homelessness - thegoodwills.com

Digressions – Bob’s top gripes for 2023-2024

Yes folks, it’s a list, and not just any old list. This one selects (just some) of the things that gave the writer an urge to pen ‘outraged father of one’ letters to newspapers in 2023. All are ongoing issues in 2024.

Cash is King

Kudos to our local Credit Union teller who happily counted bags of coins and deposited them in our respective bank accounts. Some banks are no longer providing such service options, claiming to be ‘ cashless’.

We have encountered (as have you), instances of retail outlets (restaurants and bars) who refuse to take cash. Last time I looked up the legislation, cash was still ‘legal tender’. Did you know that includes one and two-dollar notes, phased out in 1984 and 1988 and replaced with the very same coins we took to the Credit Union. Go figure.

While it may be very old school to secret coins away in a container for use at Christmas, this year She Who Hoards bought a bottle of Mumm and a quality red with the proceeds. It’s called saving.

Help yourself check-outs here to stay

Major Australian supermarket chains will probably persist with their policy of encouraging customers to scan their own groceries at self-service check outs. I am one (and we are many) who refuse to do this.

The major chains will tell you they are employing more people than ever to cope with new shopping options (on-line delivery). But clearly, fewer staff are required when a store has (for example) eight service check outs and eight self-service stations. There is usually at least one employee in the self-service areas, ostensibly to ‘help’ people but more likely to spot opportunistic theft.

Large retailers including Booths (UK), Walmart and Costco (US) are reportedly winding back their self-service options. Booths is removing self-service check outs at 26 of its 28 stores, saying its customers rejected them as ‘unreliable and impersonal’.

News Ltd quoted a Marks and Spencers executive that self-service check outs lead to what he called ‘middle class shoplifting’, that is theft by people who normally would not dream of it but are motivated by an “I’m owed it” attitude.

Shoplifting is up 20% in Australian supermarkets, although there is no break-down as to how much of that is down to self-service customers leaving stores without scanning some items. Supermarkets have always had losses due to staff pilfering, shoplifting and fresh food wastage. The industry calls it ‘shrink’ and it’s factored in to financial operations.

Homeless, diamonds on the soles of their shoes (not)

If anyone’s keeping a list of things various governments promised to do about housing, prioritising the homeless is not one of them.

It’s a weight of numbers thing, true, and homeless people are more likely to gravitate to States where it is possible to live outdoors most of the year. The Census figures are damning enough, but already this snapshot taken every five years is hopelessly out of date.

The Census (2021) revealed that on any given night, 122,494 people in Australia are experiencing homelessness. One in seven are children under 12 and 23% of people experiencing homelessness are aged between 12 and 24. Homelessness Australia has a more pessimistic (or realistic) picture, but it too is dated. In 2021-22, 272,700 people were supported by homelessness services (source Institute of Australian Health and Welfare). In 2021-22, a further 105,000 people (300 per day) sought help but were unable to assisted because of shortages of staff, or accommodation or other services.

https://homelessnessaustralia.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Homelessness-fact-sheet-2023-1.pdf

What’s been done about this? Not much and even if it could be described as ‘better than the last guys’, governments are playing catch up. The stories that make headlines are homeless camps (under bridges and freeway ramps) being broken up by officialdom.

McCrindle Research reports that the average full-time annual earnings in Australia is $97,510 with household gross annual income at $121,108.

The majority of rental accommodation is expensive and in demand. House prices keep rising and interest rates are higher now than when mortgages were negotiated when rates were low. In November, 552,000 people were listed as unemployed. And don’t get me started on the plight of single pensioners who don’t own their own home.

Victorian Councillors surveyed about ‘perceptions of corruption’

In May the Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission (IBAC) emailed all 632 Victorian local government Councillors. They were invited to participate in a perceptions of corruption survey. Reminder notices were sent over a three-week period to those who had not completed the survey. In total, 131 Councillors participated in the survey, representing a response rate of 21%. (Councils where Administrators were in place were excluded).

Almost 75% of respondents thought corruption was a problem in Victoria; 59% thought it was a problem among elected officials. Three-quarters agreed that some elected officials behaved inappropriately or unethically, but this did not necessarily extend to corrupt behaviour.

(Victorian MPs were also asked to complete the survey with similar findings and level of engagement).

Readers should be aware that this issue is not just about Victoria and Councils should expect scrutiny in an election year.

What good is the UN?

According to a databank maintained by Sweden’s Uppsala University, there have been 285 armed conflicts since the end of World War II. That doesn’t include the latest war between Israel and Gaza and who is to say there won’t be more before 2024 is out? The United Nations, previously the League of Nations, is supposed to keep the peace. The UN’s latest moves to stop the war between Palestine and Israel have so far been futile. There was a vote for a ceasefire, but it wasn’t a binding resolution. Both sides have since kept exchanging missile fire as the occupying force advanced. A United Nations Security Council bid to enforce a ceasefire was watered down to allow aid to get through to Gaza. Meanwhile, Houthi Rebels from Yemen (reportedly backed by Iran), have stepped up attacks on commercial shipping vessels travelling through the Red Sea. This too is a response to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

Yes, I mean no

Sydney Mayor Clover Moore was on ABC television yesterday claiming that 70% of Sydney people voted Yes in the October referendum (remember that?). I don’t remember the context but found this statistic in direct contrast to the Federal seats of Maranoa (where we live) and Fisher) where we used to live. In both these electorates the Yes vote was less than 20% and the No vote actively supported and sanctioned by sitting Federal members. Incidentally, Clover Moore defends the $6 million+ cost of Sydney setting off 50,000 fireworks at midnight as great international PR. This comes under the ‘I’m just going to leave this here’ category of social comment.

I could go on (the quality of on-line captions for the hearing-impaired, editors who organise lists into alphabetical order, hypocritical betting ads, the deterioration of ABC News (sliding rapidly into viewer-provided content and infotainment), venues that expect musicians to play for ‘exposure’, the worrying swing to the populist form of government (in Holland, Brazil and New Zealand…)

Most of all, we wish you all a Trump-free world in 2024.

Where social housing meets the working poor

social-housing-working-poor — Graph supplied by the Grattan Institute

I suppose you have been waiting for me to wax eloquent about the Federal Government’s $10 billion housing plan and why don’t they get on with it?

Don’t blame me. I didn’t vote for The Greens, who seem to think their role in government is to block legislation just because they can. The Greens MPs in Parliament want the Federal Government to freeze rentals for two years. This seems to be predicated on some naïve proposition that the Labor Premiers buddy up with the Feds and persuade the others to fall in line.

