There was once a little pub in Carlton called the Corkman. Built in 1854, it was one of the oldest buildings in the suburb. It wasn’t particularly charming—mission brown had been slopped all over it in the 1970s—and it didn’t have a particularly worthwhile social function, mostly used as a watering hole by Melbourne University law students. 
But in 2016 when its owners—developers who had bought the building a few years earlier—illegally razed it, leaving just a pile of bricks and clouds of asbestos dust, it seemed that all of Melbourne was up in arms. 
The Corkman wasn’t beloved; nor was it theirs to destroy. It was ours; so the sentiment went. To have it turned to rubble, in the middle of the day and in defiance of the rules intended to prevent such things, was an insult. 
The incident briefly gave a face and name to the anonymous and apparently unstoppable forces that shape our cities: the owners and developers who see profit where the rest of us see the potential for shelter, respite, connection or recreation. It emphasised the abject lack of control most of us have over our physical surroundings. It hasn’t always been this way. 
Cities have always been sites of struggle and social conflict because cities are where both capital and the working class is concentrated. But cities have often been the object of that struggle too. 
The most well-known example is the green bans, which involved construction workers organised in the Builders’ Labourers Federation (BLF) refusing to demolish or build things that they deemed to be contrary to workers’ interests or the social good. Their actions saved numerous heritage buildings, green spaces and public housing estates, and sabotaged planning crimes like the proposal to put a carpark and 24-hour restaurant in Melbourne’s Botanical Gardens. 
The NSW BLF came to be regarded as, in the words of one journalist, “the most powerful town planning agency operating in NSW”. One notable victory the union had was to save the public housing at Millers Point and the Rocks in Sydney in the 1970s. A plan to clear out these working-class populations in inner Sydney and redevelop the area, which sits right up against the harbour, was stymied by actions taken by the BLF and residents. But 40 years later, and in the context of a much weaker union movement, the plan was carried through. The travesty of workers, new migrants and the poor occupying prime harbourside real estate simply was too much for the state government to endure, and the $1 billion it pocketed from the dispossession of the residents of Millers Point and the nearby Sirius building too good to forego. 
Far from meekly accepting “urban renewal”—i.e. moving out the poor to make way for the rich—as inevitable, the BLF built a movement premised on the idea that the city is built by and lived in by workers, and that they should have a say over how it looks and functions. 
As the union’s NSW leader Jack Mundey put it, workers are not “just robots directed by develop-builders ... more and more we are going to determine which buildings we will build”. The BLF understood that the battle to improve the conditions of the working class was also a battle about the city. 
“There must be, in all this city area provision for working-class people, for people of low and middle income, to be able to reside in the area”, Mundey said. “It’s not much good winning a 35-hour week if we are going to choke to death in planless and polluted cities, where rents are too high, where ordinary people can’t live.”
The green ban era was the heyday of workers’ struggle over cities in Australia. And it wasn’t only the unions staking claim to the city. As students and intellectuals descended on the inner cities during the 1960s and ‘70s—drawn in by mass tertiary education and the political foment of the time—residents’ action groups emerged. It was a time of pitched battles over freeways, parks and “slums”. 
The continued existence and character of the Melbourne suburb of Carlton, for example, is largely due to these fights. In 1969, Housing Commission Victoria had plans to “renew” nearly one square kilometre of Carlton—half the entire suburb—that it had declared a slum. This, of course, meant demolishing the existing housing and relocating the occupants. Many of the poor and working-class residents didn’t want to go, rejected the slum declaration and fought—on at least one occasion with shotgun in hand—to keep the commission out. They were joined by the students and academics who weren’t keen on the gritty and bohemian suburbs they had been drawn to being turned over to “the brutal modernism” of pre-fab concrete housing and huge apartment towers. It was in Carlton that the Commission’s decades long campaign of slum reclamations ended. 
Like anything dictated by the market, urban development is chaotic and highly irrational. Nowhere is this irrationality more evident than in relation to how our cities have responded to the climate crisis. 
Up and down the coast of Australia, brand new houses are being built in areas that all sensible science says will be inundated by a rising sea by the end of this century, and well before that will be vulnerable to storm surges and flooding. 
Researchers asked a group of developers and property investors to explain why. Their answers were published in a 2021 article in the journal Climate Risk Management.
“The change [catastrophic sea level rises] isn’t going to come through now, or in the next two, three, four, five years—it’s going to come through gradually over the next 50 to 100 years and if that’s the case, do I really need to care? I mean it’s a terribly selfish thing to say but as a property owner, do I need to care?”, asked one respondent. 
Many of Sydney’s growth areas are on floodplains. The current rules allow developers to construct estates in these areas so long as they are considered likely to flood only once every 100 years. But some have had two such events just in the last five years. 
