Housing Minister Matt Brown talks tough (to small fry)

Mild-mannered NSW Housing Minister Matt Brown is the the latest in a long line of Labor Housing Ministers (think the "Honorable" Joe "Mr Clean" Tripodi, and Cherie "Trust Me, I was a Houso" Burton) who get off on talking tough to small fry.



Referring to the new Tenant Fraud Amendments to the Housing Act 2001 tabled in Parliament last week, which will see draconian measures to combat public housing tenant fraud, Matt Brown told the Daily Telegraph "We won't cop anyone ripping off those most in need".

And BMW owners have had a wake-up call too from our fearless Minister. They can forget about applying for public housing now. They'll just have to go back to the North Shore where they belong.

This inflammatory language is certain to rebound on the vast majority of honest tenants scratching to get by in poorly maintained housing stock, thanks to combined Howard Government parsimony and lack of commitment and imagination from NSW Labor.

Like the renowned Strong Man of NSW, Morris Iemma, (oh, please, don't frighten us!), young Matt has taken to talking big, in language he wouldn't dare use if he was targetting the major perpetrators of fraud in this country, big business tax "minimizers".

Think Kerry Packer, who got a State Funeral for his services to Tax Evasion. That parasite is still getting increasingly moist-eyed obituaries lamenting the "good old days", when the bugger paid practically no tax, and then gambled away the hard labor of Australians in overseas casinos and horse races.

Kiama Karma: It's not the undies that undid Matt Brown

Ex-Housing Minister Matt Brown's karma caught up with him yesterday. As Swamiji Semi-Detached Houso teaches us: "He who encourages the riff-raff to dob on their neighbours, shall himself be dobbed in by his parliamentary colleagues. And if he's not careful he may be reincarnated as a lower life-form, such as a real estate agent".

While Housing NSW's compassionate leftist hand invests heavily in community development, ex-Minister Brown's punitive Rightist hand undermined hard-won trust by encouraging public housing tenants to act out their petty resentments against their neighbours. Only recently, Mr Brown proudly trumpeted the number of people who had denounced their fellow housos to the "Housing Police" in the early days of the Tenant Fraud amnesty.

Mind you, there's a lot to be said for casting out from our midst these BMW-driving silvertails with their bizarre fetish for cross-dressing in trackie-daks and slumming it in sleazy low-rent ghettos. They should be corralled in Vaucluse or Pymble where we can keep an eye on them!

But then again, it's not for nothing that the Mighty Bronzed Oz despise dobbers. Nothing undermines our great traditions of social capital accumulation (that's "mateship" to the non-latte-drinkers amongst us) more

It's not the undies that undid him

But it's not the undies that undid Matt Brown in DH's eyes. What a man does to unwind in the privacy of his Ministerial suite on his own self-funded sofa is his own business. If keeping the lid on such antics wasn't the civilised media norm, we'd have heard a lot more, for instance, about how a certain Minister from one of our barbarous neighbouring states earned the moniker of "Swizzlestick". But admittedly, that particular politician is believed to be sufficiently talented to be worth preserving.

No, the true award for tastelessness came with the parading of first Matt Brown's niece and then his hapless child for the media, in the sad belief that this would somehow make things better. With such poor political judgment, it's no wonder that the man left no visible mark on the housing portfolio, other than to parrot his illustrious mentor Joe Tripodi's tenant-bashing catchphrases. And to rush Australia's most discrimatory legislation through Parliament, the extraordinary "Tenant Fraud Amendment 2008" which makes the NSW Department of Housing into the state's, and maybe the nation's, only government department with the powers of criminal prosecution.

With such acumen, the Minister will make a grand real estate agent. While holidaying in Kiama recently, DH thinks she found just the shopfront (left) for a start-up.

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Oh, alright, alright, so DH was given notice by her higher self recently. Well, she can hardly be expected to stay silent in the face of taunts from her fan-base (all 1 of him) that she was going soft on Housing Ministers.

Google StreetView nabs BMW

Being the public-spirited houso that she is, DH feels she has been seriously letting herself down.

With Housing NSW' Tenant Fraud Hotline in full swing, she has so far failed to dob in so much as one single BMW owner! She knows they're out there in droves, her Housing Ministers have told her so, yet she daily struggles with the guilty knowledge that it is only her lack of vigilance that has prevented the apprehension of these unconscionable barnacles on the public purse.

So when she first heard of Google Streetview yesterday, she realised immediately that she had the perfect tool to do the necessary large scale reconnaisance of the neighbourhood!

While it is true that she has not so far been able to capture any BMW in flagrante in the neighbourhood, DH wasn't born yesterday, you know. Why, there are no lengths to which the sybarites of public housing will not go to conceal the evidence of their opulent lifestyles! So she was a wise-up as soon as she discovered the suspicious object depicted. She anticipates that she will be in a position to make a citizen's arrest just as soon as she has had a chance to nip down the road and peak under the next-door's tarp.

She urges her fellow tenants to follow her example, do the right thing, and keep a close watch on their precincts. It is to be hoped that the Department's Tenant Fraud SWAT team has lost no time in establishing an evaluatory committee to investigate the addition of this invaluable tool to the Departmental Surveillance Armoury.

