Housing Insecurity Is Not a Flaw—It’s a Feature
In Dickson and across the country, thousands are being priced out of their neighbourhoods, their communities hollowed out by speculative capital, and their most basic need - shelter - held hostage to market logic. Rents surge ahead of wages. Home ownership, once a realistic aspiration for working people, is now a myth sustained by political theater. Mortgage holders bleed under interest rate hikes, while the unhoused sleep in cars, on sofas, or in shelters - if they’re lucky.
The stress for renters is not incidental. It is the result of deliberate deregulation, where landlords enjoy near-total freedom to raise rents, neglect maintenance, and enforce evictions with impunity. For prospective buyers, saving for a deposit is akin to running on a treadmill calibrated by the banks and real estate cartels. For older Australians, especially women - those structurally marginalised by a lifetime of wage suppression and care work - the result is a new and terrifying demographic of homelessness.
This is not a housing emergency born of natural forces or market oversight. It is a politically engineered crisis.
A System Designed to Serve Capital, Not Communities
To describe this situation as a failure is to misunderstand it entirely. The housing crisis is the inevitable outcome of decades of state policy explicitly designed to benefit capital: property developers, financial institutions, and the rentier class.
Labor and the Liberals, ideological allies in all but branding, have collaborated in constructing a fiscal architecture that channels hundreds of billions into the pockets of those who already own the most. Negative gearing. Capital gains concessions. Public-private partnerships that privatise profits and socialise risk. Together, they amount to one thing: the weaponisation of shelter for wealth extraction.
Empty properties litter the cities - not from housing scarcity, but from speculative oversupply. Developers build not for people, but for portfolios. Real estate functions not as infrastructure but as an asset class.
And while Labor offers a tokenistic Future Fund - an investment vehicle that siphons public money into the stock market rather than immediate construction - Dutton’s response is pure neoliberal orthodoxy: deregulate further, empower developers, and dismantle what remains of social housing.
This is not political mismanagement. It’s class warfare.
Toward a Just Housing System: Reclaiming Shelter as a Human Right
The Greens offer not reform, but structural reorientation. Not charity, but justice.
They assert the right to housing not as an ideological abstraction, but as a baseline for human dignity. Their proposals would begin to reassert democratic control over a domain long captured by private interests:
- A public developer - building 225,000 publicly owned, permanently affordable homes. Not trickle-down, but direct provision.
- A National Renters’ Protection Agency - to constrain rent exploitation, enforce minimum standards, and provide tenants with legal recourse.
- The abolition of tax shelters for the property elite - negative gearing and capital gains discounts must end.
- A national plan to end homelessness - not in the abstract, but with crisis housing and long-term support.
- Fair financing for first-home buyers - public lending to break the banks’ monopoly.
- Conditional federal housing funds - public money will only flow where public interest is served.
This is not technocratic tinkering. It is an attempt to unwind a decades-long political project that turned housing into a profit-making instrument for the few.
Why It Matters: Restoring Dignity, Stability, and the Public Good
Envision a country where housing is no longer a financial instrument but a public utility. Where families aren’t displaced by the next rent spike or driven out by speculative buyouts. Where older Australians aren’t punished for a system that devalued their labour. Where children grow up in communities, not in crisis.
That is achievable - but only if we confront the core reality: the commodification of housing is incompatible with the right to shelter.
This is not a matter of scarcity - it is a matter of priorities. In one of the wealthiest nations on the planet, we allow thousands to go without homes while luxury towers stand vacant. This is not an oversight. It is a choice.
Only the Greens have the independence to challenge this order. They take no donations from developers, owe nothing to landlord lobbies, and answer only to the people.
This election, your vote can disrupt the cycle of dispossession. Not symbolically - but structurally.
Vote to dismantle the investor state and restore housing as a right.
Vote to apply real pressure on Labor and deny the Liberal agenda a mandate.
Vote to reclaim the commons from those who sold it off for profit.
Because everyone deserves a home - not just those with a portfolio.
No comments:
Post a Comment