Opinion
The art of good government: Slow and steady won’t win Albanese the race
Sean Kelly
ColumnistA brief summary of renting provided in a major housing report released on Friday is bleak. A third of Australians rent their home. There are more renters every year, and they’re renting for longer. This might all be fine, if renting were a secure way of living in this country. Unfortunately, the next sentence in the report, State of the Housing System 2024, reads: “Australia’s rental system provides only limited tenure security and other rights to renters.”
Artwork: Joe BenkeCredit:
Then there’s tax. If you own a home, the tax benefits are huge. Historically, that was kind of all right, because “most Australians could access home ownership and the associated tax benefits that come with it”, said the report by the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council. But now that’s not the case. The massive tax breaks are making inequality worse: home owners not only get a home, they get extra cash too.
Oh, and the situation doesn’t look like getting much better any time soon.
The great myth of Australia as a “classless” society has always been just that. But there is something very vivid in the way housing makes this clear. You have those who own several homes; those who own what they live in; those who can still plausibly aspire to own a home; and those who will spend their whole life renting, with all the instability and compounding inequality that implies.
And then you have one more class: what the report terms “vulnerable groups”, who suffer most as rent and house prices rise. It’s a long list. Significantly, given the debate this nation is currently having, this includes “those fleeing domestic or family violence”.
On that topic, it’s worth pausing to remember it was just a few years ago that, with families stuck indoors, the pandemic seemed to highlight the dark presence of family violence.
This focus drifted. And so you can understand how members of the government, faced recently with calls for a royal commission, emphasised – as Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth did – that the challenge was “for this not to become an issue in the news cycle for a short period”. Instead, sustained attention was necessary – which meant delivering on the government’s existing plan. In one sense, Rishworth and her colleagues were correct.
But in the aftermath of the killing of Molly Ticehurst, a focus on the dramatic increase in women killed this year, the Bondi Junction murders, and nationwide rallies, it was hard not to feel as though the government had missed two significant opportunities. First, on substance: to capitalise on the national mood to press hard for urgent agreement on action across the states, and to justify more significant action of its own. Second, on the politics: to swoop into an area that really should be a Labor strength and demonstrate its capacity for swift and decisive action.
Instead, even putting the whole rally debacle to one side, it all felt a little lumbering – as though, given an open shot at goal, the government had decided to play for time. The great problem for the government is that what presented, early in its term, as process-based caution, is now more often shading into a general sense of slowness. This takes different forms, from the “change takes time” approach on something like housing, to the fumbling, shifting approach to the released immigration detainees.
A common observation during the pandemic was how it had shone a spotlight on problems in society. The paradox was that the pandemic itself crowded out dealing with those problems; that would have to wait until later. Now it’s later, and it feels as though the cost-of-living crisis is doing it all over again. High prices make everything – access to bulk-billing, housing scarcity – seem worse, while preventing us from talking properly about those problems.
You could see this in the aftermath of last year’s budget, when the government’s decision to deliver desperately needed increases in payments to the poorest, such as rent assistance and JobSeeker, copped flak from the more tabloid elements in the media because “ordinary working people” were also doing it tough.
Unsurprisingly, those elements of the media skipped right over the great importance of these payments to women leaving violent partners. One wonders, without much optimism, whether their approach might be different this year.
In recent weeks, there has been some focus on what women need to leave. The federal government extended an emergency payment. Other factors need action too: on Friday, this masthead reported on a shortage of emergency accommodation in NSW so bad that tents and car parks are being used to house women.
But there is also the question of what happens after those first few panicked weeks. Unsurprisingly, if you think about it for two seconds, many of those women will very quickly be dependent on government payments.
Which means that, as long as those payments remain so low as to guarantee poverty, women who leave violent partners have to decide to enter poverty. This means they’re less likely to leave and more likely to return. And for those who leave, they are more vulnerable to ex-partners who try to control them, via fathers’ frighteningly common manipulation of the deeply flawed child-support system.
And – again, this should be obvious – the rental market is a big factor here. To leave, you must first be able to imagine leaving. But how can you begin to conceive of a new life if the chances of ever finding somewhere affordable to live seem non-existent? It’s worth noting here the proportion of single mothers on payments who own their own home has halved in 20 years.
What we should have learnt from the pandemic, and what we should be learning again now, is how unhelpful it is to treat the many problems in our society as distinct – as though each can be confined to its own convenient media cycle, before the next, entirely separate problem takes over. Solving genuinely difficult problems requires different types of response: some swift, targeted and decisive, some slow, connected and sustained. For substantive and political reasons, the Albanese government must demonstrate to voters it can do both.
If you or anyone you know needs support, you can contact the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), Lifeline 131 114, or Beyond Blue 1300 224 636. The men’s referral service is on 1300 766 491.
Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.