1945
2004
dream? 
As she left the
Back to the Future Forum, this image reminded long term public
tenant, Carmel McMennemin, of the shattered dreams that stretch back
to 1945.
The Chifley Labor Government established public housing through the
first Commonwealth-State Housing agreement in 1945 to ensure people
on low incomes were no longer subjected to the poverty trap of the private
housing market.
Why do we have 38,000 elderly pensioners in Victoria who pay 49% of
their income in the private rental market? Food or heating or rent?
Painful daily decisions...
We bulldozed houses
like the one above to create highrise estates like Park Towers below.
The experiments continue ...
The State Housing Minister recently
accused HAAG of running a "misinformation campaign" on privatisation
of public housing.
As you will be
aware from our previous newsletter, the Office of Housing has decided
to go ahead with its plan to spend $70 million on establishing 4-6 large
Housing Associations.
The latest we have heard is that this will be finalised by the end of
August.
While we haven't succeeded in stopping this process, our campaign has
shifted focus to state that there should not be any transfer of public
housing to any Housing Associations.
Because we have
reached this critical time we decided to distribute our concerns in a
leaflet to delegates at the ALP State Conference on Saturday 29th May.
We even managed to give it to the Housing Minister, Candy Broad, twice!
More importantly, we received a great deal of positive feedback from conference
delegates who are rank and file members who are generally concerned about
the privatisation of government services.
While we had hoped
our leaflet may generate some concern within the ALP, we were not prepared
for what happened next.
We received information from an ALP member that the Minister had written
to all delegates about HAAG's "highly misleading fliers" and
"inaccurate claims".
We can only assume that delegates at the conference were incensed enough
about our concerns that they approached the Minister to complain.
They must have protested so strongly that the Minister was forced to write
to all delegates in response.
Minister Broad's letter however, grossly misrepresented our position and we therefore have written to all ALP delegates reinforcing our opposition to the privatisation process.
We have also written
to the Minister for the third time requesting a meeting to inform her
of her errors and why she should not continue privatising public housing.
We believe one of the main reasons she doesn't understand our view is
that she has refused to meet with us since we first requested an appointment
in January 2003!
On a positive note the Federal Opposition Leader Latham announced a huge boost to public housing that supports HAAG's position!
HAAG was astonished
on Wednesday 6th July to hear Mark Latham announce that Labor would provide
a $325 million boost to public housing if elected.
We believe this would be the biggest boost to public housing for nearly
20 years and has the potential to change the focus away from privatisation
by again endorsing public housing, not private-public partnerships, as
the solution to the housing crisis.
Mark
Latham also criticised the "privatisation by stealth" that has
been introduced by State governments as a reaction to the lack of public
housing funding and called on state governments to match his funding commitment.
If you would like a copy of the correspondence between HAAG and the State
ALP, contact our office on 96547389 or 1800 637389 (country callers).
