Caveat housos: On "having your say"

Beware government departments, NGOs or academic institutions offering you the "free gift" of free speech via the opportunity to attend a dreary meeting to "have your say", possibly with the added incentive of a cup of International Roast and some No Frills assorted biscuits.  

 

You will find that you are letting in a Trojan horse from which will swarm a horde of consultans who will occupy your precious time for as many years it takes for you find out that there was no result for your earnest efforts, or if there was, someone else took the credit and the pay for your ideas.  

"Having your say" [noun phrase] : 

1. [vernacular] Magging over the back fence with your neighbour Mrs Kaphoops
2. [bureaucratese, code] We are a government agency and we want to tick boxes saying we have consulted with tenants. We are happy to claim any policy ideas you come up with as our own without acknowledging you or your intellectual property, and we will do our utmost to hose you down if you try to mention the M-word*

* M-word: It-that-must-not-be-named, aka Maintenance. See under: Maintenance, lack of

Free speech is already free. All you have to do is exercise it. And as they used to say in the women's movement, "Don't be too polite either, girls" ... and guys too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Selflessness of the Filthy Rich

DH feels we do not give the filthy rich enough credit for their sacrifices for the common good of our great nation.

Imaging the ethical quandary this family of wealth north shore members of the horsey set endures every week.

These Royal Ascot worthies have no
relationship to the Fitznobbs of
our story. They are merely illustrative
of the sacrifices made by the filthy
rich as an example to us all.

They hire an east Asian cleaner, a hardworking woman who has not seen her kids in years, as she scrimps and saves to support the aged parents and children back home. She gets up at 5 for a long commute to the unaffordable suburbs where she must work. Meanwhile The Family zips around in its helicopter between its various properties.

But consider how the Fitznobbs must bleed every pay day. Yes, their heart breaks for her situation and they would love to pay her more than $22 an hour, and even the occasional taxi home after a late night's cleaning, to allow her to save for a visit to her family.

But consider what this would do to our economy! My lord, think of the inflationary pressures such a rash precedent might generate!

So they sacrifice themselves and lash themselves to the mast. Every cent is carefully counted out to the half-hour,  don't you worry about that. Our economy is safe thanks to the selflessness of our owning classes.

A Tale of Two Tenancies: Public and Private

DH's street has public housing on one side, and privately owned single-storey workers' cottages dating back to what looks like the early 1900's, on the other.

It has been a stable community on both sides for over the dozen years since DH has lived there. But as the old home owners pass on, people who grew up in the street, the cottages, which are very tiny, hot and pokey inside,  are being bought up by speculators from a country which shall not be named, beginning with the letters Cashed-up, who have no love for quaintness of the Inner West, and who tart the cottages up cheaply in order to let.
Last year a lovely family with a 3 boys from baby to kinder age moved in. A new special chemistry between them and some of the houso families with little kids of their own. Every day, the street was filled with love and laughter. (Yeah, really!!  'Scuse sentimental tearing up as DH types).  Everyone sat on their stoops or the curb till dusk, watching, joining in or chatting as the littlies were taught cricket and other games by a couple of dads.

There hadn't been such joy in the street since about 7 years ago when the earlier cohort of neighbourhood kids finally grew up, went off to Uni or TAFE, or began brilliant careers. Yes, eat your hearts out, "Housos" fans, but our little street of just 8 houses, has already produced 5 Gen Y Uni and TAFE graduates or near-graduates, in Commerce, Arts, Music Management, Medicine, and Librarianship, plus a senior manager in a multinational corporation!
And all those kids gathered outside DH's house where a basket ball hoop was affixed to a wall by a neighbour.  For hours on end, every day, year after year, DH delighted in the regular thump, thump, thump of the ball hitting the wall, knowing that it meant the kids were alright, having a safe place to hang out. And they were so nice too, always asking "Are you sure you don't mind us being here?".
But with the new neighbours it was all to end, all too soon. Coming home one afternoon, DH saw removal vans. After just 6 months, the landlord decided he'd sell the place to make a profit, the private tenants were given notice. Being lucky enough to find another place at short notice, they were off.
It was so sad. The street has reverted to its quieter more insular ways, with only one cricketting dad left to lead the team to glory.
Thus do our rotten private tenancy laws destroy communities, on the whim of landlords eager for profit.
And what happened? The landlord changed his mind, the house didn't sell, and no-one will rent it because of the exorbitant rent he wants for this corrugated roofed hothouse. And there it has sat, empty, for the 2nd year in a row, in the middle of our city's housing crisis!

