Opinion 17: Performative Privatisation: A Bleak Future for Victorian Social Housing

By Isaiah Balcombe Ehrlich

On the 20th of September, 2023, the Victorian Government's Labor Party released its housing statement and plan for the next ten years. On the 31st page of the document, via a dot point, it was announced that the Government would be ‘retiring our ageing high-rise towers’.1 While replacing these aged facilities with newly built homes sounds attractive, the Government's plan to replace them is fraught with issues concerning existing residents. The Government plans to lease out Victoria's publicly owned land to developers in return for a promise to allocate some units to recipients of social housing. The privatised grand proposal, which requires excessive demolition and reconstruction work and displacing thousands of long-established residents, carries heavy financial, emotional, and carbon implications. This process of shrugging governmental responsibility onto the private sector through a lease model can be seen as a form of 'performative' privatisation. Its ambition is also short-lived, slated to only last forty years, providing only a thousand additional units at an enormous cost. This proposal must be reconsidered, especially in the context of Australia's housing crisis. To help better understand this proposal and how it fits into the historical context of Victorian Social Housing, I interviewed Dimity Reed, a noted Melbourne architect, academic, governmental advisor and former Commissioner of the Housing Commission of Victoria.

Could you briefly explain your background in architecture and policy making, particularly concerning social housing in Victoria? 

'My interest in and concern about social housing grew from having grown up in the South Melbourne boarding house my grandmother ran. It was a large Victorian house owned by the Brighton Orphanage, with probably fourteen rooms all rented out by my grandmother. The men who rented the rooms were seasonal workers who repaired the railway lines across the Nullabore, picked fruit in Mildura and sugar in Queensland and worked for the Melbourne  & Metropolitan Board of Works laying or repairing drains in between seasons. Nanna lit the fire in the kitchen at 3.30am every morning and gave them all breakfast before they started work. Almost all the housing around us was owned by the orphanage and the properties that weren't were owned by private landlords. We knew all our neighbours. Much gossip went on. Then a great drama upset the area: the Government was going to demolish whole blocks of houses and build new housing! This was greeted with fear not enthusiasm. I was probably 12 at the time and it was some years before I put all these pieces together and understood the squalor and overcrowding that many thousands of our neighbours lived in due to the greed of those we came to know later as slum landlords.

The Government's intention in building the towers was to house the citizens who could not afford to house themselves well. They knew that America was responding to housing issues in this way and decided that Australia could follow their lead.’ 2

As housing Commissioner of Victoria throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, you had a great deal of exposure and experience with many of these social housing developments. Could you provide some details about your experience with the HCV? 

‘Over the next 6 or so years we all watched with alarm as whole streets of houses in South Melbourne, Fitzroy, Carlton and Richmond were demolished by the newly enthused Housing Commission of Victoria.  So I started architecture in Melbourne with a great interest in the issues around public housing.  I also began writing for the Age on architecture and housing and one evening the Minister for Housing rang me and asked if I would like to become a Commissioner of the Housing Commission. My friends were appalled but I accepted immediately. What an offer!

The Commissioners were all thoughtful blokes but no one knew enough about the issues to initiate any change. The organisation was getting terrible press.  But very soon a tenant from Broadmeadows rang me and asked if we could meet; she had many ideas about creating neighbourhoods in these new places.  We met and then employed her quite soon and I believe she was central to years of improvements in how rise buildings could work in a society unused to them.  

It was an important time in Victoria with numerous groups engaged in housing issues and much interest in decentralising housing provision from this huge bureaucracy to smaller societies. They set up a number of excellent organisations which now form an important component of social housing provision in Victoria. At that time I was asked to prepare a White Paper on Housing for Victoria to outline intentions and processes. It was an important way to move through the angst and failures and to clarify intents.’ 3

Dimity's reference to this tenant's significant influence upon the improvement of her towers reflects an often sadly underutilised perspective, that of the people who actually live in these developments. Often, these perspectives are treated with indifference or condescending paternalism. Whilst obvious, often direct and authentic community engagement is lacking within such developments. This lack of interest in authentic engagement is emblematic of the Australian approach to social housing, in which often ill-informed decisions are made, and those most vulnerable pay the price. 

What do you believe are the current issues with the Victorian Government’s Approach to Social Housing?

