Tuesday, 29 October 2024

Housing

Samantha RATNAM (Northern Metropolitan) (22:25): (1217) My adjournment matter tonight is for the Minister for Housing. Over the past several years Victorian Labor has embarked on a retreat from public housing. Public housing is owned and managed by the state in Victoria, with fixed housing costs and rights that are protected by law. It offers long-term tenure so people can access an affordable home and build a life in the community. It has been the intervention that good governments have used to ensure everyone has a secure and affordable place to call home. It was the response of good governments when they faced a housing crisis and resulted in much of Victoria’s public housing stock, including our public housing towers.

But over the last decade Labor has tried to outsource its responsibility for housing to non-government and private housing markets. Large amounts of public housing stock have been transferred to community housing providers, and whole estates have been demolished and privatised, most with no public housing rebuilt at the sites. As Labor advances this outsourcing and privatisation agenda, it is now making a deliberate and calculated decision to change the language it uses to describe residents in order to diminish and dehumanise public housing residents. Labor and the government of the day are now calling residents ‘renters’ in the official departmental communication about public housing communities in what seems like a pretty obvious attempt to diminish the status of residents and to assert their power as the ‘landlord’. Some residents have lived in their home for decades. They have formed strong communities, some across several generations, so why should they be made to feel like their homes are not truly theirs? Don’t public housing residents deserve to feel they can live in a safe and secure home or does the government reserve this right for the privileged and the wealthy only?

This shift in language comes alongside Labor’s policy to erase public housing altogether. Labor is trying to erase the term ‘public housing’ entirely from the housing vernacular, instead opting to use ‘social housing’. While ‘social housing’ is meant to be an umbrella term for public and community housing, the reality is that when the government announces a new social housing project there is generally no public housing in that project, only community housing.

Labor wants to withdraw completely from the provision of public housing in Victoria. With their plan to demolish and privatise Victoria’s 44 public housing high-rise estates, after already demolishing several low-rise estates across Melbourne, Labor has been met with staunch resistance from residents and the broader community, and they feel threatened by this. We saw this most recently when hundreds of residents and activists gathered for a rally to protect public housing.

Diminishing public housing residents to mere ‘renters’ is one more way to try and break the spirit of those people who would be so bold as to resist what is happening to them. We see this kind of dehumanisation across government services – patients are now called ‘customers’ and doctors and carers are now called ‘providers’. This is the language of capitalism, the language of profit making that has seeped into the way governments talk about people they serve. But what starts with objectifying and commodifying language ends with objectified and commodified treatment. Labor must end their use of this Orwellian doublespeak. Minister, I ask that you afford public housing residents the dignity and respect they are entitled to and ensure all references are to public housing residents, not renters.