What part of States Rights do they not understand? As Prime Minister Anthony Albanese rightly says, the Federal Government could not impose a nation-wide freeze on rentals even if it wanted to. The mechanism for such a move lies with the respective State and Territory governments. I can’t imagine that telling the landlords (and developers) in their constituencies that they can’t raise rents for two years would help State or Territory government re-election chances next time round. Having said that, the Australian Capital Territory has implemented a rent ‘cap’ so anything’s possible.

The Bill, which stalled through lack of support in June, has been tabled again this week although not much has changed. There is talk (at chat show level) of a double dissolution – that is, Mr Albanese will go early to the people and let them decide. Unlikely.

There are a few things to note about the Housing Australia Future Fund. For one thing it’s not a new idea. The $10 billion fund was an election promise, which means its formation goes back well before 2020. We already had a Future Fund (which primarily invests in the share market and in commercial property). The Labor Government’s plan to co-opt this fund into investing in the volatile housing market has made it a target for the Coalition and dissident independents.

One of the issues as I see it is the Bill has been designed as an economic/financial policy instrument. Given the size and severity of the housing problem in this country (affordability, rental housing shortages and homelessness), it should have been designed foremost as social policy, letting the numbers take care of themselves, as numbers do.

The Greens are not alone in their critique of the Albanese government’s housing policy. Numerous housing advocates say that despite the size of the Housing Australia Future Fund, it will scarcely touch the sides of the problem. The legislation promises 30,000 new social and affordable houses in the first five years. Once the fund starts generating returns, more social and affordable projects can be started. And as Housing (and Homelessness) Minister Julie Collins added, this will include 4,000 homes for women and children affected by family and domestic violence, or older women at risk of homelessness.

That’s all very well, but numerous reports concur that the current social housing need is for more than 100,000 dwellings. A report by the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation (NHFIC) showed that Australia is facing a shortfall of 104,000 houses in the next five years. This is brought about primarily because the construction industry can’t keep up with demand. Then there are mitigating factors like rising interest rates and the ever-increasing cost of raw materials.

This glum forecast came at a time (April) when rental vacancy rates in every capital city in Australia were at or below 1% (Ed: and likewise in regional cities and towns). Bad weather in 2022 added to the woes of builders; some of whom closed their doors, leaving home buyers with half-finished dwellings and cost over-runs.

The NHFIC is forecasting 1.8 million new households over the next decade, with just 148,500 new dwellings added this financial year. The total will drop to 127,500 in 2024-25, with the biggest drop in apartments and multi-density dwellings (40% down on levels experienced in late 2010).

In 2021, the Grattan Institute took a futuristic look at how we could build 100,000 social housing dwellings by 2040. As you can see by the table above, this would depend entirely on State and Territory government assigning matching contributions.

Grattan Institute economic policy director Brendan Coates wrote:

“If matched state funding was forthcoming, the Future Fund could provide 6,000 social homes a year – enough to stabilise the social housing share of the total housing stock. It would double the total social housing build to 48,000 new homes by 2030, and 108,000 by 2040.”

Four Corners should do an investigation on what exactly is meant by the terms ‘social, affordable and community housing’ and who benefits. Once upon a time there was just public housing. It was owned by the government and traditionally leased to people who were on government pensions and unlikely or unable to find paid work. The rental for people in these circumstances was traditionally struck at 25% of income. The Department of Human Services also calculates rent assistance for people in this category. Now, however, we have public/private partnerships which develop ‘affordable’ or ‘community housing’ properties. While the rents charged to these properties still look attractive (to those in the private market), it can represent up to 40% of disability or aged pension income. The properties are typically built new by private developers on land bought or provided by the relevant Government (or Council). These projects are financed by investors, so even though the housing provider may be a ‘not for profit’, the profit motive is inherent, whereas with public housing it is not.

Whatever the Federal Government and its State and Territory counterparts are going to do about social housing, they’d best get on with it. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) has estimated that the need for future social housing will be 1.1 million dwellings by 2037.

The 2021 Census recorded there were almost 350,000 social housing dwellings across Australia (just under 4% of the number of all households), at the end of June 2021.

AHURI recently reported there were 165,000 applicants on the waiting lists for public housing, more than 40,000 applicants for community housing and just over 12,000 applicants for State owned and managed Indigenous housing.

“If we add together all the households on the waiting list and those already in social housing, we find that over half a million (close to 565,000, or just over 6%), Australian households were living in, or had requested to live in, a form of social housing.”

All that aside, there is the ever-growing cohort of ‘working poor’ – Australian families where one or both parents have jobs. But their household income can’t keep up with high private market rentals and the cost of living in general. Not to mention the 1.8 million Australian households Roy Morgan Research says are at risk of mortgage stress.

No quick fixes in sight although the CFMEU (one of the country’s last robust unions), wants the government to impose a Super Profits tax on the top echelon of companies.

The Guardian reported that CFMEU says a super profits tax of 40% of excess profits would ‘comfortably’ cover the cost of building more than 750,000 new social and affordable homes.

The CFMEU revealed this bold plan last week at the National Press Club, tabling a commissioned report by Oxford Economics. The report assumed that a permanent 40% tax on excess profits on companies with over $100m annual turnover, would raise an average $29bn a year, enough to fund the construction of 53,000 new homes each year.

Yep, that’ll happen.

Submarines or social housing?

housing-crisis-homelessness — Image by Jon Tyson www.unsplash.,com

One of our readers commented that on the same day the media were banging on about the Federal Government’s $368 billion submarine plan, a lone SBS panel programme focused on the national housing crisis.

It is tempting to compare spending on affordable housing with the capital cost of up to five nuclear-powered submarines. The Federal Government’s (annual) commitment to affordable housing (currently $1.6 billion), equates to about 13% of its annual submarine budget (ie if the $368 billion is spread equally over 30 years). This assumes that successive governments will continue to spend that much on affordable housing (and submarines).

While housing is the responsibility of individual States and Territories, the Federal Government develops national policy and funds it with grants to the States and Territories.

That’s the theory, but in reality the critical shortage of housing, the cost of housing and the rising tally of homelessness is a clear and present danger to Australia’s social stability. Just this week the 2021 Census data on homelessness was released – what kept them, you might ask?

More than 122,000 people in Australia experienced homelessness on Census night, an increase of 5.2% from 2016, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

The ABS interpreted the numbers as representing 48 people for every 10,000 people, compared with 50 people for every 10,000 in 2016.

While that is a reduction, the historical snapshot would seem to be an unreliable statistic, given that measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19 throughout 2021 contributed to some of the changes in the data.

