Equally Disappointing: What Should We Take From The Australian Election?

Sitting Pretty: Even if Australia's incumbent Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, somehow manages to scrape together a ramshackle government, Bill Shorten has almost certainly done enough to keep his ALP colleagues’ daggers in their sheaths. Labor’s voters are especially delighted that Turnbull’s discomfiture is the result of Shorten turning the Liberals’ own weapons against them.

 

BILL SHORTEN’S FOREWARNINGS may yet ensure a rich electoral harvest for the Australian Labor Party. His prediction that Medicare, Australia’s public health system, would be at risk if Malcolm Turnbull and his Liberal-National Coalition were returned to office certainly focused the minds of Australia’s poor. Fear of losing Gough Whitlam’s greatest legacy to the Australian people, combined with Compulsory Voting (which ensures that poor Australians actually vote) may yet be enough to make Shorten Australia’s next prime minister.
 

Even if Turnbull somehow manages to scrape together a ramshackle government, Shorten has almost certainly done enough to keep his ALP colleagues’ daggers in their sheaths. Labor’s voters are especially delighted that Turnbull’s discomfiture is the result of Shorten turning the Liberals’ own weapons against them.
 

Election after election, the Liberals and their right-wing media allies have employed scare tactics against Labor. This time, however, it was Labor doing the scarifying. What’s more, those scare tactics contained a sizeable kernel of truth. The Liberals would relish the privatisation of Medicare. Why? Because it’s an article of ideological faith among Australia’s “economic rationalists” that the private sector is better at supplying services than the state. To claim, as Turnbull did – repeatedly and with growing exasperation – that his party harboured no such intentions raised disingenuousness to new heights.
 

Shorten’s tactics recall those employed by Helen Clark in the New Zealand general election of 2005. On that occasion the warning issued was about housing and the likely consequences for state house tenants of a Don Brash/National Party win. It was enough to see the large South Auckland polling booths tip the balance in Labour’s favour.
 

Twelve years on, and Labour’s 2005 warnings concerning housing and the fate of state house tenants are being vindicated almost daily. That it has taken so long is because National’s ideological antagonism towards state housing, which Don Brash displayed openly and honestly, has been camouflaged and concealed by John Key’s government.
 

It has been National’s intention, ever since winning power in 2008, to eliminate the state as New Zealand’s default housing provider. According to the economist, and author of “Generation Rent”, Shamubeel Eaqub, New Zealand’s stock of state houses – proportional to its population – is at levels not seen since 1949. At the core of National’s housing policy is the all-too-familiar neoliberal negation of the state’s capacity to respond to social need. In terms of practical policy, this is expressed by facilitating the entrenchment of the private sector as the only legitimate provider of housing – even for the poor.
 

The radicalism of this new policy regime is only slowly being recognised. Much easier to spot has been the sudden emergence into public view of the consequences of the state abdicating its role as housing provider of last resort. The grim spectacle of families living in their cars has stimulated public outrage and forced the National Government’s hand.
 

At the National Party’s 80th annual conference, held in Christchurch over the weekend, the Prime Minister announced the establishment of a billion-dollar Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF) to kick start what is intended to be a local government-administered housing construction programme. This latter effort seems likely to become the responsibility of a new legal entity – the Urban Development Authority (UDA). The first cities to receive a UDA will be those currently experiencing the fastest population growth: Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Christchurch and Queenstown. The HIF will not, however, be empowered to issue genuine grants to these cities, only loans, and the funds expended are to facilitate the plans of private property developers exclusively.
 

Dismissed by Labour Leader, Andrew Little, as “a rushed, piecemeal policy that hasn’t been thought through”, Key will, nevertheless, be hoping that voters receive these announcements as evidence that his Government is, at last, “doing something”. It is nowhere near enough, but unless Labour executes a radical overhaul of its own, very similar, housing policies, Key’s latest efforts will be compared not unfavourably with his opponents’.
 

