- by A Carruthers
- The Guardian
- Issue #2123
Australian mainstream media has been sprouting the same nonsense on housing given by Master Builders’ Australia – that the current housing crisis is simply due to “union blocking” and “government red tape.” The line is that if only the unions got out of the way and the government cut red tape, things would get better. This is codswallop.
LABOR OR GREENS?
Labor’s approach to housing is through the Housing Australia Future Fund, a corporatist approach. The “Future Fund” approach dates back to Peter Costello – it came into being through selling off Telstra in 2006, taking the temporary income from the sale and putting it into the Fund. One of the Funds is now for Housing.
The stupidity of the Fund idea is that when you sell off government assets, fixed capital, you never get it back. The financial model leads to decline in profit for the government because it no longer owns the core assets. This approach always leads to decline in the total assets, a lack of return from the assets, and therefore a decline in the ability to plan through the assets. The Future Funds are managed by the US Northern Trust Corporation in Chicago, who have zero interest in building our national economy, zero interest in people.
A lot of the challenges given by the Greens have been given negative treatment in corporate media. Is that fair?
Not really. Their campaigns on rent control are largely correct as a regulatory measure in the short term. The rent freeze is the type of reform that the working class need right now. Moreover we can agree with the Greens on two core issues; building public housing, and cracking down on private landlordism, seizing empty investment properties.
SOCIALIST APPROACH
However the Greens’ good policies are not enough. What workers’ governments can do is expand state assets, and build directly using state assets and pioneering state-owned enterprises to boost home ownership. The highest levels of home ownership in the world are Laos, Cuba, China, Vietnam and the Eastern European countries. Laos is the second highest at 97 per cent. China at 93 per cent. Eastern Europe retains these levels of ownership due to the legacy of socialism.
How does it get this high? In part because of socialist rule-of-law on housing as a human right. In socialist countries investment properties are subject to heavy market regulation by the upper Ministries. Everybody is entitled to one home, for themselves or their family, not a property portfolio. As Xi Jinping put it, “houses are for living in, not for speculation.”
Yet it isn’t just about legal measures. There is also a material aspect – building. Socialist unions and builders themselves are conscious of their role in the larger planning mechanism. The government and the Communist Party encourages whole-working-class commitment to the right to housing. Building means something. It’s not the government getting out of the way, it’s the government getting right in the middle of things, overseeing the entire planning process.
By contrast, the Australian government attacks builders by trying to destroy the CFMEU, and uses racism to blame international students for the housing crisis.
Socialist planning, of course, is the subject of great scorn in the capitalist world. Even this long after the fall of the Eastern Bloc, it’s very rare to hear discussions about it in the West. But this is precisely how we could get home ownership into the 90 per cent range. Arguably it’s the only way to get there. Rational thinking tells us that, despite the perceived rigidity of the planning process, without it things just get worse.
But to get to the point of having 90 per cent home ownership rates, we first need to campaign for an overhaul of the housing system, fix the current mess, regulate the system, restore members’ ownership of the CFMEU, and push the Liberals and the Labor Party out of power. That is our present task.
