We ARE running around with our heads cut off!

The Beagle editor,

I and many other historians might take issue with your summation (in last Friday’s ‘Beagle’) of the reasons for and the responses to the Great Depression in Australia.

But you are dead right asserting that now ‘we are running around with our heads cut off. The call is for the government to do something. Exactly what is never defined. Just the same bleat that “The government needs to fix this”’ when considering the issue of housing and homelessness.

There are currently a number of problems that need to be addressed:

1. Basically, not enough houses are being built to meet the current demand for housing;

2. This (along with other forces such as the attractiveness of short-term letting – when contrasted to what used to be ‘normal’ long-term renting – that have resulted from the success of things like Airbnb, and the use of negative gearing of property by just a small proportion of privileged society) has driven up the affordability of purchasing housing properties to historically-high and, for most people, now never-achievable levels;

3. There is absolutely no willingness from the Australian government, the State government, local government and, I suggest, the numerous bodies that supposedly represent the homeless, to agree on any plan to solve the current housing shortage anywhere in Australia;

4. We have to stop thinking this is just a problem that affects the ‘traditional homeless’. It’s a tragedy that essential workers such as doctors, nurses, teachers cannot find accommodation in our area. It’s appalling that young people who are ‘just starting out’ cannot aspire to buying their own homes. They are equally in need of (affordable) housing as are the ‘homeless’;

5. We have to eradicate the thinking that a ‘basic home’ (that many would just love to have!) or a ‘first home’ must include 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a 2-car garage, a media room, every desirable modern bell and whistle, etc., etc., etc.. The availability of a very ‘basic home’, after all, is infinitely better than the availability of no home.

It does not require rocket science or huge investments in the Eurobodalla or the Bega Shires to zone and service large parcels of land (each providing hundreds of residential blocks of land) on the outskirts of towns that could provide additional housing – and thereby help alleviate the current housing shortage. And there is no reason why this could not occur NOW.

It requires little imagination to fund additional housing. ‘Housing bonds’ with attractive interest rates would appeal to investors who are currently receiving paltry returns from conventional investment sources could, at the very least, fund ‘public housing’ within these new estates.

And employment opportunities would immediately become available to huge numbers of our young people in the form of building apprenticeships and unskilled labouring positions.

What is really needed now is a community group with a little drive and imagination…and a real commitment to start to tackle the housing crisis in the local area.

That drive, that imagination, that commitment is not going to come from government at any level, so it must come from the community. If it doesn’t, the current housing crisis is only going to become more acute.

Peter Lacey

Quaama Further reading: Centenary flashback: Great Depression leads to new Housing Trust

Above: on being told that they are destined to the Too Hard Basket for fear that their collective embryo of ideas might develop into something that could well upset the flawed fiscal obligations required to keep a broken housing model in motion.