“During the 2021 Census, we saw fewer people ‘sleeping rough’ in improvised dwellings, tents or sleeping out, and fewer people in living in ‘severely’ crowded dwellings and staying temporarily with other households,” ABS spokesperson Georgia Chapman said.

The affordable housing issue is not just about people sleeping in doorways. A new report produced by the Queensland Council of Social Services (QCOSS) clearly shows that working families are among those falling prey to the acute rental housing market shortage. It’s worse in some States than in others.

The report from QCOSS and The Town of Nowhere campaign is sobering reading. It predicts more than 220,000 households in the State will not have affordable housing within 20 years.

The report was prepared by national housing expert, University of New South Wales Professor Hal Pawson, and UNSW colleagues.

The tough conclusions include that there are around 150,000 households across Queensland with unmet housing needs. This includes 100,000 households who would typically be eligible for social housing. These households are either experiencing homelessness, or are low-income households in private rentals, paying more than 30% of household income in rent.

The figure is more than twice the official indicator of 47,306 households on the Queensland social housing waiting list. The latter has grown by 70% over the past three years.

Un-met housing needs are highest in satellite cities south of Brisbane. Pawson’s study shows that 10% of all households in Logan, Beaudesert and Gold Coast are homeless or living in unaffordable housing.

Professor Pawson said Queensland would need 11,000 affordable and social homes each year for the next 20 years, about 2,700 of which would need to be social housing.

He told the ABC the government had promised to build 13,000 social and affordable homes by 2027. But the QCOSS report found that the number of people with “very high need” for social housing was 37% higher than the system could accommodate.

In the decade leading up to 2017, there was “minimal” investment by State and Federal governments in affordable and social housing, Professor Pawson said.

“Unless they can get a grip on the situation, it’s a problem that over the next generation will continue to become more stressed and more pressurised.”

Much of the blame for the current problem is laid at the feet of private landlords. Private rentals in Queensland have risen as much as 33% since 2020. The sharpest increases, however, have been in regional markets. For example, over the past five years median rents rose by 80% per cent in the industrial town of Gladstone, by 51% in the tourist town of Noosa and 33% in the Gold Coast area. Nearly 60% of low-income households in the private rental market are facing unaffordable housing costs, with 15% in extreme housing affordability stress (rent accounting for more than half of total income).

While rentals have risen steeply, the bigger problem is a lack of rental accommodation. Rental vacancies are close to zero not only in Brisbane and the Gold Coast but also in regional towns.

The report states: “Queensland’s private rental housing has seen several years of declining vacancy levels and rent inflation rates far above the national norm. More generally, the sector remains entirely dominated by small-scale investor landlords whose usual prioritisation of capital growth over rental revenue inherently compromises tenant security.”
The upshot of this is that landlords are selling on the rising market, resulting in fewer houses for rental. Coupled with this is the inadequacy of tenant rights on rents, security and conditions. The Queensland Government enacted significant rental regulation reforms in 2022, but these fell far short of the changes advocated by tenants’ rights campaigners.

The Productivity Commission reported last year on the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement framed by the Albanese Government.

The agreement provides $1.6 billion a year in federal funding to the States and Territories, with the aim of improving access to affordable and secure housing.

However, the Commission judged the programme ineffective and in need of a major shake-up. With rents rising and vacancies falling, low-income private renters are spending more on housing than they used to. One in four households have less than $36 a day left for other essentials, the Commission said.

For those who might argue against more investment in social housing, there are success stories. The Queensland Government has funded a small number of permanent supportive housing (PSH) tenancies for people who have experienced long-term homelessness. PSH combines subsidised long-term housing with access to intensive but voluntary support services. One PSH programme, Brisbane Common Ground (BCG), established in 2012, is a 146-unit apartment block with 24/7 on-site support. Studies reported high tenancy sustainment rates and tenant satisfaction levels. It also produced significant savings via reduced use of emergency services and crisis accommodation. (QCOSS Report).

Despite the success of projects like BCG, there are many examples of State governments backing away from the commitment to social housing. For example, the New South Wales government is reportedly preparing to sell its Waterloo social housing complex in Sydney. The ABC reported that Waterloo Estate, the biggest social housing estate in Australia, houses almost 2,500 people.

The 18ha site will be redeveloped under a NSW government strategy called Communities Plus, where public land is offered to developers on the proviso 30% of what they build is dedicated social housing. This is clearly a retrograde move away from a project that is 100% dedicated to social housing. Meanwhile, more than 51,000 hard-pressed households are waiting for a home in NSW.

In an even more backward step, Darwin’s local Council has reportedly been issuing $162 fines to ‘rough sleepers’. The latter may or may not be indigenous people known as ‘longgrassers.’ (see link below)

Darwin Council issued a statement saying it had been subject to significant pressure from some current Northern Territory government MLAs. The MPs wanted to increase the number of infringements (and the size of fines), issued to vulnerable people who are sleeping rough in public places. (And what happens when these people cannot pay the fines? Imprisonment for non-payment? I guess that’s one way of getting people off the streets..Ed)

In its defence Council said council rangers issued fines as a “last resort”.

“We do not consider the fining of vulnerable people the solution to complex issues such as homelessness.”

More reading

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jul/12/queenslanders-miss-out-on-social-housing-due-to-failures-to-build-homes-and-inaccurate-waiting-lists

https://www.drbilldayanthropologist.com/resources/Longgrass%20people%20of%20Darwin%202012.pdf

Rental crisis raises risk of homelessness

rental-crisis-homelessness — A roof over your head (eventually). Image by www.pixabay.com,

This topic was sparked by news from a near-neighbour who had received the dreaded ‘landlord requires vacant possession’ letter.

All tenants go into a lease today knowing that the landlord can decide to sell the property, at which point they will be evicted. A lot of landlords have been doing that over the last two years, taking a profit as property prices spiralled.

The rental vacancy figures in this town and just about everywhere else would suggest that once a rental property is sold, it disappears from the rental pool – at least for a while. The national rental vacancy is 1.2% – at a time when analysis of Census housing data suggests that 700,000 private dwellings are locked up and uninhabited. More on that later.

We all know people who are renting and finding it increasingly difficult to feed their families. In recent months, there have been many stories in the media about families struggling to find a place to live. Those who find themselves at the end of a lease with no new home in the pipeline are at risk of becoming homeless.

Even when we are told the reasons for the shortage of housing, solutions are less obvious. Mostly due to self-belief and a strong self-image, some people caught between a lapsing rental and a tight vacancy rate will find their way round it.