And the moral of this story is, as always:

Broken communities and housing shortages are not caused by houso wastrels wanting a "handout for life". All this is caused by governments who won't stand up to the landlords' lobby, and who will not enact fair tenure laws in the face of small-time investors who are free to prey on the needy.

"How simplistic of DH!", I hear you say. And no doubt it is, no doubt it is, in this best of all possible free-market worlds.

Seriously, is SBS Housos gunna give us housos a bad name?

There's no way but up... 

 

Besides, who sez only the upper crust is worthy of satire? (If you call fuck jokes satire...).

Seeeriously: As soon as you start treating any group as if they are fragile,  you run the risk of insulting their humanity, their collective capacity for self-reflection and action. Ever met anyone who feels good about being called "vulnerable"?

So if anything,this show may even defuse class struggle by giving downward envy an outlet.

It might get funnier too if we give it a chance. Some of it was funny, like the rap anthem.

But let's wait and see whether "Housos" incites lynch mobs of decent citizens to descend on our estates and sprinkle us like so many salt and pepper flakes around the better suburbs.  

If you are thinking of joining a lynch mob tho, just remember the structural problems (don't mention the "C" word*) that cause the family breakdowns, the mental illness, the dislocation, the wasted lives, the addictions, the gambling, etc etc that created us subprime folks. It could happen to you...

...


Someone should tell SBS they're being ripped of though. With every 3rd word being "fucken", they're only getting 20 minutes of script for every 30 they pay for.  

...

* Not that "C" word, dickheads!. The "Cap#@**$alism word.

For a really classy review of this show, check out the collective wisdom of the Brown Couch's Cultural Studies A-Team

SBS Housos: The Verdict: Subprime

Subprime slapstick about supposedly
subprime people for an even more
subprime audience in a deservedly
subprime timeslot.
 

SBS Housos: The Survey

DH's quiet enjoyment of her FB page was shattered by yet another questionaire yesterday.

Fair dinkum, is there no place where the damn sociologists and social workers can't find us??? 


Loik, there were no weren't no fair dinkum choices neither.

What about some fully sick options loik: 

• F%!# off, oi ain't tellin the guvmint nuffink
• F%!# off, oi don't want no trouble
• F%!# off, oi've already done 3 Uni surveys and a Focus group this week, and all oi got in return was a cuppa International Roast and soggy Sao biscuits

Housos

Yeah? Whaddaya think yer lookin at?

Thanks fer boostin me page hits but.

Just helpin meself to a slice of audience share ...




* For newbies, DH reckons she's yer old style working-class heroine type Houso...

What now that the Maintenance Tsunami has washed over?

... leaving this, and at least another,  estate DH knows about,  repainted twice (for shoddy work the first time) ... despite being made of treated synthetic planking which should never have been painted in the first place but will now have to be painted for evermore. .

An ex-employee of Spotless during the stimulus tsunami tells DH that Spotless was in chaos at the time, being totally unprepared for the deluge. DH had 3 different very young project managers within a couple of months, each one shocked at the work done by the previous mob. And HNSW wanted to redo her bathroom on inspection, but DH had had enough, would rather live with a bit of shoddiness than have the whole place turned upside down by a new set of contractors and their hurriedly conscripted and untrained rellos ...

OK, enough negativity, but it's been a long time between sprays. And always remember the buck stops with the government of the day. There's a lot of good people in HNSW, doing what they can with the budgets and priorities allocated to them.