In Melbourne—up until recently the fastest growing of all Australia’s cities—most growth is happening on the fringes, where about 100,000 people settle every year. The urban boundary has expanded three times in the last two decades, twice under Labor governments at the behest of developers and landowners who reap huge windfall profits when native grasslands and farmland is re-zoned residential. 
The housing estates that are subsequently built in these areas are a patchwork of disconnected “planned” communities—miles away from the public transport network—with little in the way of jobs, shops, hospitals or other vital infrastructure. 
Fewer than 5 percent of jobs are accessible to those living on Melbourne’s urban fringe, meaning they are within 60 minutes on public transport or 30 minutes in a car. If you have a job, you will be driving for a long time to get to it in most cases—car-dependence is baked into the design of these developments. 
Then there are the houses themselves. Prices are at record highs, but the blocks are getting smaller so the developers can carve out more from each land parcel. The average block size in many growth suburbs is about the same as some of the more densely packed inner ring, but the houses are getting bigger. The building footprint area in some places is as high as 90 percent of the block, while in older suburbs it tends to range between 45 and 70 percent. This means there is little space for a backyard, trees, or soil for rainwater to be absorbed. It also makes these areas much hotter than other parts of Melbourne. 
A knock-on effect is that air-conditioners are needed in order for many new houses to be habitable, but the heat island effect of such densely packed suburbs can impair the air conditioners. This is not even to mention the environmental consequences of continuing to build new houses that are dependent on air-conditioning to be fit for human habitation. 
This all matters because although it’s not always obvious, the built environment has an enormous impact on our well-being. Studies show that living within one kilometre of a supermarket is associated with better health and less disease, and that this relationship is strongest in working class areas. Yet in urban growth local government areas in Victoria, only about one quarter of houses are within this radius, despite the target being 80-90 percent.
Access and proximity to green open spaces is likewise associated with better social connection, better sleep, improved physical and mental health and less disease. Even the presence or absence of street trees has an impact—studies show people are more likely to walk when there are trees and they are more likely to talk to their neighbours. Yet tree canopy data shows that parks in the western suburbs of Melbourne have less canopy tree coverage (6.2 percent) than the industrial areas of the eastern suburbs (7.7 percent), and that parks in working class areas have less infrastructure to encourage use, like playgrounds, benches and shade. 
It’s the same story in relation to access to public facilities such as libraries. For people living in the wealthy local government area of Stonnington in Melbourne, there is one library for every 40,000 people. In the more working-class council areas of Melton (outer west) and Dandenong (outer south-east), there is currently one library for every 90,000 people. In ten years, there will be one library for every 160,000 people in Melton. By this time, there will be four times as many children living in Melton as there are in Stonnington, and half the number of libraries. 
In Melton, libraries are being substituted with “access points”, which is a vending machine operated by Lendlease where you can collect pre-ordered books without ever talking to a single person, let alone making a social connection. There is no building or public space associated with the machines, no shelves to browse and zero prospect of making a serendipitous discovery that give libraries some of their magic. 
It doesn’t have to be this way. Contrast the Lendlease book vending machines to the approach briefly favoured by Enrique Peñalosa, a reforming mayor of Bogota, Colombia, in the late 1990s. The local government built grand and beautiful buildings in some of the poorest areas of the city. Libraries became more than utilitarian exercises in distributing reading material. 
“There was an emphasis on not only that libraries were functional, but also that they had to be majestic, in homage to every child, every citizen who would enter there”, wrote Charles Montgomery in his book Happy City. It’s unlikely that any child feels lifted by the majesty of the Lendlease vending machine. 
There are challenges that humanity faces which don’t have easy answers—even under a socialist system controlled by the majority. But how to make cities that are fit for the people who live in and sustain them is not one of those. It is astounding how much is known about how our buildings, cities, parks and nature can improve or diminish our lives. In the very first strategic plan prepared for the city of Melbourne in 1929 nearly 100 years ago, the authors knew that children needed parks to be healthy. What’s more, they knew the minimum park space each child needed, and they knew the maximum distance a child would be able to walk to get there. 
People who study cities know what the ideal depth of a front garden is to encourage conviviality among neighbours but that also permit retreat when desired. They know what the ideal footpath width is to encourage walking, and what type of street signage could help people with dementia navigate their neighbourhoods. But this immense knowledge is not put to use unless it happens to also be profitable. 
Making cities genuinely liveable for all, places which help people live happy and healthy lives, is principally a political question, not a technical one. Capitalism, and the profit-hungry priorities that underpin it, is the barrier to achieving this. Winning collective, democratic control over the vast resources that make cities work is the solution we need.