The extraordinarily close finish in the Australian general election is, in part, a reflection of the extremely drab selection of colours in which both the Left and the Right were content to paint their country’s future. What most Australians experienced was an overlong campaign characterised by limitation, negation and fear. Without the enforced participation of Compulsory Voting, Turnbull’s Liberal-National Coalition would have been returned handily. The self-interest of the “Haves” would have seen to that.
 

To ensure the participation of the “Have Nots” in 2017, New Zealand Labour will have to offer much more than Shorten-style scare-tactics. To compensate for the lack of compulsory voting, Little needs to devise a campaign that is expansive, affirmative and chock-full of hope.
 

If a broad programme of state house construction does not lie at the heart of that campaign, then a hung parliament will be the most that Labour deserves.
 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 5 July 2016.

Dirt And Squalor: The Housing Crisis Comes Full-Circle.

Planned Response: Squalor and dirt was the market’s solution to the acute shortage of affordable housing, and the First Labour Government’s heroic, state-organised, response has become the stuff of political legend. How Mickey Savage, keen to find an outlet for the restless energy of John A. Lee, his great rival for the masses’ affections, gave him responsibility for organising a massive programme of state house construction. And how Lee, by mobilising both the public and private sectors, built thousands of houses for the working poor.

 

THOUSANDS OF NEW ZEALANDERS are at the mercy of a “slum landlord”. Unfortunately, that slum landlord is the Government. The person who put into words what so many people have, for the best part of a fortnight, been feeling, was Dr Bryce Edwards. The political studies lecturer from Otago University was speaking as panellist on Television New Zealand’s Q+A programme.

 

It is a measure of how fraught the housing issue has become that TVNZ was only able to persuade the Housing Minister, Dr Nick Smith, to appear on the programme if he was interviewed alone, and was given the right-of-reply to the following interview with Labour’s housing spokesperson, Phil Twyford.

 

There was a time when Government and Opposition spokespeople felt up to the job of defending their respective positions in head-to-head debates, live, on national television. To my knowledge, guaranteeing a Government Minister a separate right-of-reply constitutes an editorial concession without precedent on either of this country’s free-to-air networks.

 

The Minister’s sensitivity was, of course, understandable in a week when New Zealanders learned that sub-standard conditions in a solo mother’s state house accommodation had materially contributed to the death of her infant daughter. Then to learn, just days later, of another death attributable, at least in part, to sub-standard state accommodation. When asked by journalists to comment on these tragedies, Dr Smith responded that: “People dying in winter of pneumonia and other illnesses is not new.”

 

This was the context in which Dr Edwards’ “slum landlord” comment was able to strike such a raw public nerve.

 

How has it come to this? What has permitted the housing conditions wheel, over the course of 80 years, to come very nearly full-circle?

 

In his book, We Call It Home: A History of State Housing in New Zealand, Ben Schrader describes how the Truth newspaper, just one week after the election of the First Labour Government, in 1935, began campaigning against “the slum problem”.

 

“The article began”, writes Schrader, “by vividly juxtaposing the newly completed National War Memorial with its sordid surroundings.” Truth compared this “beautiful piece of architecture”, erected to ensure that the “supreme sacrifice” of the Great War was not forgotten, with that of the Wellington slums, standing “a stone’s throw away” from the Memorial’s tower. In these dwellings, Truth observed: “men, women and children are making a different kind of sacrifice. They live in squalor and dirt, in little shacks lacking even the ordinary comforts of existence.”

 

Squalor and dirt was the market’s solution to the acute shortage of affordable housing, and the First Labour Government’s heroic, state-organised, response has become the stuff of political legend. How Mickey Savage, keen to find an outlet for the restless energy of John A. Lee, his great rival for the masses’ affections, gave him responsibility for organising a massive programme of state house construction. And how Lee, by mobilising both the public and private sectors, built thousands of houses for the working poor.

 

So successful was Labour’s scheme that the town planner, Cedric Firth, could write, more than a decade later, about the citizen’s right to a “decent dwelling being regarded as on the same level as the right to education, sanitation, to good and abundant water supply, to an adequate road system and a certain amount of medical care.”