It isn’t hard to find caravan parks, farm-stays and outback tourism ventures that need residential caretakers. The successful candidates get to park their vans for free and quite possibly pick up a small stipend as well.

People in these circumstances (a) do not regard themselves as homeless and (b) they can enjoy the luxuries afforded by a 22 ft caravan and an annexe.

June quarter data from CoreLogic shows that Australia’s rental market continues to tighten as low supply levels cause national vacancy rates to dive. Rents continued to rise across all capital cities and property types over the past three months.

Dwelling rents in the June quarter were 9.1% higher across the capital cities and up 10.8% in regional areas, compared to June 2021.

CoreLogic report author Kaytlin Ezzy said the recent upwards trend in rents has occurred mostly in the absence of overseas migration.

“This sustained period of strong rental growth has seen national dwellings record the highest annual growth in rental values since December 2008, when rental demand was supported by record levels of international migration,” Ms Ezzy said.

Vacancy rates across national dwellings fell to a record low of 1.2%, down from 2.2% this time last year.

In March, CoreLogic contributed to a report in The Guardian that found rents in Queensland had risen by as much as $200 a week over the previous two years.

The report found that steep rent rises in parts of Queensland forced people into caravans, sheds and poverty – even before widespread flooding displaced thousands more people.

While the ABS has released 2021 Census housing data, it will be “early to mid-2023” until we see the homelessness data. The most recent official data was collected in 2016 and released a year later. The homeless tally then was 116,427.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) estimates that in 2020–21, around 278,300 people received assistance from Specialised Homelessness Services (SHS). Around 111,100 clients were homeless when they first began support.

There are different categories of homelessness, apart from those who literally have nowhere to go and end up sleeping rough or in a charitable shelter. Then there are people living in sheds, garages and other unconventional buildings, couch surfing (staying with friends), hostels and unsuitable temporary accommodation.

Since late 2019, the onset of the Covid pandemic, the escalating price of real estate and an ever-increasing scarcity of rental properties has unquestionably added more individuals and families to the homeless tally. There is an increasing cohort of ‘hidden homeless’, that is people who are either not eligible to apply for support or feel they do not need it.

In Australia, some of these people head for the great outdoors. Accommodation demand driven by ‘Grey Nomads’ has produced hundreds of free camps and low-priced camp-grounds run by local show societies. The free roadside reserves, which may nor may not have a toilet/and or shower, usually have rules about how long you can stay. In Tasmania, many free camps allow you to stay for up to a month.

.Everyone’s circumstances are different, but we have met many people who had sold their house and bought a road rig. Many of the so-called Grey Nomads are retired tradies and public servants who can afford a $200,000 self-contained rig and go on the road for months at a time.

But if you travel the country and stay in free camps, you are just as likely to see a couple living in a 30-year-old caravan towed by an equally ancient car.

The big problem waiting for Australia’s new Prime Minister to tackle (after he has settled down our Pacific neighbours), is the housing crisis.

Believe me – it is a crisis. There are simply not enough houses to go around. This is particularly so in Queensland, where interstate migration has put the housing sector under massive strain.

There are reasons for the dire shortage of housing and they include delays in building new homes amid adverse weather in 2022. Then there are homes destroyed by floods or bushfires.

But as residential property analyst Michael Matusik discovered, the housing shortage is in part due to some 700,000 private dwellings that are “deliberately left vacant”.

Matusik reached this conclusion after analysing 2021 Census housing data, which showed there were one million unoccupied dwellings in Australia (about 10% of the country’s private residential accommodation).

The ABS defines unoccupied dwellings as: holiday homes (for owner’s use or rented out); investment properties without a tenant; newly built but vacant dwellings; habitable dwellings being renovated and/or vacant dwellings for sale or lease.

Matusik wrestled with those categories and calculated that after discounting the latter, 700,000 unoccupied dwellings were investment properties that were locked up rather than tenanted.

“Many of the unoccupied dwellings are in capital cities, especially Sydney and Melbourne where more apartments are in the dwelling mix,” Matusik wrote in his regular subscriber bulletin, Matusik Missive. “In these cities the proportion of overseas buyers, especially from Asia, and particularly from China, is the highest in the country.

“It is somewhat safe to say that something like 70% of the unoccupied dwellings across Australia are deliberately locked up.

“Assuming past immigration levels return, then there is a need to build some 150,000 new dwellings across Australia each year.

“If we could unlock these 700,000 empty homes, we would not need to build a new home for 4.5 years.”

While admitting this is ‘fantasy land’, Matusik says that any move to open up these dwellings would go a long way to improving short-term dwelling supply.

As we approach National Homelessness Week (August 1-7), some agencies will no doubt be calling for an earlier release of Census data on the homeless.

I asked the peak body, Homelessness Australia, for a comment; but remembered it was de-funded by the Federal Government in 2014. When one of their volunteers gets back to me, I’ll include their comment.

For now I’ll say that however bad the news is, it is better that we know sooner than later.

Homeless people sleeping in their cars

homeless-sleeping-cars — Image: Lucas Favre, www.unsplash.com

Today’s headline about homeless people could well be an urban myth; that is, a story people tell each other, swearing that it’s true. The housing crisis in Australia – a combination of unaffordable housing and scarce rental properties – is forcing people to live in their cars. I’ve done a bit of fact checking on this, but hang around while I relate this story from Tasmania.

We’d stopped at Scottsdale, a high country town in Tasmania’s north-east. We’d chosen the town’s free camp, which provided toilets and showers (the latter powered by three one-dollar coins). We were settling in for the evening when it became obvious that the older woman next to us was preparing to spend the night alone in her small Japanese car. The overnight forecast was a minimum of 7 degrees. She’d hung towels in the side windows and fixed a screen over the windshield. She seemed to be withdrawn, so we respected her unspoken need for privacy. But as far as I could tell (being next door and all), she went to bed as soon as it got dark. I decided my penance for not engaging in conversation was to make her a coffee in the morning. But when I arose (at 7.30am), she had gone.

It’s not illegal to sleep in your car in Tasmania – I looked it up. In theory if you are homeless, you could free camp your way around Tassie and nobody would hassle you. Some free camps allow you to stay for up to a month. But it does get cold from April to November, and rough campers would have to travel to town to find a public shower.

In Queensland, it’s illegal to sleep in your car unless you are parked in somebody’s driveway (with their permission). In which case you’d probably be inside, on the couch with the dog. There are similarly tough rules in the Northern Territory.

As blogger Tim Beau Bennett discovered, many local governments have specific by-laws vetoing this practice, so it would pay to check.