And in DH's experience the contractors were all really nice, and many did excellent work. Economists will be arguing forever about whether the stimulus package's "Just do it, never mind the quality" philosophy saved the nation. It's a pity that there wasn't enough time to scope the work properly.

And now, dear Gd,  we have a Liberal Government, not noted for their philosophy of mercy towards suspected unproductive swill.

So what's happening with maintenance today?

Budgets are increasingly restricted. What money there is will be diverted to major infrastructure projects, e.g. replacing deteriorating plumbing , sewage, ageing gas lines. Handovers to Community Housing to continue apace of course. The PAS (Property Assessment Surveys) are things of the past. If it ain't an emergency and it's not part of planned maintenance, which will happen who knows when, DH opines that you should not waste your time ringing the HNSW Call Centre 1300 Housing as there is nothing much left in the maintenance kitty.

The terribly nice people there (and it is with pleasure that DH reports that the call centre team has increased in size, and waiting times are down), will tell you the same thing at great and somewhat obscurantist length and then offer to pass your request onto your local office. DH is not saying a word about what is likely to happen then. But, hey, try your luck.

What are the Liberals up to?

Meanwhile the Liberals in their wisdom, or perhaps in their desire to be seen to be different, bold and decisive, have decided to to decisively hack the hell into HNSW and split it between two Departments: Family and Community Services under the pleasant though clearly lightweight Pru Goward, while Assets is moving to the Dept of Finance and Services, under the Minister known as Greg Pearce.  This is to happen in October and no-one has the slightest clue how it will play out. Pru Goward's keynote speech at the Shelter Conference  may give us some clues. If memory serves, she believes in motherhood, looking after the genuinely weak, and she encourages our (underfunded) NGO's to be really creative and think up something quick because certainly no ideas were forthcoming from her.

How this split into two can possibly be a good idea is anyone's guess. Think of the working parties to delineate the demarcations that are bound to spring up. Think of all the solutions that happen through chance meetings in corridors and by coffee machines that can't happen when the two arms of an organisation are compartmentalised and geographicallly separated. And, of course, the stationary costs...

Sylvia Hale deserts housos for Excellent Middle-Eastern Adventure

Retired NSW Greens Housing Spokesperson to announce ambitious plan to rehouse 7 Million "refugees" in Israel?



All Hale, Sylvia! Saviour of the Fleet

Retired NSW Greens housing spokesperson, Sylvia Hale has apparently accepted a post as Turkey's emissary to Israel.  In a flotilla initiated by Turkish Islamists, she is planning to breach the borders of the only halfway democratic state in the Middle East on a batty crusade to rehouse 7 million so-called Palestinian refugees in a land that is 1/3 the size of Tasmania!



You may recall that during its stimulus package splurge, the Australian Government expended $5 Billion to build just over 19,000 affordable housing units across our vast nation. And that's the most the Lucky Country can afford despite raking in gazillions in mining royalties.  Actually ... whatever happened to that? ...

Yet housing expert Hale obviously has a plan up her sleeve for housing all 7 million of  em'!  DH is waiting with bated breath for its release. If only she had applied such genius to NSW's housing shortage instead of joining this Flotilla of Fools!

The Dibley Branch of the NSW Labor Party: A Memoir

By offering this memoir of her life as political spakfilla in the Dibley Branch of the NSW Labor Party, DH hopes to be right there in the rearguard behind such influential party reformers as John Button, Rodney Cavalier, and John Faulkner.


Dibley Branch rank and file.
The good old days when
we still had a quorum.

She can think of no better background reading for this searing expose than Button's 2002 Quarterly Essay, Beyond Belief: What Future for Labor?  Cavalier's  Power Crisis: The Self-Destruction of a State Labor Party, and Faulkner's Neville Wran Lecture


The above works may give the impression that the ALP consists of Dibley branches all the way down, but such is not the case. DH's branch must take the honours, being generally considered to be, arguably, the very grandaddy of all ALP branches in our great state.


So how did DH's career as a backbrancher, doorknocker and how-to-vote leaflet-thruster begin, and why did she abandon ship?

