Don’t give me a home amongst the park trees

Recently in The New Yorker, author Andre Dubus III wrote about a weekend enjoying the high life in New York. The premise was

I had been writing daily for nearly twenty years, and now my third published book had become a major best-seller, and I – who at forty-one had never had more than three hundred dollars in the bank, whose mother once had to prepare for me and my siblings a dinner of saltine crackers spread with butter – heard myself telling my dear aunt Jeannie that I was going to fly her first class to Manhattan, to celebrate her birthday in style. I wasn’t sure what “in style” meant, except that it should have something to do with the word “luxury.” When I typed that into my computer, I was led to the Royalton and then to the Plaza, where we’d be staying our second and third nights in the city.

Suffice to say, Andre, Jeannie and family had a good time – and it cost a bomb.

A lot of people don’t have the fortunate circumstances of Andre Dubas III. At the end of his essay, he is somewhat disillusioned with the ‘high life’ and has a new sense of value, based around the home that he and his brother built (with the earnings from the same book) for his family, with the ‘granny flat’ downstairs for his mother 

Sometimes a car will roll slowly down our driveway, and for a dizzying heartbeat I’m convinced it’s the landlord coming for the rent we don’t have. But other moments feel like luxury, filling me with a calming gratitude. When I want to visit my mother, I just walk down the stairs to her apartment stuffed with her plants and her books, her photos of us when we were young and often so unhappy. Before sitting on her sofa, a real one, I pour her a bourbon, and I pour myself one, too, and my mother and I sit and catch up on the labors of our respective days, on my brother and sisters, on my kids and her grandchildren, on all these people we love, high times or not, a smile on her lovely, aging face.

According to news reports, a lot of Australians are one salary payment away from homelessness in the current economic environment, something Dubus reflects on in his essay. ABC online reported recently of the plight of a number of people who are living in tents in Wangaratta, Victoria. They all have a different backstory and unfortunately no-one has found their happy ending, unlike Dubus (who took 20 years to become an ‘overnight success’). Regardless, they all have the right to a solid roof over their heads, which obviously keeps the cold and rain out to a far greater extent than the current arrangements. 

The problem is larger than Wangaratta as well. Apart from comfort and warmth, there are also significant benefits to people’s lifestyle and ability to find work if they have an address that isn’t ‘under the third gum tree in the Main St park’. This ABC online story discusses homeless in Sydney. Melbourne and on the Gold Coast. Mentioned is Lee, who  

Just as Sydney’s temperatures dropped to single digits, he got a break.

Last month the NSW Department of Communities and Justice gave him a one-bedroom apartment in the Waterloo public housing towers.

“That, to me, is literally like winning the lottery,” he says.

“I can get my clothes and dress for interviews … and grab my laptop and apply for jobs – so it just fundamentally changes what’s within your possibilities.”

There should be more of it … but it’s complicated. Crikey recently discussed that social housing is a state responsibility – not a federal one. Yet, most states wait for an injection of federal funds before they do anything about significant upgrades to existing social housing stock or building additional stock. While an injection was announced in the past couple of days, the previous injection was in the time of the Rudd Government. 

The current government does have legislation in front of the Senate to increase the funding for social and affordable housing which the Coalition has, naturally, rejected because it doesn’t suit their narrative. Despite their rhetoric about the adverse effects of removing negative gearing and capital gains advantages of property ownership, the number of Australians that own multiple residential properties is reasonably small. It wouldn’t take much to carve out the small ‘mum & dad’ investor from measures targeting the multiple property owners.

The Greens (who have the numbers when combined with the government to pass the legislation) want more money to be available sooner. They also demand that the federal government somehow impose a rent freeze or cap on the states, again despite legislation about property rentals and sales being a state responsibility. Probably adding to the complexity is that most of the Greens in the lower house of Parliament represent reasonably affluent electorates, so at the same time as they are pushing for more social and affordable housing to be constructed, they are supporting campaigns locally to ensure that none of it is the ‘millionaires rows’ that they represent in Parliament.

So we are in position where the government is trying to do something, although arguably not enough to address a social problem in Australia. The political party that could help them do something have decreed it’s not enough, preferring to do nothing. Albanese’s Government has ‘upped’ the offer to the Greens in recent days as the Greens have to the government in recent weeks, but the frustration is showing – with some justification.

All this does nothing for the people living in tents and under cardboard boxes this winter who won’t be able to ‘get my clothes and dress for interviews … and grab my laptop and apply for jobs’. Instead, we have political parties are playing a drawn-out fight to the death in an attempt to position themselves favourably to their constituencies for the next federal election contest.

If circumstances change for some reason in the next 12 months, the person living in a tent under the bridge could be you or me next winter. In a developed and affluent society, a roof over a person’s head is a fundamental right – not a political plaything or a privilege. It’s time our politicians at all levels of government remembered that.

We should be better than this.

 

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