 

These are no longer the expectations of either those responsible for supplying social housing, nor, sadly, of those obliged to seek shelter in New Zealand’s decaying stock of state houses. Having forgotten (if he ever knew) how manifestly inadequate the market’s “solutions” were to the problems of the 1930s, Finance Minister, Bill English, appears hell-bent on resurrecting a social housing market – even if he has to dig up the corpse with his bare hands!

 

Commentators across the political spectrum, joined just this week by economists from the OECD, are urging John Key’s National Government to launch a state-financed and directed effort to address directly the lack of affordable houses for the poorest New Zealanders. As Dr Edwards’ fellow panellist on last Sunday’s Q+A programme, Fran O’Sullivan, put it: “It’s been done before in our history.”

 

The problem, says Dr Edwards, is that the political parties’ housing agendas are “a bit deluded and empty”. National and Labour are “still quite timid” when it comes to committing themselves to the sort of low-cost housing construction effort that offers the only truly effective solution to New Zealand’s twin housing crises. The first, which condemns far too many Kiwis to lives of “squalor and dirt”. And the second, fuelled by the speculative mania currently gripping Auckland’s runaway housing market.

 

Market delusions and political timidity allowed slum landlords to thrive in the 1930s. Eighty years later, identical failings on the part of their state-owned successor have added an ironical twist to the community’s demand for radical housing reform.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 16 June 2015.

Truly Dickensian

After Housing Minister, Phil Heatley's, new "prior permission" rule for state house tenants, one is tempted to ask: 'What's next - workhouses?!"

THE performance of Housing New Zealand’s Chief Operating Officer, Stephen McArthur, on this morning’s edition of Morning Report was deeply disturbing. Defending HNZ’s new policy of requiring state house tenants to acquire prior permission from their landlord before offering shelter to a person, or persons, released on bail, he managed to sound both cruel and condescending.

Access to state housing is supposed to be determined strictly on the basis of need, but McArthur and his masters – presumably with the full sanction of Housing Minister, Phil Heatly – have decided to insert this entirely new contractual obligation in HNZ’s standard tenancy agreement.

The effect is to introduce into the State’s landlord-tenant relationship a truly Dickensian level of paternalism. It was quite clear from McArthur’s tone that he regards state tenants as a lesser-breed of human-being.

These unfortunates, along with their wayward friends and family, cannot be relied upon to act responsibly towards their neighbours. So, unlike other adult members of the community, their decision-making must be augmented and refined by the altogether more responsible and informed judgement of HNZ staff. And, while "normal" home-owners are perfectly at liberty to designate their own homes as places to which family-members and/or friends in trouble with the authorities may be bailed, state tenants must apply for and receive their landlord’s "permission" before offering such refuge.

Leaving aside HNZ’s rejection of the long-established common-law principle that a person is deemed innocent until proven guilty, this new "prior permission" rule cannot help but dangerously stigmatise state house tenants. Whenever citizens are required to divest themselves of rights enjoyed by other members of the community – in this case the right to offer safe haven for a person or persons in distress – they are diminished as citizens, and demeaned as human-beings.

HNZ’s new rule, by undermining the equality of all citizens, strikes at the very heart of New Zealand’s egalitarian traditions. It is objectionable from virtually every reasonable perspective, but most particularly because it constitutes a form of "prior restraint".

What HNZ – and the National-led Government – are saying with this new rule is that state tenants are essentially children, whose judgement cannot be relied upon, and whose rights and freedoms must be rigorously circumscribed in the name of protecting the rights and freedoms of their neighbours and the local community.

It's a telling insight into the ethics of this Government, that it sees HNZ’s new rule as being both fair and reasonable. What in God’s name is fair and reasonable about requiring parents to secure the prior permission of some faceless bureaucrat before they’re allowed to bring their son or daughter, niece or nephew, home from the Police lock-up?

What’s next: workhouses?