It's easy to answer the latter. As a houso, DH is already a member of a despised and stigmatised minority. To compound the odium by easy identification as NSW Labor branch memeber is more than any one human being can be expected to bear.

As to how DH decided to join the party: It certainly was not that she was "A True Believer", which she came to see as a rallying call for working-class Catholics devised by middle-class Romantics. Not being either of the above, DH doesn't believe in belief.

It all began when she got the offer of public housing far away from the worst block of flats in the worst street of the silvertail suburb she would have liked to have grown up in. Deposited with DH Junior in the wilds of the Inner West, for the sake of sheer survival, she needed to plug into the local goss toot sweet.  


The quickest route to being-in-the-know was obviously to join a party: the Greens, Labor, whatever. Well, not the Liberals. There were still limits in those days, now sadly hard to distinguish.

Her quest for the good oil began with the local ALP. Come the nth Tuesday of the month, donning a fetching red bandanna, she poked her nose around the corner of Dibley Town Hall's Small Meeting Room.

Well, friends, DH found herself gasping. "OMIGODDDDDDDDD!!!! THIS is Australia's major political party??? This round-up of the red-nosed denizens of the Tiddler's Arms? This feeble handful of bearded loons from the local mariner's rest? These hairy ladies? No, sorry, that last was DH spotting her own reflection mirrored in portraits of aldermen gone by. But let's not overlook the party's youth wing: a thug or two in reverse base-ball caps, casing the joint for the possibility fetching up in a safe Labor seat.

And presiding over all, the new Member for Dibley, a smart babe with a bob-cut and saint-like reserves of patience.

"OMiGod", thought DH, "if ever an assemblage was ripe for the picking by a consortium of white-shoed mafiosi and property developers, this it!  Why, our major party is seriously at risk of being totally white-anted from within!!!”.   Being totally clueless and out of touch with contemporary politics, she did not realise that it had already happened.   And so it came to pass that without a moment's hesitation, DH threw to the winds all thoughts of taking the moral high ground by joining the Greens!  Her country needed her!  She would single-handedly, if needs be, wrest back the ALP for the underprivileged!

Of course, things were not always as they seemed. The bearded loons, on the whole, turned out to be erudite and charming. The young thugs were, to a lad, idealistic children of the middle-classes, and who could begrudge them their romantic fantasies of being working-class heroes? And as for the tipplers, DH diagnosed most of them as self-medicated aspies, trying to get through a life made difficult by too much intelligence married to an insufficiency of social front. As a sometime Asperger's advocate  DH is allowed to say such things.  

And there was not even any point lying in wait with a rolling-pin for the whiteshoe brigade. They never ventured into Dibley, which was earmarked as a play-pen for the remnants of the Left, a necessary escape hatch that allowed them to dream on.


Fortunately, the branch had only two factions, the Droners, and the Bletherers.

So DH never got to be in the know. If texting hadn't been invented she would have slept through most of the meetings. Interminable hours were taken up debating technological matters that practically no-one present was competent to judge. Who was she (or anyone else lacking an engineering or economics degree), to evaluate the need for a desalination plant, the intricacies of the national electricity grid (or was it market?)... Actually DH does have a part economics degree, but it was only in Political Economy, useless in any practical sense, when you consider it's the same education that Michael Costa and Antony Albanese had.

It was not always thus. Believe it or not, DH is no longer the smart young thing you see cradled in the arms of a raw prawn on your right. No, way back in the seventies, she was already a member of this selfsame branch until rising rents forced her out of the 'hood. Way back then, each branch meeting was stacked to the rafters with ambitious 30 somethings: bristling with barristers, slithering with silks. The halls echoed with economists and tottered under the sheer mass of Trotskyite entryists. The rule-book was used like a football. Pre-meeting strategies were drawn up, lawyers took up positions on the playing field and controlled the meeting by passing points of order to each other at breakneck speed. With such brilliance on display, mere teachers, academics, and public servants rarely managed to get a word in edgewise.