The biggest problem with assessing the level of homelessness in Australia is that the most reliable data (the Census) only comes out every five years. It could well be Spring before we see the first results of the 2021 Census. We therefore rely on data that is six years out of date (116,471 in 2016). But what’s been going on in the interim?

Recent reports show that up to 44,000 women of all ages are vulnerable to homelessness, with domestic violence being a key risk. Homelessness Australia (the National peak body for homelessness in Australia) released an analysis of housing data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare that showed that 1,600 women over 50 sought help from homelessness services in 2016. These women were either ‘couch surfing’ – that is, staying temporarily with friends or family members, or sleeping in their cars. The numbers had increased 75% and 81% respectively between 2012 and 2016.

Homelessness Australia launched a campaign in March this year calling for $7.6 billion to be allocated to long-term housing for women over the next four years.

The research identified a shortfall of 16,810 homes, the building of which would provide economic benefits of $15.3 billion and create 47,000 jobs across the economy.

The 2019-2020 research report Nowhere to Go, prepared by Equity Economics, showed that 9,120 women are becoming homeless every year. Women who had experienced family and domestic violence were the biggest client group seeking assistance. In 2019-20, 119,200 clients, or 41% of all such clients, sought assistance while experiencing domestic and family violence. More than half (55.8%) required accommodation. Alarmingly, the data also revealed that 7,690 women go back to abusive relationships, out of necessity.

It is perhaps illuminating to discover that Homelessness Australia was funded by the Federal Government until December 2014. Since then, it has been staffed by volunteers and has no paid staff.

As we mark the eighth birthday of Friday on My Mind, those of you who have hung in for a long time would know I often write about this topic. Australia has had a steadily increasing homelessness problem since 2011. The elevation of housing from a place to live and grow a family to a wealth-generating asset is the key issue.

An Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) investigation from November last year found that up to two million renters aged 15 or over are at risk of homelessness. AHURI’s brief to researchers was to identify those at risk of homelessness in smaller regional centres.

The resulting paper shows just how close so many people are to becoming homeless, primarily because of rental increases and ever-tightening rental vacancies.

All it would take is one life crisis – a relationship breakup, a serious illness or losing work due to economic circumstances, the authors concluded. Many people found out at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic how circumstances can quickly change.

The survey was commissioned by AHURI from researchers from Swinburne University of Technology, University of Tasmania and Launch Housing. The task was to estimate rates of people at risk of homelessness for small areas (with a population ranging from 3,000 to 25,000).

Those interviewed were considered at-risk of homelessness if residing in rental housing and experiencing at least two of the following:

low-income;

vulnerability to discrimination;

low social resources and supports;

needing support to access or maintain a living situation;

a tight housing market.

The AHURI study is an important one at this fragile stage of the electoral cycle. It bridges the gap between what we officially know about the homeless and the ‘hidden homeless’ – those who are couch surfing, sleeping in their cars, house-sitting or doing the slow lap of Australia.

Even if you have a job, the next challenge is to find a rental property. This week our local paper, The Daily Journal, carried a report that the Southern Downs region has the lowest rental vacancy rate in Queensland (0.1%). The figure, a 10-year low, comes from a Real Estate Institute of Queensland survey of 50 local government areas.

While rentals in the Southern Downs are cheap compared to metropolitan cities (advertised weekly rentals start at $210 for a one-bedroom unit, to a three bedroom house in Warwick ($600). I am assured on at least an anecdotal level that the scenario is being replicated all over Australia.

The Federal Government’s main response to this shameful crisis was the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement (NHHA). The scheme started on July 1, 2018 and provides around $1.6 billion each year to States and Territories.

The NHHA included $129 million a year for homelessness services. States and Territories must match the sum applied for when claiming this money.

The NHHA identifies ‘priority cohorts’, which is public service jargon for people most in need of a roof over their heads. (Dehumanising language is but one of the many issues when considering homelessness. They are not ‘cohorts’ – they are people. Harumph. Ed)

women and children affected by family and domestic violence,
children and young people,
Indigenous Australians,
people experiencing repeated homelessness,
people exiting from care or institutions into homelessness and
older people.

Yes, it’s a depressing topic, but better solutions and attitudes could be developed, starting by not demonising those who either can’t find work or can’t work. Then we need to stop stigmatising those who for whatever reason have nowhere else to go.

In Nomadland, Francis McDormand’s character Fern is asked: “My Mum says you’re homeless. Is that true? Fern: “No, I’m not homeless. I’m just houseless. Not the same thing, right?”

I’ll leave you with a ‘three chords and the truth’ country song, Somebody’s Daughter by Tenille Townes.

Homeless or “Houseless”

homelessness-grey-nomads — Goondiwindi Showground at dusk, photo Bob Wilson

I felt obliged to write about the vexed topic of homelessness after witnessing people sleeping rough in Queensland’s small towns. It shouldn’t happen, but it does.

The stereotype of a homeless person is the hobo asleep in the doorway of a city store, worldly goods in two carrier bags as a pillow. The reality is closer to an unhappy teenager, couch surfing with friends, or an 60+ women in a van on her own. Or Mum and two kids living in their car in a small town where they are less likely to be hassled. She’s cooking stew on a two-ring propane stove at the local park while using a public power point to charge her mobile. The kids are running about, being kids.

As we all should know, the official data (at the last Census in 2016), confirmed there were 116,000 people in Australia who were defined as homeless. However, the Australian Homelessness Monitor 2020 estimated the numbers had climbed to 290,000 by the close of 2018-2019 – that’s one in 86 people.

Queensland has big challenges when it comes to helping the homeless. The state is so physically large (1.835 million square kilometres) that social workers can sometimes rack up a 1,300 km round trip just to see one client.

This FOMM started forming after we watched the Academy Award winning movie, Nomadland, on Sunday night.

Emerging into a chilly early evening I said, “Better get home and light a fire,” despite being well aware our cosy brick house doesn’t yet need much heating (Warwick recorded 1degree Celsius last night-Ed).

Nomadland, if you have not seen it, is a docu-drama focusing on a 61-year-old widow, Fern, who has joined the legions of people known in the US as van-dwellers. Fern has been hit by a quadruple whammy: husband dies, factory closes, job goes, town is abandoned.

Left with a house she cannot sell, Fern hits the road in a beat-up van she has modified for her own purposes.

In Australia she’d be known as a Grey Nomad, although as in the US there are two distinct classes of traveller. First there are the well-to-do nomads, able to afford a big road rig with all the trimmings. Most often they are self-funded retirees, letting their hair down after a lifetime working. In the US they’d probably be known as Snowbirds (wintering in Arizona).

