Public Forum: War Or Public Housing

Okay, I might keep this brief because I feel like it might be more productive when people ask questions.

So I'll just skip through it pretty quickly.

So my work experience has been with public housing renters, primarily at West Heidelberg, Tenants Union, and now in a Melbourne community legal.

And, you know, that's been, you know, quite a long time.

And I think in that period, it's been really evident that there's this shift happening that is spoken about openly that you know that Homes Victoria and the government never say we're stepping back from the provision of public housing but that's clearly what's been happening as far as I've observed.

So that's the landscape.

I'll talk in a second about the tower demolition program specifically, but I think we have to say that all of it is an approach that's fundamentally characterized by dishonesty.

The ground lease model whereby the land isn't actually sold, I think really is as good as privatisation, because I think that in 40 years' time when that land is no longer being used as really effective public housing supporting communities to grow, because we know that eviction rates are much higher in community housing, for example, I don't think that there will be anyone paying any notice to that land being sold in 40 years' time because we won't even know of it as something that belongs to us by that point.

So one of the statistics, I think I didn't want to bore you with that, but with too many of them, but this one is, I think, really telling.

Since 2006, the number of public housing dwellings has fallen by about 12%.

This is despite huge population increases and so forth.

So it went from 341,000 to 298,000 in 2024, and that will continue to decline.

with the tower redevelopment program.

In the same period, community housing dwellings increased fourfold from 30,100 to 119,000.

So there's a huge replacement going on.

And yet this hasn't been, And there's no public mandate for this.

This is not argued to us as something that's a good thing that's happening.

It's just really happened in an underhanded way.

And so I think looking specifically at the tower relocation program, that dishonesty has been reflected in how Homes Victoria has conducted itself with the people who live in those towers.

They have envisaged a situation whereby they would build this community housing as a replacement and just shift everyone in there and anyone who didn't like it or who has a big family would be moved to the far outer suburbs.

And so part of the way that they've affected this is to just tell people that there's no difference between community housing and public housing.

And very many people have been told this explicitly.

Very many people have not understood the differences, or they've understood that there's some differences, but they think, oh, well, the rent's not changing, so it's fine.

The amount of times we've asked in writing for some legal guarantee that people's rent won't increase and being met with absolute silence, you would not believe.

So there's nothing holding these community housing providers, which are non-government private organisations, from actually adhering to these promises that the government is making to justify the tower relocation program.