Note: DH hastens to advise Housing NSW that the late model Hyundai Getz peeking out of her garage belongs to a visiting friend.

2008 | The Housing Year that was | Down Among the Housos

It's the same the 'ole world over,
It's the poor wot get the blame
It's the rich wot get the bail-outs...
Ain't it all a bleedin' shame

"Reshaping Public Housing" has started to bite, particularly in the area of ...

Mental health

As public housing becomes increasingly limited to "those most in need" DH has noticed increasing anxiety among tenants about threatening behaviour from people with behavioural and delusional disorders. This perception is borne out by the 2007-8 Central Sydney North Regional Tenant Resource Service Report which states that for the second year in a row, concerns about mental health/ anti-social behaviour/ rebuilding community cohesion have edged out the perennial tenant favourite gripe, Maintenance, inadequacy of. When you consider that tenants all over are reporting that all but emergency maintenance has been on hold for at least 18 months, while we await the new you beaut Planned Maintenance regime (see below), you can surmise how worried tenants must be.

One of the pillars of "Reshaping" was meant to be the "Accord", a formal agreement between various agencies to support tenants with high support needs to maintain their tenancies. Three years later, there have only been a number of pilot projects, and they are still "under evaluation".

Waiting for Maintenance

Housing NSW's maintenance costs are about $1 million dollars a day, based on the previous year's maintenance bill of the order of $350 million. HNSW is attempting to make long term savings by introducing a new regime of planned maintenance. The idea is that contractors armed with Blackberries descend on all of us, survey what needs fixing, beam it all up to a central database, and then it all gets done in one broad swathe. We await the next exciting episode.

Meanwhile, a typical case study...

18 months ago, a tenant reports a cracked and jammed window that won't open. HNSW response: Nail the window down until approval is given for replacement. Many calls later, approval given. Approval now had for months, but nothing done. Now approval reneged, while awaiting the New Maintenance Sweep.

Tenant Fraud ruckus

Under that fine upstanding young minister, Matt Brown, Housing NSW became the first non-police department in Australia to give itself powers of criminal prosecution over tenants who falsely reported their earnings. The amendment to the Housing act that did this was rushed through parliament, before people like Clover Moore and Sylvia Hale had a chance to gather their wits. The Minister guesstimated that the savings would be about $50 million. Tenants were encouraged to dob in their neighbours, which would seem to militate against the millions spent by Housing NSW on Community development and building strong cohesive communities. There were about 4400 reports of which about 1/4 were self-reports according to "Your Home". Does this mean that 3/4 were reports by neighbours? It will be interesting to see the actual savings compared to the cost of eternal vigilance

2008 | The Housing Year that was | For policy wonks and acronym aficionados

[And if you're not into policy, bureaucratese, and acronyms, go straight to 2008 The Housing Year that was Down Among the Housos. This excursion into tedium is just to disprove those who claim DH is "all sparkling wit and style, and no substance"].

2008 was the year the new Labor Government began to fulfil its election promise to redress the Howard Liberal government’s shameful neglect of housing over its 11 years in office. Howard and Co left housing to “Market Forces”. We all know about that now, don’t we? During its tenure, the Liberals ripped $3 billion out of social housing and transferred it, via the Commonwealth Rental Assistance Scheme, to the pockets of private landlords. Despite fundamental agreement between a raft of government, industry, and NGO housing experts at the 2008 National Housing Conference that negative gearing is the greatest cause of housing inequity, no government has so far been game to touch the national sacred cowshed.

Federal

Tanya Plibersek, universally admired for her commitment to social justice, compassion, intelligence and seeming tireless energy, appointed minister for the new portfolio of Housing.

Oct 14 The federal government announced an increase in First Home Owner Grants to $14,000 for established dwellings and $21,000 for newly-built dwellings

Nov 24 The National Rental Affordability Scheme Act 2008 (NRAS) pass. This scheme aims to increase the supply of affordable rental dwellings by up to 50,000 by 2012. Under the Scheme successful applicants will be eligible to receive a National Rental Incentive for each approved dwelling, on the condition that they are rented to eligible low and moderate income households at 20 per cent below market rates. Second round applications close 27 March 2009

Nov 29 The National Affordable Housing Agreement, (NAHA) replaces the former Commonwealth State Housing Agreement. The Council of Australian Governments (COAG), aka the States, agreed to the … er.. $10 billion agreement, which means they will get $800 million over five years to reform and improve responses to homelessness $1.94 billion over 10 years ($834.6 million over five years) to improve the quality of Indigenous housing and tackle overcrowding in remote communities; and $400 million over two years for social housing as a down payment on longer term reforms.

Dec 21 PM Kevin Rudd and Housing Minister Tanya Plibersek release the White Paper on Homelessness. The government will spend $6.1 billion over 5 years with the aim of halving homelessness (current 105,000 people sleeping out on any given night) by 2020. Amazingly, the NGO's appear to love it.

