“My name is David, I’ve lived in Public Housing for 11 years in a wonderful 3 bedroom unit within a cul-de-sac from 1978. It’s provided us with an amazing sense of security and it’s been absolutely wonderful to live in. I wouldn’t live anywhere else, and in fact I’ve felt most secure in this home. It’s a home in Elizabeth East, and it’s thankfully not been privatised.
However, we are at a crossroads, we’re at a crossroads now as a society. We can choose to have homelessness, poverty, and division or we can choose another future. We can choose more public housing to deal with the rental crisis, to deal with the welfare, the health and the education issues in a holistic manner.
We can choose band aid solutions as governments have been for decades, but they absolutely are not working anymore. The alternative is working towards universal public housing, building thousands of public homes, fixing and upgrading current homes that are both publicly and privately owned and bringing them into public ownership where they belong. Passed down from one generation of the collective to the next. That’s what we should be doing. We should be having properly funded tenants unions, appropriately funded public housing with services that work for all of us.
I want to see a really good standard of living for people, and that means having homes that are actually liveable, accessible, that are sustainable and that are income controlled. Rent caps and rent freezes are a start, but let’s go further over the long term and tell the landlord class and the capitalist class that we will not stop there. We want a housing system with more public housing that is controlled at 25% of your income. We want housing that is public and universally available to all people ASAP. We want essential services back in public hands and we want the rest of society in the hands of the many, not the few but in the collective! It’s time.
We have choices. We can choose between tax cuts for the wealthy totalling over $200 billion. We can choose the AUKUS Submarines at over $368 Billion. We can choose handouts to fossil fuel corporations or even the $8 billion+ per year spent on franking credits and negative gearing etc. All of the tax breaks for the landlords to buy their 5th, their 6th, their 7th, their 8th, their 9th and their 10th home. Shame on that!
What should we do instead? Those opposite: the politicians in the Liberal and Labor parties, the landlords, the capitalists, what are they telling us? They say we need to pinch and that we should save by spending less here and less there. They tell us: there’s a trillion dollars of debt while they spend the money in all the wrong places and they refuse to tax the wealthy while ripping apart what is left of Australia’s progressive taxation system. All while they spend more money on war machines.
Absolutely not, we choose otherwise, we choose an alternative that says we will tax the richest, we will make the greedy fuckers pay, and we will put our services back where they belong, in our hands!!” – David Deex.
Anti-Poverty Network SA 