South Australian Housing Trust:
New battleground for "law and order" advocates

by Bob Briton

A recently tabled report from the South Australian Government's 
Statutory Authorities Review Committee has opened a very public 
debate on how the Housing Trust deals with troublesome tenants. 
The advocates of the "law and order" approach have been greatly 
encouraged by the report and have been making the early running 
on the issue.

The Committee's presiding officer, Labor MLC Bob Sneath, 
described public housing as a "privilege". He stands by the 
report's 33 recommendations for change to the Trust's procedures. 
Among them are a "three strikes and you're out" policy for 
disruptive and "difficult" tenants and a system for deducting 
rent arrears from tenants' wages and benefits.

There can be no doubting that the problems faced by the Housing 
Trust are real. Last year more than 3230 homes were found damaged 
or neglected when they were vacated, leaving a total bill for 
repairs of $2.3 million. The majority of the many complaints from 
tenants about "burnouts" and other serious, anti-social behaviour 
on the part of neighbours are genuine. One in four trust tenants 
are now behind in their rent.

Missing from a lot of the media coverage of the current 
situation, however, is its social and historical context. 
Committee president Bob Sneath, himself, made a passing reference 
to part of the problem with comments carried in an article in The 
Advertiser last week. He concedes that the Trust "has changed 
dramatically in recent years due to the shift in Commonwealth and 
State funding for public housing" and that the "emphasis is now 
on emergency housing for underprivileged members of the 
community".

From public to welfare housing

The shift in focus of public housing started in the years of the 
Fraser Coalition Government in the mid to late 1970s, when its 
Ministers would refuse to even mouth the words "public housing" -
- preferring instead to talk about "welfare housing".

They ruled out public housing as an option for those with what 
the Commonwealth determined were sufficient means to pay for a 
place in the private rental market or to buy a home.

Critics who pointed out that public housing tenants collectively 
paid for their housing many times over, and that any alleged 
"subsidies" to tenants were dwarfed by the handouts made 
available to home buyers, were quickly dismissed.

Concerns that the scaling down of the role of public housing 
would remove the brakes on private housing costs were ignored. 
Warnings that public housing areas could become ghettos 
concentrating some of society's most marginalised people were 
also discounted.

Subsequent Federal governments may have moderated their language, 
but the policy direction has remained the same. In the 1990s 
capital payments to state housing authorities fell from $700 
million to around $500 million.

This year SA is facing a further $10 million cut. "Because of 
this anticipated shortfall in the next Commonwealth State Housing 
Agreement, this State faces the prospect of having to sell 1120 
dwellings a year to maintain the viability of the remaining 
properties", State Housing Minister Stephanie Key told the press 
in May.

This response will poke a sizeable hole in the plans of the Rann 
Government' s Social Inclusion Board to address homelessness. The 
housing stock is set to decrease at the same time that welfare 
expert Julian Disney estimates that we need 14000 new low income 
homes in SA. Since 1992, the number of housing trust properties 
has dropped from 63,000 to 48,000.

The waiting list this year for a housing trust home has reached 
26,670, up by 1300 on the previous year. Persistently high 
unemployment means that growing numbers of people are meeting the 
low-income eligibility criteria of the Housing Trust.

Skyrocketing housing prices and their flow-on effects on the 
rental market have forced more and more people onto the waiting 
list for some relief from private rents.

In September, Pam Simmons from the SA Council of Social Service 
described the situation faced by many of these families: "If 
basic living costs for a family in this State are at $647 a week 
that leaves unemployed parents on social security payments $128 
short. That's the difference between two meals and three meals a 
day. It also counts out going to the Show or the football. Home 
ownership is a sick joke when even maintaining a home is beyond 
your reach."

Widespread "housing stress" — the plain old inability to eat and 
pay the rent — has been identified by a number of recent 
studies.

In one commissioned by the Flinders University and the Housing 
Trust, itself, it was revealed bailiffs evict an average of four 
tenants a day or over 1000 per annum in SA. Rent arrears are the 
reason in 90 per cent of cases and 84 per cent of these happen in 
the low end of the market with rents of up to $150 per week. Only 
25 per cent of these cases had been before a tribunal.

While all this highly disruptive social change is being imposed 
on the people, the almost exclusive focus of the media is kept on 
the small number of the most dis-connected tenants that disturb 
the peace. As usual, a discussion of the radical reordering of 
society's priorities that is warranted by the current crisis just 
doesn't feature.