Steph Price

The politics of cities

It has been variously described as smelling like off ham, burning plastic and chemicals. Officially, it produces “a strong odour with wet paper and sweet fermented characteristics”, in the words of an odour engineer from the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). People who live near it report experiencing headaches, sinus problems and skin irritation because of the unrelenting stench. 
The cause is a 40-year-old recycled paper mill run by Visy. With an annual turnover of more than $7 billion, it is the largest privately-owned company in Australia. The plant operates 24-hours a day, seven days a week, and is located in the mostly working-class suburb of Reservoir in Melbourne’s north. Residents there are fed up.
The mill’s stench has been a source of complaint in the area for years. In May 2021, the EPA investigated and issued Visy a remediation notice requiring action be taken to minimise the emission of offensive odours into residential areas. It was also required to provide a written report explaining the actions taken and their effects, as well as proposals for further odour control measures. 
When EPA officers visited the site on 1 September 2021, a month past the notice’s deadline, they found the company had not done the necessary work and issued it with a $9,087 fine. More than a year later, residents say the smell persists and yet there have been no further financial penalties for the company. 
In early September this year, Visy was issued a formal warning—one of many—by the EPA for again failing to act by the EPA’s deadline. On 12 September, a highly anticipated EPA-mandated community meeting was held by the company, at which dozens of angry local residents had the opportunity to make their feelings known.
All those that spoke talked about the psychological impacts of the smell. “It’s inescapable”, said one resident. “Visy are having a real good go at ruining our lives”, said another as everyone took their turn to describe how the stench affects them. 
Chris Bydder, a senior odour engineer, had earlier confirmed to the Age the connection between offensive odour and distress. “Smell stimulates a whole central nervous system and when that happens, you can get other knock-on effects—you start to become stressed, there’s also feelings of helplessness.”
Many in the meeting pointed out that Visy is a highly profitable company that was simply putting the continued generation of profits ahead of the people living near the mill. Others were astounded that a company owned by the country’s fifth richest family, worth more than $24 billion, could have received only one fine of $9,087 for years of damage done to human health and the environment. It was pointed out that if any of the residents at the meeting committed a minor transgression like littering, the EPA would swiftly issue them a fine for every offence, and a hefty $370 fine at that. Yet a massive company can flagrantly defy the rules repeatedly and over a long period with impunity. 
The close relationship between Visy’s owners, the Pratt family, and the state Labor Party did not go unremarked upon by those in attendance. It was noted that just the month before, the Victorian Labor Party and Premier Daniel Andrews had held a $4,500-per-head fundraiser at Raheen, the Pratt family’s Kew estate. In February, Andrews also attended the bar mitzvah of Leon Pratt, son of Visy executive chairman and one of Australia’s richest men, Anthony Pratt, and in 2019 he opened Visy’s corrugated packaging facility in Truganina. Anthony Pratt’s company, Pratt Holdings, was the biggest political donor in Australia in 2021.
Reservoir residents are committed to forcing the company to stop the stink, including by ceasing its operation until the air is clear. Community group Clean Air for Reservoir is encouraging residents to monitor and report on the odour to the EPA and aim to put pressure on politicians and the company through lobbying and other action. 
Steph Price lives within smelling distance of the Visy mill in Reservoir and is the Victorian Socialists candidate for the seat of Preston.