‘I am appalled by the Victorian Government’s interest in demolishing the existing towers and redeveloping the sites. I am hoping that the recent recognition of the serious moral and legal flaws in the CFMEU will kill the outrageous proposal. The existing buildings are working. They can and should be renovated over time according to need but they must remain in public ownership for social housing.

We can not EVER reduce public ownership of public housing. The need increases every month as employment and cost of living issues arise monthly.

Housing provision is an essential component of good Government just as health and education are.

It is absolutely essential that this bag of lies our State Ministers appear to be accepting must be exposed for what they are: if they want land for their mates, just go to where other developers have gone – the outskirts of town.

Land is available and buyers are there waiting.

You ask if I notice any differences in the Government’s attitude towards social housing in the decades of my involvement. The answer, tragically, is yes. I don’t see this Government as having any social concerns at all. And this is the first State Government in my adult life that I would say that about.’ 4

This change in approach towards social housing Dimity refers to exists within the context of Australia's housing markets and our overwhelming economic reliance upon the commodification of housing. As famed economist Yanis Varoufakis stated, the Australian economy is based upon ‘Houses and Holes’. It is ‘caught up in a frenzy of orchestrated idiocy of talking about houses as investments’ when ‘houses should be places where we live and investments should be going into things that produce future value’.5 It is sadly a quintessentially Australian perspective of viewing housing as primarily a financial instrument instead of an essential human right. Due to this immense overreliance upon housing as a financial commodity, the Government and the developers who hold power over our political system have a vested interest in maintaining these property values.

The Ground Lease Model

Within the context of this governmental need to both maintain property values and accommodate colossal developers, the proposed 'Ground Lease Model' takes on a dark light. The Government describes the Ground Lease Model as a program in which 'Victoria leases land to a consortium to build, operate and maintain housing on the site for 40 years’ .6 The land, and all homes, is then returned to public ownership which means ‘there is no sale of public land’.7 The Victorian Government designates this relationship between itself and private developers as a ‘Public Private Partnership’, which could be viewed more as a soft or performative privatisation by a cynical eye.8

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek often refers to a conception of the ‘morning after’ of a great social change.9 Zizek asserts that in ‘the morning after’, the enthusiasm for social change ‘has to be translated into concrete measures’.10 Here, organisations such as Office are providing an invaluable tool to protest the Government's plan, a realistic alternative. In response to the Government's plans, the non-profit firm 'Office' directed by Simon Robinson and Steve Mintern has presented alternate methodologies for the future of our social housing under the mantra of 'retain, repair, reinvest'. Office is notable for the level of pragmatic detail that makes up their alternate proposals for site-specific interventions. For example, in their recent publication, Flemington Estate Feasibility Study and Alternative Design Proposal Office presents an in-depth, costed plan that outlined how the existing buildings could be retrofitted and renovated with comparatively far less impact upon the residents than the governmentally endorsed plan of demolition.11 Office estimates a saving at a purely financial level of $364 million whilst still largely retaining the existing buildings.12

The core of this issue is a lack of care for social housing at a governmental level. Trying to bolster these failing developments by introducing private development is a ridiculous attempt to shuck responsibility. The role of private developers is to produce money, the groups are inherently greedy. Zizek defines such greed as ‘the search for profit’, which historically has ‘motivated capitalist expansion’.13 As Zizek stated, ‘instead of focusing on individual greed’ in ‘moralist terms’, ‘the task is to change the system so that it will no longer even allow or even solicit greedy acting’.14 It is not enough to reprimand the Developers and Government for these actions; we cannot blame an intrinsically greedy entity for being greedy. Tight measures must be implemented to protect essential social services such as housing from the pitfalls of the private market.  