And always there were the queues, those g-ddamn queues,  snaking around the corner and upstairs for credentialling:  Peter Baldwin's leftie army of gentrifiers jostling against joblots of the right's bully boys rounded up from the local pub, the Branch-Stackers Arms. It was all about saving Dibley from High Rise Developments. Or anyhow that was how it was explained to DH, who being a clueless young stackee, had absolutely no idea what was going on. It all culminated on that infamous night when the meeting room lights suddenly went out,  something heavy crashed through a window in a shower of broken glass, and ...

... to be continued

Waiting for the Tenant Messiah



The Handing Down of the First Draft Tenant Participation
Framework Consultation Paper

 Oh ye of little faith. Didst thou think HNSW had hidden Its face from thee forever? Didst though think that rumours of the advent of the Draft Tenant Participation Framework Consultation Paper of 2008 was merely a chimera*

Then sing Hallelujah! For it has come to pass that with the last of the stimulus manna consumed, the heavenly gates of Housing NSW Ashfield have once more reopened for core business.


And lo they have released yet another blueprint for the New Jerusalem, which they call the Draft Tenant Engagement Framework Consultation Paper 2011

 

The Handing Down of the 2nd, 3rd,
4th, and nth drafts ad infinitum



But verily DH sayeth unto thee, these flimsy frameworks will avail you naught, for lest a Tenant Messiah arises from amongst you, your consults will be as the dust, which blows hither and thither and settles not, neither will ye dwell in a peaceful habitation, let alone in quiet enjoyment of secure tenure.

At best you will score a free cup of International Roast, some assorted creme biscuits and if you're lucky, the bus fare home.  

In short, without an independent tenants' union, consults will come and go, but you will never get past the 2nd of the 5 gates of Tenant Consultation Purgatory, viz:

1. Information:
2. Consultation:
3. Involvement:
4. Collaboration: 
5. Empowerment: In your dreams...

For you don't get what you don't fight and organise for, and wherefore shouldst HNSW be expected to organise its own opposition against itself?

And how on earth is this Independent Social Housing Tenants Union to be formed out of the mixed multitude of "those most in need"? DH sees no way forward unless a leader arises from within the tenant body with the energy to unite, motivate and hone us into an effective independent force. 



*Chimera: (n): a grotesque monster of diverse parts,  often depicted with the head of a bean-counter and the body of a social worker.    

Gillard still waltzing to Howard's tune.

Now that Labor's welfare-bashing budget has been unveiled, the identity of the mystery couple in the previous post can be revealed.

Disgusting, innit?

Valentine: Happy 15th Anniversary HNSW, love, DH.

DH has only ever received one Valentine's day gift in her sad,  unloved life. And that was from Housing NSW in 1996.

Yes, today is the 15th Anniversary of the date she took up residence in the only secure accommodation she has ever known! 
That is why, for all their faults, she will adore HNSW forever. They are the best Landlord in NSW!

(And, no, this touching pas-de-deux is not an accurate representation of DH's relationship with the Director-General). 

The Sharia Law component of the Residential Tenancies Act 2010

I terminate thee, I terminate thee, I terminate thee


Under the new act, landlords still retain a unilateral right to evict tenants as per classical Sunni Sharia Divorce Law.


What, you may ask, does DH know abt Sharia law? Not much, but she found the subtleties on Wikipedia.


DH thought Western law was considered to be an advance on classical Sharia law, but there you go...

So:

WHAT DO WE WANT?

• "No Grounds Terminations" by landlords terminated
• Compensation for tenants who are terminated because a landlord wishes to speculate on the property, including the cost of removal, and compensation for stress, loss of work time, disruption of children's schooling, loss of accrued social capital (neighbourhood friendships)
• Failing this, at the very least, a right by tenants to "No Grounds Termination" with no more penalty than landlords suffer

WHEN DO WE WANT IT?

• By amendment. ASAP!

WHAT ARE OUR CHANCES OF GETTING IT UNDER A LIBERAL GOVT?

• Shut up, Sunshine,  and keep packing...

