The Australian Labour (sic) Party does not even call itself a socialist party. Actually it is a liberal-bourgeois party, while the so-called Liberals in Australia are really Conservatives. – V. I. Lenin, Pravda No. 134, June 13, 1913.
Housing policy – ‘there goes the neighbourhood’
Most Australians wealth is connected to home ownership. In 1988, the Todhunters lived in Fryar Street Camp Hill in Brisbane. The house was then worth $65,000. In 2023, the same house sold for $4.1 million. How can that be? In the space of 35 years, the house at 42 Fryar Street is worth 66 times what it was in 1988? Even if the latest owner spent $1 million renovating the house, using the most expensive architects and builders, and putting in five bedrooms and an in-ground pool, he has made a killing. It can’t be an accident that there is a Maserati parked out front.
The rent on the modest house at 25 Fryar street is $700 per week. The rent on the Todhunters house would be far more than that. Especially with the hand-laid freeform Cradle Mountain stone in its entryway and garden walls; its timber floors and Tasmanian oak hardwood feature walls and floor-to-ceiling joinery. To top it off, there is a three-metre-high pivot entry door and a massive 10-metre-wide cavity wall. Grandeur only fit for the rich.
In the year of the bicentennial, the Todhunter’s were a working class family; not factory workers, mind you, they had white-colour jobs, but they were still just workers. The kids went to catholic schools and aspired to being teachers or even to become a doctor. The doctor couldn’t afford this.
Who is going to live that house now? Certainly no one from the working class. The main salary earner would have to be the CEO of a company, at least. And what about the guy with a Maserati who has made $3 million clear
Meanwhile in Musgrave Park, South Brisbane, there are homeless people living in tents.
The local member for people living in Fryar Street is Max Chandler-Mather who originally opposed the housing bill before federal parliament on the basis that he wanted to have a cap on rents. Labor would have none of it, why? Why wouldn’t you put a cap on rents when people are hurting so much?
Why wouldn’t you put a capital gains tax on a principal-place-of-residence that makes 66 times what it was worth 30 years ago?
Max’s uncle lived across the street in a house that looks like housing commission. It’s been sold too. Next to it used to be the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Now there are two dual-storey boxes with the obligatory swimming pool that typify gentrification.
Just how obscene is this, that just a few kilometres away people are living in tents at risk of weather, sickness and violence?
Brisbane lord mayor candidate, Jonathan Sriranganathan, argued his federal colleagues had “given up [their] leverage without extracting enough concessions”.
But is it about winning concessions or is there something systemic that is at fault here?
Why is it that, in one generation, a street can be turned from being working-class to being the home of the mega-rich?
In some parts of the planet, there are people still living in caves. In the western world like Australia, the thinking is damit, go for broke, make as much profit as you can, exploit as many people as you like owners many houses rent them out and make a mozza.
Meanwhile the local Coles at Coorparoo that has been under-paying it’s workers for years has turned into some sort of lavish local foodary where workers that used to work in the deli gone – some transferred – others gone looking for work elsewhere, probably in the outer suburbs where it is cheaper to live.
Whoever said Australia was the place of the fair-go?
The housing bill passed by the Labor Party in the federal parliament puts billions of dollars into the hands of developers and get-rich-quick landlords already on salary and wages (because of negative gearing). Social housing is a con. It too will be privatised as the old housing commission houses were. Look at the houses in Stafford there were quite a few housing commission houses there which have steadily been sold under lib/lab governments. Those house going to police officers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, accountants: the middle class.
So the Labor’s housing policy is keeping the middle class happy. Along comes the voice of the renter, Max Chandler-Mather and says ‘we’re not gonna pass your bill‘. The hard heads in the Greens say yes we are. Why? Because they want to win the votes of the renters? They certainly want to win more votes, with 10% of the vote they can’t do much, even in the inner city. But what is the party if it’s not an environmental party with a social justice element grafted onto it? The watermelons, green on the outside red in the middle. Well there’s the problem with reformism. Is capitalism stable enough to sustain this balancing act? Maybe, there will be a few wars, maybe a nuclear one, there will be a lot of losers. And then, there’s climate change. That’s not gonna go away under capitalism. Climate change is not a symptom of capitalism, it is capitalism.
Watch out, the developers are coming.
Ian Curr
28 Sept 2023