Ground Lease Model 1 Projects

The Government has so far completed four developments, known as the Ground Lease Model 1 Projects, one of which I was able to visit. The Bangs Street development in Prahran was built on the site of an earlier social housing development. As with all similar redevelopments, a cursory Google search will reveal a series of news articles where former residents spoke up against the forceful relocation and displacement of existing communities. The development comprises 228 social and 206 market rental homes; this mixing of social and market housing, also known as 'social mixing', is often billed as a methodology for bridging a divide between the two groups. However, in the Bangs Street development, the social and market-rate units are split into separate buildings. This can also be observed in another Ground Lease development in Carlton: ‘They are divided into separate buildings with separate gardens, explicitly with a view to increasing the value of the private apartments’.15 I believe this faux social mixing employed by the Government is emblematic of their entire approach to social housing. This entire process frees the Government from their responsibility whilst seemingly lining the pockets of developers or, as Dimity phrased it, ‘their mates’.16 In exchange for taxpayers financing the demolition of the existing sites, we are given the privilege of leasing away commonly owned land for forty years in return for a penance of the sorely needed social housing.

 So what now?

What should we do if the Government's proposed model is as deeply flawed, if not outright Machiavellian, as suggested? As Dimity stated, whilst ‘The existing buildings are working’ this does not mean that they do not require renovation and greater maintenance, but largely, these buildings have worked for over fifty years and will continue to work. To deny the building's right to exist based on its disrepair, which the Government is responsible for, is outrageous. The model proposed by the Government is, from a moral perspective, reprehensible and, from a pragmatic point of view, woefully inefficient and wasteful. The proposals of groups such as Office present an alternative vision for the future of social housing in Australia in which social housing is considered less an obligation but a basic human right and a responsibility of the Government. American novelist Pearl S. Buck once famously wrote, ‘The test of a civilisation is in the way that it cares for its helpless members’. According to this test, it seems the Victorian Government has failed.

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Notes:

1.  Housing Victoria, Victoria’s Housing Statement ; The decade ahead 2024-2034, September 20, 2023, https://www.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-09/DTP0424_Housing_Statement_v6_FA_WEB.pdf

2.  Reed, A conversation on social housing

3.  Reed, A conversation on social housing

4.  Reed, A conversation on social housing

5. Yanis Varoufakis, The “Insane” Reality of Australian Housing that no politican will admit, March 3, 2024

6.  “Ground Lease Model | Homes Victoria,” accessed July 31, 2024, https://www.homes.vic.gov.au/ground-lease-model

7. Homes Victoria, Ground Lease Model

8. Homes Victoria, Ground Lease Model

9. Slavoj Zizek, A Left That Dares to Speak Its Name (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 57

10. Zizek, A Left That Dares to Speak Its Name, 59

11. Office, “Flemington Estate: Feasibility Study and Alternative Design Proposal,” Retain Repair Reinvest (Melbourne, October 14, 2024), https://office.org.au/api/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/OFFICE_RRR_Flemington-Estate_Report.pdf

12. Office, “Flemington Estate: Feasibility Study and Alternative Design Proposal.”

13. Zizek, A Left That Dares to Speak Its Name, 60

14.  Zizek, A Left That Dares to Speak Its Name, 60

15. “Social Mix in Housing? One Size Doesn’t Fit All, as New Projects Show,” Find an Expert : The University of Melbourne, accessed July 31, 2024, https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/news/5341-social-mix-in-housing%3F-one-size-doesn't-fit-all--as-new-projects-show

16. Reed, A conversation on social housing

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References:

“Ground Lease Model | Homes Victoria.” Accessed July 31, 2024. https://www.homes.vic.gov.au/ground-lease-model.

Housing Victoria, Victoria’s Housing Statement; The decade ahead 2024-2034, September 20, 2023. https://www.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-09/DTP0424_Housing_Statement_v6_FA_WEB.pdf.

Reed, Dimity. A conversation on social housing. Interview by Isaiah Balcombe Ehrlich, March 8, 2024.

Office. “Flemington Estate: Feasibility Study and Alternative Design Proposal.” Retain Repair Reinvest. Melbourne, October 14, 2024. https://office.org.au/api/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/OFFICE_RRR_Flemington-Estate_Report.pdf.

The University of Melbourne. “Social Mix in Housing? One Size Doesn’t Fit All, as New Projects Show.” Accessed July 31, 2024. https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/news/5341-social-mix-in-housing%3F-one-size-doesn't-fit-all--as-new-projects-show.

Varoufakis, Yanis. The “Insane” Reality of Australian Housing that no politician will admit, March 3, 2024.

Zizek, Slavoj. A Left That Dares to Speak Its Name. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020. https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/A_Left_that_Dares_to_Speak_Its_Name/6SrfDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0.