The other type of nomad, perhaps like those portrayed in Nomadland, live permanently on the road, in whatever style of motor-home or caravan they can afford. Like Fern, these people do not regard themselves as homeless (so are therefore not a statistic).

They favour free camps, recreation reserves and roadside rest areas where local governments have sanctioned overnight stays.

Some just pull off into the bush, far enough away that they cannot be seen from the road. In Australia, free camps will usually have a toilet; some may have a shower and a few have electricity. Fees range from nothing to $10 or $15 a night, the latter usually only applying to camps that have power and showers.

So while we toured around playing at being nomads, in Nomadland, Fern lives permanently with these restrictions and more. In one scene she is tucked away in her camper van at night eating a pizza when a man creeps up and peers through the van window. Then he hammers on the door.

“You can’t park here!”

“I’m leaving, I’m leaving.”

In Australia, our version of van-dwellers gather together in large numbers at the better known “free” camps. They also favour the physical space and lack of bureaucracy found at local showgrounds. These facilities are popular with big rigs (buses, motor homes and fifth-wheelers). If you own such a vehicle it is hard to find a caravan park which can accommodate an 8m-long van plus towing vehicle.

In Goondiwindi, I counted 50 rigs staying overnight at the showgrounds on the edge of town, close enough to the highway to hear the constant roar of heavy traffic. For $25 we got a powered site, TV reception and (as always out west), patchy mobile reception. There was a camp kitchen, toilets and showers and a separate toilet and shower with disabled access. Also the all-important dump point (for vans with chemical toilets).

Many small town showgrounds charge between $15 and $20 a night, less if not using power. It is often an honour system, with no way of knowing how many people came in after dark and left before dawn.

It’s probably impossible to establish how many Grey Nomads live permanently in their vans and own no real estate. They’re not homeless as long as the money holds out and the vehicle does not break down. As Fern explains to someone who is hiring casual staff – “No, I’m not homeless – I’m houseless.”

According to Tourism Research Australia, about 2.6 million Grey Nomad trips were taken by 55 to 70-year-old domestic travellers in 2019. This was up 12% on the previous year. As we found on our journey north in 2021, restrictions on international travel are accelerating this growth.

In a submission to the Inquiry into Homelessness in Australia, the Queensland Government stated that in 2018-19 , one in 116 people in the state received homelessness assistance.

“While this was much lower than the national rate of one in 86 people, it shows an increase from the previous year.”

The submission said that 55% of Housing Register applications had been identified as being at risk of homelessness.

Homelessness in Queensland is driven in part by housing affordability pressures, increased cost of living, stalling wages growth and welfare payments that don’t keep pace with the cost of living.

The majority of the 43,000 people seeking Special Homelessness Services (SHS) were spread among three cities (Brisbane, Townsville and Cairns) and seven regional centres.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders accounted for 33% (14,432) of all those seeking SHS (40% men and 60% women).

The largest cohorts seeking help were people fleeing domestic and family violence (31%), people with mental health issues (27%) and young people aged 15-24 (20%). My demographic accounted for just 6% (2,676), men and women (50/50) aged between 55 and 70.

I always had this somewhat romantic notion that being homeless and sleeping rough in tropical Queensland might not be a hardship. I said as much in the lyrics of Big Country Town: “We caught the ferry back to Main Street, there’s fellas sleeping in the park, beneath the blanket of the summer, they’re safe and warm there in the dark.”

Well, maybe in the height of summer, but on this caravan trip we shivered through a few single figure nights. As many Grey Nomads would know, sub-zero night temperatures are common in the interior of the country.

Meanwhile, as autumn turns to winter in Warwick, charities are doing their best to fill the gaps in services for those suffering hardship. Volunteers from the Seventh Day Adventist Church take their Community Van to Leslie Park every Sunday evening. The Salvation Army organises a ‘community gathering’ every Saturday, offering “a free meal, a positive and practical message and friendship.” These well attended free meal sessions attract more people than one might expect in a town of 15,000. Until you remember than one in 116 Queenslanders were homeless in 2018-2019, and that was before the pandemic.

More reading

https://bobwords.com.au/tales-of-quarantine-and-homelessness/

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-17/queensland-homeless-crisis-rental-shelter/100074284

Footnote; The Conversation, which I often cite, is on a donation drive to ensure it can continue providing independent, academically sound, not-for-profit journalism. https://donate.theconversation.com/au

When Aussie families lived in kerosene tin huts

This week we are leaving president-elect Joe Biden to struggle with his Disunited States, to reflect on a time in Australia’s history when homeless people were forced to build kerosene tin huts. This Depression-era story may also give us pause for contemplation as the year-long corona virus pandemic sends many nations into deep recession. No-one wants to use the D-word but also no-one can predict how long countries will have to deal with Covid lock-down periods.

As you may already know, if you also subscribe to our Goodwills Music page, we wrote a song about it. I had the idea couple of years ago when visiting Morven, in south-west Queensland. The show piece of the historical village there is a Depression-era kerosene tin hut. It was built by the late Bob Johnson, whose widow Ethel runs the village.

A sharp-witted reader wanted to know if I was ‘trumpeting’ the new song in last week’s piece about Nellie the Elephant and the price of democracy. I prefer to think of it as drollery (listing it as one of the news stories you may have missed because of the mass media preoccupation with the US election).

Sometimes I have an idea for a song and it loses momentum because I can’t match the lyric to a tune (or maybe I’d rather watch Grey’s Anatomy). Kerosene Tin Hut sat in the drawer for a year or so until She Who Now Also Writes Songs helped me stitch the lyrics together.

As you may gather, we were brought up by parents who lived through the Great Depression (and WWII). They were frugal, good at recycling before it was a thing and were fond of sayings like “never a borrower or a lender be”. Goods could be bought on lay-by, but never on ‘tick’.

That generation was good at saving to buy a particular item deemed necessary for a family – like a fridge, or a washing machine (once the copper and the mangle went to historical villages). I remember once complaining about not having a wardrobe in my bedroom. Dad brought home three wooden butter boxes from the bakery. He stacked them one on top of the other and Mum made a curtain to hang on the front. This is where I stashed my Famous Five collection (I’d grown out of them), and recently collected Mad magazines.

People who battled through the Great Depression (1929-1939), became adept at “making a muckle out of a mickle” as Mum and Dad would say.

Not much has been written about that period in Australia when shanty towns were developed on common land, usually on the outskirts of towns and cities. This happened as unemployed families were either evicted from rented dwellings or worse, lost the homes they were struggling to buy. Small communities formed on Crown land, where the inhabitants did not have to pay rent or rates. They erected corrugated tin huts or, more commonly, kerosene tin huts.