 

The Act is dead! Hail to the new Residential Tenancies Act 2010.

The point, however,  is to continuously improve it!

Today, 31st Jan 2011, the old Residential Tenancies act will be replaced by the 2010 Act

Overall, there are a lot of improvements for private tenants, and DH refers you to an excellent wrap at the Tenant Union's blog The Brown Couch

The good bits include:

• regulation of tenant databases (those evil repositories of haphazard misinformation that shafted you the way credit rating databases can, but without half the transparency)
• protection of tenancies in some cases where domestiv violence is an issue
• better protection for tenants in share-housing arrangements
• fee-free’ options for paying rent (can you believe landlords had the option of making you pay to be able to pay your rent.)
• longer notice periods for ‘no-grounds’ termination notices...
  which bring us to the bad bits....

The BAAAAAD bits

Like, how on earth, in a country like Australia, can landlords decide on a whim, to force you to move at any time it suits them??? And yet not so much as pay for your removal costs, not to mention compensation for time lost at work, stress, interruptions to your children's education, loss of social capital (that's "friendly neighbours", but sounds impressive if filing a complaint to anyone who will listen)

For factsheets explaining your rights as a tenant, see www.tenants.org.au. If you run into trouble, contact your local Tenants Advice & Advocacy Service (details also at www.tenants.org.au)

Happy {Invasion/Australia} Day, Girtrude!

 By all means, rejoice, Girtrude, if you:

• are young (and preferably slim)
• free (at least outside business hours and on weekends)
• can afford a plot of golden soil
• earn at least minimum award rate wealth for your toil
• own your own mining conglomerate

  

That's if you're not an Aboriginal mourning Invasion Day, or one of the 5% of Aussies who can't find toil no matter how often they rewrite their resumes, or how many Cert IV's and Statements of Attainment they achieve  



Of crse, some who rejoice on
Australia Day are yet to hear
the bad news..

This includes people over 50, disabled people, people with borderline mental illnesses or intellectual disabilities who are not defined as disabled, trying to live on $235 a week for a single person.   

 

Bad luck too for the 1 in 10 Australians below the poverty line, that's 2 million Aussies, baby!

Not even going to bore you again with the depressing stats on homelessness in "The Lucky Country". See previous post 

PS. For those of you who come by sea, sorry, we appear to have run out of boundless plains...Please refer to the Minister for Sustainability for further instructions



But seriously, we are all blessed with a beautiful country, so  let's work together to make Australia Truly Fair!

Bottom-line: Wishing housing tragics a Grin-and-Bear-It New Year

Be happy if you can, but it would seem excessively chirpy for DH to be skipping around wishing a Happy Smiley New Year to the: 

• 1,100,000 Australian families in housing stress (ie paying more than 1/3 of gross income on housing)
• 100,000 homeless
• 175,000 on public housing waiting lists
• 49,000 on community housing waiting lists
• 10,000 on Aboriginal housing waiting lists *

Credit should be given to Federal Labor during Tanya Plibersek's tenure as Housing Minister, for their attempts to reverse the housing neglect of the Howard years.

Unfortunately you can't reverse 10 years' neglect in one.  But Labor has given it a game effort via the National Rental Affordability Scheme, which subsidises developers prepared to offer homes at 20% below market rent. 

And they have committed $5.6 billion to the Nation Building Stimulus Plan (Housing) which is expected to deliver 19,600 new homes, of which 10,000 were completed by Xmas 2010.

So a big HAPPY NEW YEAR to the 10,000 lucky ones, and chin up to the rest!

The stimulus tsunami has rolled over, start bailing...

Credit should also go to Housing NSW for turning around on a pinhead, and pushing through the Federal government's stringent and high pressure, use-it-or-lose-it demands. It's been a tough year and you can't entirely blame nimbyism for opposition to construction without time for prior consultation.

* The data refers to all Australia, rounded to the nearest 1,000, cited in Shelter NSW Housing Australia fact sheet. Based on the 2006 census or later depending on availability. Check the link for accurate years.