Reservoir Visy mill is above the law, and it stinks

A modest industrial dispute in the northern suburbs of Melbourne has become the latest flashpoint in the battle for the right to strike. Around 90 envelope production workers at the Australian Paper site in Preston – who have been out the gate since 16 January – were ordered back to work by the Fair Work Commission on 16 February.
Their union, the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, has obtained a stay on the decision while an appeal is heard. However, coming just weeks after a blanket strike ban was imposed on NSW rail workers, the commission’s return to work order peels another layer off the facade that Australian workers have a legal right to strike.
In her reasons, commissioner McKinnon found that the company’s refusal to bargain “while stoppages are on foot”, justified a decision to send the workers back into the factory. In response, the union pointed out the obvious: if the company’s case is that its own obstinacy is blocking bargaining, then directing the workers back to work is a reward for belligerence.
But the logic of such a move was clear to commissioner McKinnon, one of three recent Michaelia Cash appointees to the national industrial tribunal. Having previously held positions at the Farmers’ Federation and within the federal Employment Department, McKinnon counts among her backers numerous prominent anti-worker zealots within government, including Eric Abetz.
While the union’s lawyers have mounted an appeal against the decision, describing the company’s application to suspend industrial action as a “prime example of how [the Fair Work Act] can be abused by an employer”, the workers are carrying on their strike action.
This group of workers doesn’t think the Fair Work Commission is there to do them any favours. “We haven’t heard anything from the commissioners”, said Robert, one of the AMWU members Red Flag spoke to on the picket line. Kristina, another worker, said that the company’s insistence on bringing the commission in shows that it’s still not serious about a settlement.
More than six weeks in, the 90 unionists on strike at Australian Paper understand that this dispute is about industrial muscle and will be lost by whichever side buckles first. The workers are adamant it won’t be them. “We’re beyond angry”, Robert said. “We’ve been angry since the beginning of the year.”
At issue are three simple things: the workers want a 2.5 percent annual wage rise and for the company to drop its proposals to cut their rostered days off and introduce grandfathered wage increases – a strategy to freeze the wages of some until others “catch up”. On the picket line, there’s a sense that the company has crossed a line. If it can force through its claims, these workers know that they’ll always be on the back foot. “Today, they just want to screw you down everywhere; they always want to take more from you”, Kristina said.
Right now is crunch time. The striking workforce has stuck out the strike to get to a point where the company is feeling real pressure. Only now is the warehouse empty of stock and the company struggling to supply its customers, including government departments, major banks and Officeworks.
For Australian Paper, this is the reason the commission must intervene on its side. In arguments at the tribunal, its lawyers claimed that the strike must end because the company can’t focus on reaching agreement while it’s “managing efforts to mitigate the effect of the action … on its ability to meet customer demands”. For the workers, this is the point of the strike. “For 10 months they did nothing, until we came out here”, Robert said.
It seems harder to hold your ground these days, both Robert and Kristina agree. No one at this factory has been out on strike for this long before. But there’s no question they know what it will take to win. “We are strong and united, and we won’t back down or give in”, said Kristina.

Striking envelope workers digging in

Eighteen months, one Herald Sun cover, half a dozen national news articles and multiple court appearances after he was charged with assault, Victoria Police have dropped their case against Steven Diston, Electrical Trades Union organiser. Admitting they had no prospects of winning in court, Victoria Police withdrew charges against Diston just weeks before his case was due to be heard.
The bogus assault charge stemmed from an incident at the high profile union protest outside the Carlton and United Brewery in Abbotsford in 2016. Around four months into the dispute, with pressure mounting on the company, a manager ventured through the picket one early morning and tried to attack Diston.
Speaking to Red Flag, Diston said the manager “snapped” before grabbing, and trying to headbutt, him. A video recording of the brief interaction clearly shows the union organiser attempting to calm the aggressor, who eventually backs down and walks into the brewery. “It wasn’t a big deal”, said Diston, who expected the matter of the manager’s incursion to end there.
Instead, within a few hours, two police cars were on site and numerous officers were inside the brewery taking statements from CUB management. “We could see them conducting interviews through the windows from our scaffold”, Diston said. Then, after three hours inside, the police bundled back into their cars and drove off without so much as a word with Diston or the 14 other witnesses to the event – unionists on early morning picket duty. “I was completely gobsmacked”, he said.
By the next day, a manager’s puffed chest attempt to intimidate a union organiser had turned into a Herald Sun front page about “union thugs” bashing a sickly CUB worker on the picket line. “It’s things like that that bring it home”, Diston said about the impact the bizarre media coverage had on picketers. “You can talk about the lies they’ll print, but until you see it, you don’t believe it”, he said. “It just made the boys stronger.”
With the backing of the ETU, Diston vigorously fought the charge from the start. He reflects on his experience as an insight into how the police and the criminal justice system can be used to intervene on the bosses’ side in an industrial dispute. “The police have the power to lay charges on completely innocent people and disrupt their lives immensely for whatever purpose they choose … [and] drop the charges before it hits court and it costs them nothing”, he said.
Despite pleading not guilty at the earliest opportunity, at his pre-trial hearing Victoria Police’s colourful account of the incident had Diston “sounding like a cross between Pol Pot and Ghengis Khan”, he said. “I would have locked me up given [the police] description.” The mountain of evidence in his favour meant little to a system happy to accept the company and police narrative.
Throughout the saga, Diston and his lawyers pushed for police to interview the 14-odd witnesses to the event in question. They were astounded when police finally conceded they had no intention of speaking to the only witnesses to the whole incident. Why? All 14 were union members, and investigators had deemed their evidence to be worthless.
If you Google Steven Diston today, the internet will tell you he’s the union organiser charged with assault at the CUB picket. It won’t tell you that the police’s flimsy case against him was doomed from the beginning or that it collapsed before making it to trial. The Herald Sun hasn’t issued an apology for its front page splash or even reported that the charges were dropped. Diston could probably sue the paper for defamation, but he won’t bother. “It’s a system designed by the ruling class, for the ruling class”, he said. He’ll just keep fighting it instead.

