Students and unionists protest Brisbane’s housing crisis
The student campaign group “Get a Room: Students for Affordable Housing” organised a protest in Brisbane on 14 June, calling on the Queensland Labor government to take action on the housing crisis. Around 500 members of the construction union, the CFMEU, left a nearby building site to join the action outside Parliament House, demanding a rent freeze, a massive expansion of public housing and a ban on evictions.
Despite a $12 billion budget surplus, boosted by increased revenue from the skyrocketing price of coal, the Palaszczuk government has done almost nothing for Queenslanders suffering from housing stress. The surplus is the largest of any state government in history, and yet Labor’s only new housing commitment is to build a measly 500 homes by 2025.
Rally chair Laura Nolan, environment officer for the University of Queensland student union and a member of Socialist Alternative, called out the government’s budget as “bullshit”, saying “The housing market is failing students and failing working class people”, before leading a chant: “Fuck your surplus, we need houses!”.
Amy McMahon, Greens MP for South Brisbane, noted that there are already more than 50,000 people on the waiting list for public housing in Queensland. “Labor’s plan for public housing will take 50 years to house those people, and that’s if not a single new person is added to that list”, she said.
According to the Queensland Council of Social Services, rents have risen faster in Queensland than in any other state. Rents are shooting up in Brisbane, but the situation is even worse in regional towns. Average rents in Rockhampton and Mackay have increased by over 40 percent in the last five years, and in Gladstone they have gone up by a shocking 80 percent. Homelessness in Queensland has increased by 22 percent since 2017, much faster than the national average of 8 percent.
The attendance of hundreds of construction workers is an excellent reminder that trade unionists, students and the poor have a shared interest in fighting back against this crisis. The CFMEU has repeatedly called for the government to build more public housing, and construction unionists have a long history of demanding housing that ordinary people can afford.
“We’ve got capacity to build more public housing in this state. We’re happy to build it; in fact we take great pride in providing a service to the community”, said CFMEU assistant secretary Jade Ingham at the rally.
“The government needs to get real with their own priorities and start focusing on what really matters. We are in the throes of a war on the working class. [The housing crisis] is a consequence of decades of that war, of profits being put before people, of big multinational corporations, who pay fuck-all tax, being given priority over the working class in this country.”