Maleny reader Mike Foale remembers the kerosene tin era, but for different reasons. He contacted me after I’d sent the new song around to a mailing list.

Like others, he asked the obvious question – where did the kerosene tins come from? Kerosene was widely used in the 1920s for cooking, lighting and refrigeration, but also provided cheap fuel for tractors.

Mike recalled from his days growing up on a farm in the Mallee that the early tractors of the 1920s to the 1950s ran on kerosene, as did other stationary engines used on farms.

“Kero was imported in four gallon (20 litre) square-top tins, with a box around the tin for travel security.

“On our farm, the boxes were converted into shelf units. Dad had to sell the early tractor off (a Caterpillar) for lack of maintenance services in the Mallee. So I grew up in the 1940s with draft horses doing the farm work, but the shed was full of empty kero tins.”

Kerosene tins were popular in Tin Town because they could be cut into square tiles with tin snips then stapled together over a bush timber framework.

Western Plains Cultural Centre local activities officer Simone Taylor has researched the ‘Tin Town’ which existed in Dubbo, NSW. The town formed in the late 1920s during the onset of the Great Depression and disappeared 20 years later. Ms Taylor told the ABC in 2018 there was a a lot of stigma attached to ‘Tin Town’.

“The shanty’s residents were pitied by the people of Dubbo. I think the people in Tin Town were getting on the best they could, but in newspaper reports it’s clear the town was seen as a social issue to solve.”

Tin Town survivors recall the hardships – there was no electricity and only a single community tap to access water. Council collected rubbish and sewage every week for a small fee.

In Dubbo, as in other locations where Tin Towns evolved, kerosene tin huts were erected on Crown land. They did not appear on official maps, so historians rely upon people’s memories and references in old newspaper articles.

Australian National University historian Joan Beaumont told the ABC that Australia was one of the countries worst hit by the 1920s crash. Communities that relied on wool and wheat exports suffered the most as global demand fell away. While the evidence suggests that Tin Towns housed families and pensioners, Professor Beaumont said single men without strong family connections were more likely to live in tin shanties.

Why is this relevant today, you might ask, when our wealthy are uber-wealthy, well-educated professionals are doing well (in two-income households) and the middle classes are, well, in the middle?

The massive disruption to the orthodox economy caused by Covid-19 has forced even conservative governments to use Keynesian economics to manage the crisis. The theory evolved by John Maynard Keynes advocates increased government expenditure and lower taxes to stimulate demand. This, rather than monetary economics (controlling the supply of money), is more likely to help avert a global depression.

There is a domino effect when people who depend on a wage to pay rent or service a mortgage, not to mention car loans, credit cards and ‘60 months nothing to pay’ consumer lures, lose their source of income.

The job goes, the search for work is fruitless, the bailiff comes calling. Suddenly, you are living in your car (the 21^st century version of the tin hut). Those of us with a proper roof over our heads ought to count our blessings – count twice when rain falls.

As this recent Sydney Morning Herald article informs, the early help offered to get homeless people off the street in 2020 is being wound back. While the official homelessness figure is north of 116,000, the Australian Homelessness Monitor found that 290,000 people sought homelessness services in the year before the pandemic.

Homelessness numbers fell between April and June this year as a result of Federal government assistance, a moratorium on evictions and a targeted campaign to get rough sleepers indoors. But the future is looking somewhat bleak as supports come to an end.

Telling people to stay home during a Covid spike is all well and good if you have a home in the first place. The alternative may well be descensus in cuniculi cavum (descent into the cave of the rabbit), or in 2020 vernacular, down the rabbit hole.

Tales of quarantine and homelessness

quarantine-homelessness — Image: Nurses wearing surgical masks during the 1918 Spanish Flu’ pandemic which killed 15,000 Australians and millions worldwide. State Library of Queensland CC

Had it not been for the coronavirus outbreak (the WHO calls it COVID-19), few Australians would have known of Manigurr-ma, a purpose-built accommodation village 30kms from Darwin.

Manigurr-ma, or Howards Springs as it is zoned by Australia Post, was built in 2012 at a cost of $600 million as part of the Ichthys LNG gas project. Developed by infrastructure company Aecom for the multinational INPEX consortium, the village can house up to 3,500 people in 875 accommodation units, each with four rooms. There is a 1,750-place dining hall, a commercial kitchen which can produce 10,000 meals per day, a licensed tavern, a cinema, medical centre and laundry.

For the next fortnight or so, the village will be home to 266 Australians evacuated from the coronavirus epicentre, the Chinese city of Wuhan. Despite assurances that the risk to the general public is minimal, Howard Springs residents are making their opinions known.

After the LNG plant at Howard Springs became fully operational in 2018, the village was closed, after housing 3,500 construction workers at its peak. In May last year, Ichthys LNG Pty Ltd transferred Manigurr-ma to the Northern Territory government at a ‘peppercorn’ rental. A spokesperson for the NT Government told FOMM a ‘have your say’ campaign was carried out last year.

“Proposals were received from a range of parties, including public feedback for the future use of the Village and its assets.

‘‘The various submissions will be considered in the final decision by the Government about how the site and its assets will be used”

FOMM notes that the proposal required submissions to be “commercially viable”.

Given that a shortage of housing is a key issue for Darwin’s homeless population, I hope someone threw that particular hat in the ring.

Quarantine, from the Italian Quarante (meaning ‘forty’), has been around since Old Testament days. The word referred to a rule introduced in Venice that all ships suspected of harbouring people with infectious diseases stood offshore for 40 days.

Several small islands off Venice known as Lazarettos were established in the 1600s when plague was rampant. Some of these off-limits islands were later converted to mental hospitals or convents. But as far as the general populace were concerned, they were, and still are, ghost towns.

Most countries had a place where people with leprosy or plague were banished. China had a well-established policy from 600 AD to detain plague-ridden sailors and foreign visitors, preferably at sea.

North Brother Island in New York’s East River was used for decades as the site of an infectious diseases hospital. A reporter from the New York Post who was recently taken on a guided tour of the now-closed station wrote that the island’s remote location was deemed perfect in the 1880s for a hospital to treat contagious smallpox and typhoid patients.

“Mary Mallon, who earned the name Typhoid Mary by passing the disease to 51 people while working as a cook in Brooklyn and Long Island, was its most infamous tenant. She displayed no symptoms herself, but was quarantined until her death in 1938.”

Sydney’s Quarantine Station at North Head (Manly) took in immigrants who had fallen ill (as well as some residents). As the authors of a book published in 2016 found, some recovered and were released. Some never made it out.