CUB dispute: Police finally drop charge against ETU organiser

Civil rights weren’t the only big winner out of the same sex marriage postal survey. Australia’s largest envelope producer – Australian Paper – did pretty well after getting the contract to supply the Bureau of Statistics with about 16 million survey envelopes. Now, after locking away an unexpected profit boost, the company is attacking the workers that helped produced the windfall.
Around 90 envelope production workers at Australian Paper’s Preston, Melbourne, site have been on strike since 16 January. “They’ve strung us along”, explains Margaret Peacock, lead Australian Manufacturing Workers Union delegate at the site. She’s talking about the marriage survey job.
News that the company was tendering for the contract came during enterprise agreement negotiations. The workers say that the company suckered them into working extra shifts and overtime to meet the contract deadline. “They lied to us and led us to believe [an agreement] was in the bag”, she says.
Instead, as soon as the survey envelopes were delivered, the company came back to the bargaining table pushing harder than before. “We thought we had it nearly sorted”, says AMWU organiser Dean Griffiths. But when bargaining started after the survey, the company said it had “changed its point of view” and was going after claims that had earlier been dropped, including cuts to rostered days off and a freeze on wage increases for some. “Deal with it, we’re not moving”, was the company’s new bargaining position, according to the union.
The workers – almost all of whom are in the union – elected to deal with the company’s back flip by walking out the gate. “Last EBA we did simple things – we [struck] half a day here and a day there, but this is the first time we’ve ever gone out indefinite, ever”, says Margaret. “I don’t think they were expecting us to do it – they still probably think we’ll give up.”
As evidence that they have no intention of giving up, Margaret pulls out the roster she draws up every day to ensure that there’s an even spread of workers on the picket. Everyone gets their name marked off when they get there. It’s this organisation that Margaret thinks is important to keeping spirits high on the picket. “Everybody is still strong”, she says. “We’re not going to give up. If we give up now we’ll never get anything and the next EBA they’ll take more and more”.
As lead delegate, Margaret is called “mother of the chapel” by other workers. It’s an old print union custom. She’s worked at Australian Paper for 33 years, 10 of those as delegate and five as “mother of the chapel”, a title she carries proudly.
Many workers have been here a long time. Most have more than 20 years clocked up. This group will be hit hardest by one of the company’s main attacks – “grandfathering” wage increases. Dean explains that this essentially means freezing the wages of the highest paid workers until the lowest paid “catch up”. For some, it would be four or five years before they see another increase.
No one here is on big money. Margaret, with more than 30 years in the job, is on $21 an hour. “All of the girls are”, she says. That’s where the rostered days off come in. “That’s the only good thing about working here”, she explains. They get 16 RDOs a year. The company wants to cut that down to 12. “They want everything and they’re giving us nothing.”
The workers are demanding that their RDOs remain unchanged, and they want an annual wage increase of 2.5 percent and back pay to the date that their last agreement expired – 20 March 2017. The company has told the union it won’t negotiate until it calls off the picket. Margaret says that’s not happening. The workers have left things open to talk to the company but they won’t go back in until they get some movement.
“I really think that they’re going to have to give up”, she says. “It’s not as easy as they think – some of the bosses in there think that you just press a button and the machine runs. You’ve got to know how to set it. They need us to run the machines – to make the envelopes and to get them out.”
With reports that envelope stocks at some Officeworks stores are dwindling, the strikers know that the company is feeling the pressure.
The Australian Paper workers’ picket runs from 5am until 11pm Monday to Friday. The workers are asking supporters and union activists to drop by for a sausage and a chat at 54 Raglan Street, Preston.

