smash union busting and to smash the attacks on public services. We need mass action on the streets together with hard fought strikes backed by solid picket lines.

But to fight for this perspective we need a big change in the agenda that is guiding our unions. Instead of standing up to the bosses and their governments, the pro-ALP union officials are busy diverting workers into blaming our overseas worker sisters and brothers or the overseas bosses that they work for. That just divides us from our true worker allies and gets the bosses at home off the hook. Part of the reason the Laborite officials are doing this harmful, divisive stuff is because they are reluctant to call strikes and so are scrambling for other means to save jobs. They put forward the anti-strike laws as their excuse. But we need to turn our unions into ones that fight and are prepared to make these anti-strike laws a dead letter by mobilising industrial action so powerful that the government won’t dare use them. We need a union movement that will struggle to unite local workers with our guest and overseas sisters and brothers instead of dividing us. A leadership that instead of tailoring our demands to what the bosses can accept will demand what we actually need: fully paid jobs for all, totally free medical and dental healthcare for all, free access to TAFE and unis, free 24 hour childcare and a massive increase in public housing.

Now the ruling class will respond to this by saying that this will cause economic collapse. To this – just as our working class sisters and brothers in Greece must also do – we will respond:  if your system cannot provide for the masses needs without collapsing, then we’ll need to take the economy out of your hands. We’ll need to put it into the very able collective hands of the working class.  Then we can for a start rip the $194 billion in wealth hoarded by Gina Rinehart, James Packer, the despicable Andrew Forrest, Frank Lowy, Kerry Stokes and the rest of Australia’s 200 richest people. That would provide us with funds that are 150 times as much as what the federal government currently gives to the states to spend on affordable housing!  Then we can start to build housing for the masses rather than mansions for just a few.

The spectacular advances for public housing in socialistic China point to the potential of a society based on public ownership. One of the reasons China is able to make these advances is that its banks are under public ownership and so are its main construction companies building the public housing. Here in capitalist Australia a lot of the budget for public housing ends up in the pockets of greedy private contractors like that super wealthy firm Spotless which has the contract for repairs.10

We have to remember that Red China is making these achievements even while burdened, on the one hand, with a population density 50 times higher than Australia’s and, on the other, with the fact that the workers state there is bureaucratically deformed and undermined by a degree of capitalist intrusion. So much more will be possible in a workers state under the rule of democratic workers councils. That is what we need to fight for here and around the world.

Today in crisis-ridden Greece, there is an immediate opportunity to direct events towards the revolutionary construction of a workers state.  What is urgently needed right now there is the building of factory committees (that means committees democratically elected by workers on the shop floor) that can begin to take over the running of factories and other workplaces – in the very first instance those being slated for imminent closure by the bosses. Gradually drawing in wider and wider layers of the downtrodden masses – including the large number of unemployed workers as well as working class youth and pensioners and refugees – these committees can lay the basis for the formation of real workers’ soviets – elected working class people’s councils – that can begin to vie for power with Greece’s capitalist state institutions.

All around the capitalist world we need to advance the class struggle to the stage where the building of such soviets will be posed. A key part of advancing the class struggle in this country is the fight to unshackle the power of our unions by breaking them from the control of the reformist and nationalist ALP. When that happens and when an inevitable crisis of capitalism forces the masses to consider radical solutions, a revolutionary workers party can spur the development of militant organisations of workers. Workers’ soviets, that is, that can wrench the power out of the miserly, money-grubbing, bean counting hands of a crumbling, unfair capitalist system and finally deliver public housing – truly public housing – and that means with proper repairs and real respect for tenants – for all who need it.