Hello Everybody,
Welcome back to our blog !! It's been a while, but we have a lot more posts now in the pipeline to keep you informed of the precarious situation regarding Public Housing.
There was a glitch in the system for a while where comments to this blog were not getting through, but this has now been rectified. To leave a comment, click on the Comments button at the end of the post and you will find a drop-down menu.
Below is our Submission to the Parliamentary Inquiry into Homelessness. We decided to keep it short and snappy. We are following it up with an attachment, which will address why we oppose the combined Waiting List, which was introduced as an administrative convenience but in reality is a form of social engineering.. We go into this subject in further detail in our attachment.
Most citizens are deeply concerned about homelessness.
You have until the 16 March to put in a submission.
https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/lsic-lc/inquiries/inquiry/976
We would like to thank Professor Guy Johnson and Wendy Lovell MP for their research and insights.
SUBMISSION INTO PARLIAMENTARY INQUIRY INTO HOMELESSNESS
We submit that the best solution to homelessness is Public Housing.
Arguments preferring Community/Social Housing at the expense of Public Housing are essentially ideological, unsupported by evidence or reason. Public Housing should be accepted as a necessary and permanent part of the housing mix. The money needed for Public Housing should not be siphoned into the expansion of Community/Social Housing.
Guy Johnson, Professor of Urban Housing and Homelessness RMIT and Director of Unison Housing Research Lab, in his evidence to this Committee, concedes when examining the factors preventing homelessness that Public Housing excelled : "what stood out was Public Housing. The magnitude of its effect was many times greater than anything else." ( p3 transcript )
This is too important a point to be glibly passed over. We should pause to appreciate its full weight.
The cherry-picking practice of prospective tenants by Community Housing Organisations, ( and we thank Wendy Lovell for clearly pointing this out ) is inherent to its business model. Cherry-picking, apart from being discriminatory, exacerbates the problem of homelessness. The Community Housing business model de-incentivises them from housing the poorest.
Professor Johnson has said that the dominant cause of homelessness is poverty.
We would add that this is exactly why market solutions to housing and homelessness will not be adequate.
In addition, Public Housing is a healthy restraint on the cost of the high private rental market. The privatisation policy of transferring Public Housing titles and/or management to Community/Social Housing businesses, has had little to no public discussion and the ramifications of this paradigm shift have not been considered. It has been treated as a fait accompli.
If there is to be continued government support for Community Housing, then it should be strictly separated from Public Housing as they have different functions. For example, the Combined Waiting List should be dismantled.
We urge the committee to take a fresh look at the arguments in favour of Public Housing. The support of a strong Public Housing Program used to have bipartisan support. We desperately need to recover that pragmatic bipartisanship.
Jeremy Dixon
Fiona Ross
Friends of Public Housing Victoria
Fiona & Jeremy's excellent articulation of our Victorian Government's policy and funding failures for those person's who are homeless and who are facing homelessness deserves our full attention. The arguments are not new, it has always been the case that non government housing providers are able to cherry pick their tenants. The pool of genuine needy does not decrease and the Office of Housing's total housing stock steadily reduces and it would appear no one much cares. It makes a person ashamed to be a Victorian when you have a social conscience.
ReplyDeleteI agree with anonymous,I believe community housing should be forspecialist areas such as providing housing for example for women with children and those who are under threat of violence preferable short term.once we had public housing for people with fulltome jobs such as workers at Ford in Geelong,now we DON'T even have it for people who are sleepinglon park benches!!
ReplyDeletePublic housing should be kept in public hands and there should be no consideration in transferring the land titles to private concerns which only has profit as their motives.
ReplyDelete