Striking paper workers won’t quit until company backs down

The Victorian Labor government continues to face resistance to its plan to sell large plots of public land across Melbourne. The land has been used for many decades for public housing and, in at least one case, was given to the state specifically for that purpose.
Under the plan, public housing on 11 inner city estates will be demolished and the land cleared to make way for private developments. The government is taking on the task and costs associated with flattening buildings and shifting people from the sites, ensuring that successful tenders will be presented with rare large-scale greenfields opportunities in some of the most commercially desirable parts of the city.
While developers eye off mega-profits, thousands of public tenants face an uncertain future, anxiously awaiting the inevitable knock on their door from the government’s relocation officers – a newly hired team charged with getting tenants off their estates.
Speaking on 17 January at a protest organised by the Public Housing Defence Network on the Ascot Vale estate, located five kilometres from the CBD, Steve, a long term tenant, said that no-one can tell them what will happen. “When are we going to move? Where are we going to move? How long are we going to be gone for?”, he asked. “Someone tell me. The minister can’t and the housing commission can’t. What do we do?”
Steve, like others, has been told that the government’s plan is about “renewing” the public housing on the estates. But with the only estates targeted for “renewal” being those in residential construction hotspots – including suburbs like Northcote, Brunswick, Hawthorn and North Melbourne – tenants can see through the government’s claims. “They see dollars; they don’t see people”, said Mike, one of organisers of the Ascot Vale protest.
Planning documents show that most of the public housing estates will be turned into massive private complexes, with just a fraction of the land set aside to construct new “social” housing.
Many larger homes accommodating families will be replaced with one- and two-bedroom units. The government is also giving no guarantees that new “social” housing will be managed publicly. Instead, indications are that the new “social” housing will be managed by non-government housing associations that aren’t required to give tenants the same protections they have in public housing.
Across the estates, coalitions are forming between public tenants, neighbouring residents and activists to oppose the government’s plan. With Victoria in the midst of a housing affordability crisis, public housing supporters are demanding that the estates remain public.
Steph is a member of the Public Housing Defence Network.

Vic Labor sees ‘dollars, not people’ in public housing sell-off plan

Most public housing in Australia is a monument to a different era, a time when governments built houses, just as they would schools and hospitals. Inconceivable to anyone born in the last 40 years, there was a period when the government was hungry for land to build things people could live in, not just drive on.
In Melbourne, dozens of beige concrete tower blocks erected on land acquired across the inner city are the most recognisable markers of this period – still known as commission flats, after the long defunct Housing Commission that had the job of building them. Less quintessential but more numerous are the low rise brick villages known as “walk up” estates. And there are houses, about 25,000 of them, often grouped in small pockets around the suburbs and in some regional towns.
All told, Victoria’s public housing stock numbers about 65,000. Today, it is ageing (60 percent is more than 30 years old) and often in poor condition (“seriously deteriorating” according to the Victorian auditor-general). Victoria is easily winning the race to the bottom on housing, with public housing making up a miserly 2.7 percent of all dwellings here, far less than the national average of 3.6 percent (which itself is at a 35-year low). This proportion has shrunk just about every year since the early ’80s. The reasons for this are as easy to see as the cranes climbing all over Melbourne’s skyline.
<img alt="Graph" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/public%20housing2.jpg" />
In the most recent decade past, between 2006 and 2016, Victoria’s population grew by 1.1 million people, or 22 percent. Most of these people found homes in its capital city, which is bulging with new residential construction. From the apartment blocks in the CBD to the expanding suburban fringe, Melbourne is one of the centres of what the Housing Industry Association describes as “the longest new home building cycle in [Australia’s] modern history”. Conspicuously absent from the building bonanza though is the government, which ended 2016 with around 581 fewer dwellings on its books than it started 2006 with.
It is difficult to overstate the degree to which neglect and inaction, for decades, have characterised the management of a social infrastructure that is key to providing for a need shared by every human, every day – the need for shelter. While successive governments have sat on their hands, property developers continue to swallow up land and choke on profits as Melbourne sinks deeper into a housing affordability crisis.
The statistics are well known; less than a half of one percent of private rental properties are affordable for a single person on a pension, and around 35,000 people are on the public housing waiting list. While they wait, these tens of thousands languish on couches, on the streets and in cheap motel rooms; they eke out their survival in houses they can’t afford, which are overcrowded or not fit for habitation. The government itself estimates that at least 70,000, and perhaps as many as 100,000, poor households are in fact eligible to be on the public housing waiting list.
In this context, a proposal to demolish multiple public housing estates across the city and give the land to property developers would surely be unfathomable to all but the most rabid of free market cranks. Well, it isn’t unfathomable to the Victorian Labor Party; it is policy – perversely named the Public Housing Renewal Program.
The “renewal program” is targeting an initial tranche of nine “walk up” estates in inner city suburbs like Northcote, Clifton Hill, North Melbourne, West Brunswick and Brighton. Under the plan, the existing public housing dwellings on the estates – about 1,000 of them – will be knocked down and the land cleared, at the government’s expense. The bulk of the land, wholly public and acquired specifically for public housing, will be sold on the cheap to developers who will build and sell thousands of private apartments on the estates – likely around 5,000. In “exchange” for getting a hold of the public land, the developers will be paid by the government to rebuild a fraction of the estates as social housing.
The Andrews government, of course, is not the first to have clocked that there are significant profits to be “unlocked” through the sale of public assets, including such a scarce resource as public housing. Similar privatisation plans have already been carried out controversially on estates in Kensington and Carlton. However, if successful, this government’s program would top them all as the biggest single sell-off of public housing in the state’s history. And it’s probably only the start.
The government wants to move quickly. Thousands of tenants living on the estates are now on the countdown to a mass eviction. Already, and while opposition mounts, the government is doorknocking houses to give residents relocation “agreements” that are being presented as a strictly no choice affair. It has budgeted $16 million (enough to build 53 new public housing dwellings) for staffing and other costs associated with the job of clearing public housing estates of public housing tenants.
Residents are being promised that they will be the first ones returning to their estates after the developers are done. The likelihood of this is slim indeed. The government knows this, and the developers are banking on it. For, while many thousands of new houses will be built on these estates (in some cases doubling or tripling the total number of dwellings), the majority of these will be privately owned.
Public tenants will find that the proportion of the estate that is social housing has shrunk significantly and will accommodate fewer people than before. On many estates, the loss of social housing capacity will be as much as a third. Across the first four estates for which planning documents have been made public, the number of three-bedroom homes fit for families will drop in number from 182 to 25 – a loss of 471 bedrooms. While the housing minister is pledging a “right of return” for displaced tenants, the question that no one in government can answer is: where will they go?
the government is also giving no guarantees that what remains of the social housing after the developers carve up the estates, will in fact be public housing. Instead, it appears most likely that these houses will be handed over to the community housing industry. The effect of this transfer, a politically palatable form of privatisation, is a loss of security and rights for any public tenant who can beat the odds to get back on their estate.
The Public Housing Renewal Program is shocking evidence of the lengths to which governments will go to avoid one of the obvious fixes for the deep and persistent housing affordability crisis – a large-scale mass public housing construction program. Around 3,500 new public housing dwellings every year for the next 20 years would need to be built just to bring Victoria close to the national average, to say nothing of what is needed to put a serious dent in the housing waiting list. But while the coffers for spending on police, roads and prisons are always full to the brim, hardly a penny can be found for housing, and 35,000 Victorians are paying the cost.

