DH eyes the future of public housing

Just to prove that DH is not a complete whinger, she has to give full marks to the organisers of the 2005 Social Housing Tenants Conference: an Eye to the Future – The Shape of Social Housing in 2015, and not just because she was brought off by all the blooody looxury.

While it was great to be swanning around the foyer of Sir Stamford's, tossing back mocktails like there was no tomorrow back on the estate, elbow deep in raw prawns, delicately picking over petits fours, choosing judiciously from 4 kinds of cooked meats, 6 kinds of cold meats, and a truckload of pasta, and marble bath tubs yet!, no, she has no intention of selling out the renting class, and she spent the time buttonholing anyone who would listen to her tale of woe about DoH's Rental Disincentive Scheme for Aspirational Sole Parent/ Carers.

But to be perfectly serious, it was a wonderfully imaginitive program designed to spark creative thinking about the future. There were lots of laughs as housing statistics were made palatable in a rigged "Quiz Show", and a panel of welfare and housing luminaries proved that they had a future in stand up comedy, even if the housing sector looked bleak. Fast forward to 2015, and the panel playing assorted officials of the newly name "Department of Offstreet Living", tenants and advocates, acted out various hypothetical scenarios from nightmare through welfare paradise. After each session tenants brainstormed their way through topic groups addressing the key issues facing them.

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It will be interesting to see the post-modern project in action - will multiple voices empowered to speak in their own language in an atmosphere of play and optimism achieve what traditional leftist politics couldnt? Or will the nastier Malthusian realities lurking beneath the Lucullan feasting tables prevail in the end? Will all the abundant good ideas generated by the process actually go anywhere?

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DH doesnt know, but it was telling that she found herself irresistibly drawn to the small group working on "Exit Strategies"....

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These tensions surfaced halfway through the second day, when some in the audience wanted to haul Mike Allen, the Deputy Director of Housing over the coals. It was all very well to play stimulating little games, they said, but when were we going to get down to the realities of life in poorly maintained estates, with constant governmental gouging of ever-declining incomes, ruthless evictions happening already, rent raises to come when family budgets are stretched to the limit already, insecurity about tenure, neighbourhood tensions, disrespectful maintenance contractors if they showed up at all, insulting put-downs from a succession of Housing Ministers and more.

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It was clear that despite the pleasantries and the laughter, the conference participants, at least all those that DH spoke to, were deeply mistrustful of the Department and of the Housing Minister's promises of a rosy future of consolidated housing stock, and interdepartmental agreements for service delivery (or was it interservice delivery of departmental agreements? Don't you just love the lingo? ) for those-most-in-need ...

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While there was room for many voices, there was certainly no room for "speaking bitterness". And since the prevailing structure valued positivity, even a gripemeister like DH found herself being restructured into positivity and feeling tetchy with humans who wanted to be human and have emotions and tell their personal stories and "speak truth to power", and found herself wishing that people would just confine themselves to incisive sound bites and get on with it, whatever "it" was.

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So while she likes to have a go at the powers-that-be, she needs to say a few words to admonish the rank-and-file.

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It's a waste of time grievancing at the department and saying the "Department" should do this, and they should do that, and also the other. Where's the fun in handing power over to the bureaucracy?

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Dont you know that Department's gotta do what Departments gotta do, and politicians gotta do what politicians gotta do?

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But what we tenants gotta do is get a representative body of our own where we can get a piece of the action, and a seat at every bargaining table, and that "peak" body is already in the pipeline, and its going to be called "The Social Housing Tenants Alliance" and if you havent got involved contact Garry Mallard at the national Tenant Support Network: http://www.blogger.com/

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It was also dispiriting to hear Cherie Burton being described as a "blonde bimbo" by a politically savvy housing activist who should know better than to resort to sexist stereotyping as a form of argument. DH doesn't approve of personal attacks on individuals, unless it is done with with tongue in cheek.

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It's not about whether Cherie Burton makes hay out of of being a former houso, (when rumor has it that her family came into a motza and moved to Drummoyne, in which case she should come clean). That's her job.

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It's about whether more tenants are going to get in and take over the Labor Party for instance.

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It's about whether tenants and the 70,000 people on the waiting lists realise that they have a hell of a lot of voting power.

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It's about whether tenants have the sense to realise that united we bargain, divided we beg, and get serious about forming our own peak organisation.