The Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party is about to commit political suicide. Hard pressed by the Greens in over half a dozen inner city seats – including Richmond, Brunswick, Northcote, Flemington, Albert Park and Williamstown, to name a few – they have hitched their wagon to Minister Foley’s public housing suicide mission.
Although the demographics of inner city seats has changed, one constant is the large number of Housing Commission flats and units in these inner city seats. On an ideological whim, Martin Foley has embarked on a policy of transferring the management and ownership of housing commission units to both the social and community housing sector while entering into private public partnerships to provide more public housing for the social and community housing sector.
It does not make economic or political sense to go in this direction. Why antagonise public housing tenants, the electoral backbone of the Australian Labor Party in inner city seats, to satisfy Martin Foley’s ideologically driven privatisation fantasy? People in public housing value security above all else. The security to send their children to the same school, the security of not receiving a 120 day eviction notice for no reason. The security of knowing their rent is fixed at 25% of their income if they receive social security benefits. The security of being able to build friendships and community links knowing they won’t be evicted on a landlord’s whim.
The ALP’s housing policy outlined in an advertisement in The Age on the 25th January 2017 that “will leverage vacant land owned by the Director of Housing to enable new social housing to be developed by the private and not for profit sector, alongside the development and sale of private dwellings” is political hemlock for the ALP.
The Victorian Greens have a clear policy of defending and extending public housing, they won the seats of Melbourne and Prahran by door knocking the public housing estates. Martin Foley, the Housing Minister, was re-elected on the promise of resisting the privatisation of public housing. His campaign workers door knocked the public housing estates in his electorate promising to stop the privatisation of the 12,000 public housing units the Liberal Party said they would privatise if re-elected.
If Mr Wynne, the Member for Richmond, believes he can fend off the Greens for a 4th time (Sunday Age 12/2) he needs to politically kneecap the Housing Minister Martin Foley at the next ALP cabinet meeting and ensure significant state resources are allocated to protect and extend public housing in this state, not privatising it on some ideological whim. Unless the ALP radically changes its position on public housing (as they did with the East-West Link at the last election), the Victorian Greens will hold the balance of power after the 2018 state election and Mr Foley and Mr Wynne will be enjoying their parliamentary superannuation.
Dr. Joseph Toscano / Joint Convenor Defend And Extend Public Housing