Is public housing a thing of the past?

Opposition is growing to the Victorian state government’s audacious plan to demolish up to 11 public housing estates and sell the land to developers. More than 150 public tenants and supporters gathered in a park at the base of the Flemington high rise estates on 15 October to celebrate and defend public housing. The rally was organised by the Public Housing Defence Network, a new group formed to oppose the sell-off of public housing.
Neville, a 30-year resident of Gronn Place, a West Brunswick estate targeted in the government’s plans, opened the rally with an inspiring call to resist. He vowed to chain himself to his house if the government tries forcibly to move people off the estates. The Gronn Place estate is a closely knit community that is home to around 90 children, many of whom have never lived anywhere else. Along with thousands of other public tenants, they are on a time line to eviction, if the government gets its way.
The misnamed Public Housing Renewal Program is a state Labor initiative designed to open up pockets of valuable inner city land for high density private development. More than 1,000 low rise public housing units will be knocked down and the land cleared to make way for Docklands-style apartment towers. The government has budgeted $185 million for the plans, which will net Victoria no additional public housing but will result in 5,000 new private apartments being crammed onto the estates. Any “social housing” built on the estates will be given to non-government housing associations.
Public tenants are being promised they will be able to return to their estates after the developers are finished. They are not being told that none of the new homes will be public housing. Many tenants have also been shocked to discover by reading the fine print that only a minuscule fraction of any new “social housing” will be big enough for families. The new buildings will be almost exclusively filled with one- and two-bedroom units. Most families moved off the estates will be permanently displaced.
At the rally, Egal, a resident of the Abbotsford Street estate in North Melbourne, gave a powerful speech about what the estate means to his family. “I’ve got an anaphylactic child; he goes to the school around the corner and the children’s hospital is also around the corner. I’m not interested in a mansion in Toorak, I’m interested in my little area where I feel comfortable.”
Egal and Neville were just a few of the public tenants who spoke proudly about the bonds formed between tenants on the estates. With the government’s rhetoric about the need to build “new vibrant communities” implying that public housing communities are a problem, it is important that these stories be told.
Victorians don’t have to look far to get a glimpse of what happens when governments and developers “create communities” on public housing estates. After a large estate in Carlton was handed over to developers in 2005, public tenants were locked out of most of their own estate.
Dividing walls, separate entrances, car parks and private gardens built for the private apartment owners have made a mockery of claims that the developers would build integrated communities. A recently published study of the Carlton example, by Melbourne University academics Kate Shaw and Abdullahi Jama, found that the “social-mix approach to inner-city estate redevelopments in Australia is driven more by the imperative to capitalise on the sale of public land than it is to assist public tenants”. On the Carlton estate alone, developers have already taken in at least $300 million.
This government’s current plans are much more ambitious than anything tried in the past. There is the potential for many different groups to join together to fight back. Already, the Greens have publicly opposed the plans and helped to organise the Flemington rally. A number of local councils have passed motions against the redevelopment program. The next protest will be on Saturday, 4 November, at 1pm on the Walker Street estate in Northcote.

