Daily Telegraph planning Houso Beat-up?

DH has just had advance notice that the Daily Telegraph is planning a beat-up on housos for New Year's Day.

She just got a breathless call from Telegraph reporter David Barrett, a young man in a hurry. Apologising for the short notice, he wanted to enlist her aid in a proposed panegyric on houso "fraudsters" who are to be blamed for the long waiting lists for public housing. No obvious mention of government policy failure was foreshadowed.

No doubt there are fraudsters out there (ye shall know them by the BMWs parked ostentatiously in the lean-to, if our late unlamented Housing Minister, and examplar of the modest lifestyle, Joe Tripodi, is to be believed). But it's nothing like the con perpetrated on the Aussie public by the Howard Government which ripped $3 billion dollars out of public housing and put it into the pockets of private landlords to no useful effect. What young David wanted was for DH to put him, pronto, onto any poor homeless sods languishing on the waiting list. DH was about to give David a piece of her mind on how she was not about to abet the Daily Telegraph's despicable policy of sooling the plebs onto each other to sell more papers, and perhaps even suggest he might like to do an indepth piece on housing policy, instead. But the poor little thing hurriedly apologised and hung up. DH indulged herself in the distinctly pleasurable reflection that the lad was probably getting the bum's rush all over Sydney from wised-up housos who were not about to be divided and ruled. So if the piece fails to materialise tomorrow, you'll know why.

PS: ... Not to put too paranoid a spin on it, but when is the first round of evictions of short-term leased tenants due? ... and what's the lead-time for softening up the public to accept it?