You can replace an apple with a banana but you can’t change an apple into a banana unless you're a magician or someone who can feed the multitudes with a few loaves of bread and fish. It’s pretty obvious when you think about it, so why are the words public housing, social housing and community housing interchangeable in the mouth of the Housing Minister, Martin Foley, and a host of other people who should know better? I never cease to be amazed by the amount of confusion that seems to exist in the minds of commentators, the public and government spokespersons about public, social and community housing.
The definitions are clear and concise – public housing is owned by the government and is managed by the government. It’s a simple definition that has stood the test of time. Giving away or selling public housing to non-government organisations, whether profit driven or not profit driven, is privatisation. Giving away publicly owned land to privately owned organisations to build a few public houses, is privatisation – nothing more, nothing less.
So what is social housing and community housing? Social and community housing organisations are privately owned entities with their own institutional structures providing a service to the community. A few are collectives, many are the welfare arm of religious based organisations, others are organisations that have carved out a place in the marketplace for a service that is not provided by government. As governments at the state and federal level have retreated from the public housing sector, these organisations have filled the void created by the state refusing (usually for ideological and financial reasons) to provide affordable housing to the people they represent in parliament.
Currently we are seeing the outsourcing of the management of public housing stocks to both social and community housing groups. In Victoria the public, social and community housing waiting list was a few weeks ago streamlined into one list. Although the Victorian state government claims it is putting more money into public housing than the former Liberal government which removed 400 million dollars from public housing, all this extra money is going into building up the social and community housing sector.
These sectors aren’t, as the government would like us to believe, interchangeable. Social and community housing can pick and choose the type of tenant they want, they can vary the amount of rent paid and more importantly, they can set conditions that public housing tenants would never be asked to agree to. Public housing, social housing and community housing are not interchangeable terms, they are completely different terms. The sooner people realise this and the sooner government officials and commentators, who should know better, stop muddying the waters, the sooner the issue of public housing will get the attention it deserves.
Dr. Joseph Toscano / Joint Convenor Defend And Extend Public Housing