Vic government plans Docklands-style apartments to push out public housing

Around 2,000 workers in four Woolworths distribution centres have begun pursuing legally protected industrial action, the National Union of Workers lodging applications with the Fair Work Commission for protected action ballots.
All of the sheds involved have histories of striking for improvements. Workers at the Hume distribution centre in Melbourne’s northern suburbs have built up an impressive enterprise agreement, considered one of the best in the logistics industry, through repeated industrial action. The Melbourne Liquor Distribution Centre in Melbourne’s west was the scene of an unprotected four-day strike two years ago; this action beat back the introduction of labour hire. And workers at the Barnawartha shed, near Albury-Wodonga, have struck during bargaining for their past two enterprise agreements.
By bargaining simultaneously, workers at the four sheds are overcoming some of the worst effects of Australia’s workplace bargaining system, which is designed to split workers up. Workers at Woolworths distribution centres across the country, who do essentially the same work for the same network of supermarkets, are employed under site-specific agreements made by various Woolworths-owned shelf companies (Woolstar, Queensland Property Investments etc.).
Gains won by one section of the workforce are confined to one site under this system. Simultaneous bargaining across multiple sites is one way of cutting against this “divide and rule” strategy. It is commonly practised by the militant construction industry unions, but is all too rare in other industries.
The main claims of the workers vary between the sites, but prominent in the list of demands is a pay rise of $2 per hour each year (about 6 percent for many workers), improved redundancy (Hume is closing in a couple of years, being replaced by a heavily automated new shed) and greater job security. Woolworths is one of Australia’s most profitable companies, with a profit of $1.53 billion in the last financial year.

Thousands of warehouse workers prepare for strike

A staple of union protests in the US, the plastic inflated rodent known as Scabby looks to have met his match in the lucky country. Scabby, a buck-toothed red-eyed rat with putrid body sores, is a constitutionally protected expression of free speech in his homeland. US courts have consistently upheld his right to join workers’ protests.
But in Australia, the delicate sensitivities of employers and scabs are protected by the law. Until recently, Scabby was visiting workers protesting outside Esso’s Longford gas plant in Gippsland over plans to cut their wages by 30 percent. No longer. Scabby received his deflation orders as part of a Federal Court case brought by the company behind the proposed wage cuts. It claims that Scabby, inanimate though he is, is being coercive and unduly pressuring energy giant Exxon Mobil to accede to workers’ demands for decent pay.
The case against Scabby is the most comical example of a serious trend in which basic expressions of union and class consciousness are being banned. In 2014, the High Court ruled that holding a placard calling a strikebreaker a scab was “inappropriate, offensive and humiliating” and a sackable offence. In 2016, in the context of the long-running CUB dispute, the Fair Work Commission went further still, finding that the use of the words “rat” or “dog” at a union protest constituted unlawful intimidation and bullying. More recently, members of the CFMEU are reporting that employers are demanding that they remove “union paraphernalia” – i.e. CFMEU stickers – from their hard hats before they come to work.
These cases build on the already suffocating legal restrictions placed on workers’ right to take effective industrial action. Under threat if this trend continues is the right even to talk union, argue for solidarity and apply whatever moral or social pressure you can to win other workers to your side. This is how workers have always organised and won. And it’s these traditions that the bosses want to degrade. The claims against Scabby show only the ludicrous lengths to which they will go to do so.
In Gippsland, workers remain determined. Though Scabby has moved on, he has quickly been replaced with a larger friend, a cigar-smoking inflatable feline called Greedy the Fat Cat. It’s not yet known if Greedy will be joined as a party to the proceedings against Scabby. It is understood the company is reviewing the footage of Greedy’s inflation before making the call.

The politics of cities

Reservoir Visy mill is above the law, and it stinks

Striking envelope workers digging in

CUB dispute: Police finally drop charge against ETU organiser

Striking paper workers won’t quit until company backs down

Vic Labor sees ‘dollars, not people’ in public housing sell-off plan

Is public housing a thing of the past?

Vic government plans Docklands-style apartments to push out public housing

Thousands of warehouse workers prepare for strike

Fat cats out to get giant rat

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