NSW
Lots happening in Housing NSW, which is bristling with new policies and strategies. Following on from 3 rightwing Housing Ministers whose main public pronouncements took the form of tenant bashing, we now have in David Borger, a Minister who actually has an interest in housing, urban design and renewal. Perhaps we can start taking our BMW's out of our closets..

Housing NSW is looking at a raft of you-beaut strategies around things like Common Access (so applicants don't have to traipse around telling their story to a multitude of agencies), a Disability Action Plan, new hi tech service delivery options, improving Aboriginal Service Delivery, a strategy for supporting young people in public housing. The only question is, how long will it all take???

Apr 15 The Housing Amendment (Tenant Fraud) bill passed, making Housing NSW the only government agency in Australia with criminal prosecution powers.

Sep 8 David Borger, former Mayor of Parramatta, replaces Matt Brown as Housing Minister

Sep 10 Ex- Housing Minister Matt Brown resigns in disgrace after only 3 days in his job as Police Minister

Nov 11 The NSW Mini Budget cuts $80 million from Department of Housing over 4 years, which is to be achieved by “improved operational efficiency”. The government chooses to focus on retaining its AAA rating, and breaks its promise on ongoing contributions to Housing NSW working capital requirements. The NSW Council of Social Security NCOSS response to the Mini Budget says:

The Treasurer in introducing the Mini Budget called it “tough, decisive and
detailed”. He did not call it fair. … there is nothing in the Mini Budget
for low income and disadvantaged households.

Dec 4 the NSW Legislative Council Standing Committee on Social issues announced an inquiry into homelessness and low-cost rental accommodation.

Dec 5 Housing NSW Annual Report released

Dec 11 Housing NSW releases its new strategy on Environmental Sustainability

Confession

If you're wondering why DH has been silent lately, it's because she spends most of her waking hours job hunting, doing courses and volunteering in various housing, disability and local community activities. Being a member of various HNSW committees, DH has found it pretty damn hard to be an independant critic when HNSW staff are so intelligent, nice and well-meaning, and work so hard on so many carefully-thought out policies.

It seems churlish then to complain when innovations don't translate effectively down to the local level. Of course it takes years to develop and implement policies, so being a considerate old houso, DH has been practicing patience, and a wait-and-see attitude.

(Though oddly enough, the ham-fisted "Tenant Fraud Amendment" and the "Ferguson" amendment were brought in practically overnight... But that's NSW Labor's fault ... )

The upshot is that over the years, this diary has gone soft on HNSW. If there is anyone to blame, it goes back to lack of commitment from the state government, especially the terrible right wing ministerial trio of Tripodi, Cherie Burton, and Matt Brown, to abuse and neglect from the Howard Government, (may there memory be blotted out), and sadly, a lack of cohesion, organisation and leadership from amongst tenants.

Mystery deepens as 30,000 NSW renters simply vanish!

Shock figures released at yesterday's Housing Budget Estimates committee meeting reveal that 30,000 people have vanished from NSW Public Housing waiting lists in the space of 1 year!

But only about 110 new dwellings have been built.

So where did they all go?

Did they manage to find suitable accommodation in the midst of this nation's greatest housing crisis, when the eligibility limit for public housing hovers near the poverty line?

Did 30,000 BMW owners fess up during the Tenant Fraud Amnesty and voluntarily make way for those "more in need"?

Did those waiting more than 10 years give up out of sheer frustration?

Snatched wholesale by aliens?

Responding to a question from Greens Senator Sylvia Hale about whether the numbers had declined due to frustration at the long wait, or due to tightening of eligibility requirements, new Housing Minister David Borger replied that the decline was thanks to regular surveys to determine ongoing eligibility and better matching of applicants to criteria (which are tighter). In addition, Mr Borger stated that "a number" of products like Rentstart, others products unspecified, allowed renters to make choices in relation to private housing. Umm, Rentstart applies to people with savings of less than $1000 dollars, pays 75 percent of bond, then you're on your own in Sydney's ferocious rental market, and if you're not mentally ill, disabled or aged, but merely on a low income, you haven't got a snowflakes of getting public housing in less than 8 years. In short, we're talking about closer applicant matching to the complete non-availability of housing to anyone on a low income who can still crawl.

What it's all about is that 40,000 sounds a lot better than an embarassing 70,000, and a positively excruciating 100,000 the year before. It reduces the pressure on governments to cough up a greater share of the national cake to help struggling renters.

But before you get up in arms about Housing NSW, who struggle gamely with inadequate funding, blame the Howard government. No wonder there's no new housing. They robbed Public Housing of $3 billion worth of funding over their miserable tenure. And alas, $3 billion these days wouldn't buy you a magnum of bubbly at a Bank Holiday picnic...

Iemma hires Pope, Randwick Racecourse, to hear Houso Confessions

So now we know why Iemma and da Boys had to hire Randwick Racecourse and bring in the Pope!

It was the only way to fit in the 350,000 housos lining up to confess their sins in this month of the Tenant Fraud Confessional and Amnesty.

For whomsoever amongst us hath not salted away a bit of moonlighting income to pay the electricity bills or fix the kids' teeth, let them cast the first stone.