‘Stories from the Sandstone’, published in 2016 by the University of Sydney’s Peter Hobbins, Anne Clarke and Ursula Frederick, chronicled the history of Sydney’s Quarantine Station. The title of the book comes from archaeological discoveries of inscriptions carved into sandstone by some of the 16,000 people kept at North Head between 1830 until its closure in 1984.

In the mid-1880s, infectious illnesses like smallpox, tuberculosis and scarlet fever were common and there was even a recorded case of bubonic plague in 1900. As Dr Hobbins says in the book, as a result of extensive immunisation programmes, effective antibiotics and improvements in the public health system, infectious diseases do not decimate the population as they did in the 1800s or even during the Spanish ‘Flu pandemic of 1918-1919.

The most visible (and possibly the largest), quarantine station in the world in 2020 is the cruise ship Diamond Princess, moored off Japan with its 2,666 guests and 1,045 crew ‘couped (sic) up’ as an ABC report had it, until time dilutes the fear of contagion. Princess Cruises this week confirmed reports of 39 new coronavirus cases aboard the ship, berthed at Yokohama.

“We are following guidance from the Japan Ministry of Health on plans for disembarkation protocols to provide medical care for these new cases,” the website update states.

The Diamond Princess had been due to leave the Japanese port of Yokohama on February 4, but cancelled the cruise on advice from Japanese health authorities.

The cruise ship’s situation fits the definition of ‘quarantine’ – preventing the movement of those who may have been exposed to a communicable disease, but do not have a confirmed medical diagnosis.

The key difference between Coronavirus (now known as COVID-19) and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) is that people with Coronavirus are infectious before exhibiting symptoms. This may explain the comparatively higher numbers of people contracting the disease and the overly-cautious approach to quarantine here and abroad.

A Medical Journal of Australia report compiled after the SARS epidemic had abated in 2004 demonstrated the effectiveness of Australia’s border screening. Of the 1.84 million arrivals into Australia during the study period, 794 people were referred for screening to the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service. Of these, four travellers met the World Health Organisation (WHO) definition for SARS. None of these people were confirmed to have SARS.

The media loves contagion stories about as much as it drools over earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and croc and shark attacks. Are they beating it up? Time will tell. Whatever you read on social media, as of February 13, 2020, 15 Australians had been confirmed as being infected with coronavirus. Five have since recovered.

As usual, the trail of research leading into the history of quarantine stations lured me away from the point I wanted to make.

When the Northern Territory has 12 times the national average incidence of homelessness, how is it there are 875 living units sitting vacant near Darwin (for at least 18 months)?

NT Shelter estimates that 16.5% of Territorians under 16 are experiencing homelessness. The system seems unable to cope, with Shelter’s findings that 48% of people get turned away due to a ‘lack of resources’.

As Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison conceded, we are no closer to Closing the Gap. The policy was announced in 2008 with noble intentions to help bridge the gap between health and welfare outcomes for indigenous compared to non-indigenous Australians. There are no simple answers to the fact that 90% of the Territory’s homeless are indigenous. As a Triple J story revealed, a survey of non-indigenous people in Darwin revealed a lot of ignorance about ‘long-grassers’ – indigenous people who sleep rough.

Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation’s random survey of 300 people found the majority romanticised the notion of sleeping under the stars. Only six people identified a lack of housing, failed public policy and the impact of assimilation and integration policies as reasons for homelessness.

When the last person at Manigurr-ma is cleared to leave, it would be an interesting exercise, at the very least, to trial the centre as a homeless shelter. After all, though homelessness is not contagious, it does have far-reaching effects.

People without lists are listless

Bob’s list: “Sorry dear, there was no kale (or cabbage).”

Someone (possibly one of my lecturers), once said: ‘People without lists are listless’ – perhaps an observation on my then lack of motivation.

Decades later, I went in search of the origins of this quote and came up empty, although there are many other pithy quotes about the universal ‘to-do’ list.

Author Mary Roach, who has many opinions about lists, says that by making a list of things to be done, she loses “that vague, nagging sense that there are an overwhelming number of things to be done, all of which are on the brink of being forgotten”.

Alan Cohen, author of 24 popular inspirational books says “The only thing more important than your to-do list is your to-be list. The only thing more important than your to-be list is to be”.

I’ve been enslaved to The List since realising, as I tackled university at the ripe old age of 30, that if I wasn’t organised, it would not happen.

I‘d read a few time management books, back in the days when I aspired to be a supermarket manager, but later, embarking upon a three-year Arts degree, I made up my own system. This included hand-written term calendars posted on big sheets of butchers’ paper on the study wall. I had a diary with all lectures, tutorials and assignment deadlines colour-coded and a daily to-do list. The chief instrument of production was a huge old Olympia typewriter I bought from a Toowoomba police office sale. I decorated a large pin board with cartoons and illustrations which had something to say about productivity.

My thoughts on list-making were sharpened on a week-long trek to Gympie’s Heart of Gold film festival, followed by a spot of whale-watching. We have three one-page spreadsheets on which we tick off items every time we pack the caravan for a trip.

For reasons not easily explained, we departed from this time-honoured system and subsequently left home without a dozen items, including bath towels, phone charger, camera charger, SD card (from the camera), video camera (whale-watching, right?), a bottle of olive oil, my favourite pillow, oatmeal soap and a water bottle. Replacing the last two items was a cinch and we bought two towels from a discount department store (wash before using, the label hopefully said). The moral is, if you keep lists, actually look at them.

The three most common types of lists are (1) shopping (2) domestic chores and (3) motivational.

Motivational types will tell you it is not the items on your to-do list that matter, it is the prioritisation. People in general, but mild-mannered, non-assertive people most of all, consistently leave the most urgent and stress-inducing items for last. (Crikey, Mavis, we must talk to Jimmy (16) about his marijuana breath).

Since computers, tablets and smart phones became commonplace in homes and workplaces, the list story has taken precedence. The majority are ‘click bait’, which means whoever invented the list is getting paid for every click that takes you to an ad-festooned page. The worst of these show only one item per page, forcing you to click through if you really want to read about the 10 most successful bandy-legged men.

Some lists are, well, just way over the top. Like the one Franky’s Dad found, a list of the top 34,000 albums of all time. No, M, you don’t have time for this!

Journalist and bloggers have found that the quickest way to write a compulsive article is to turn your topic into a 10-point list. If you write a couple of paragraphs about each item you’ll quickly get to your deadline.

Lists pop up on social media all the time – ten ways to tame a wombat, 25 things you never knew about armpit hair, the top 17 crazy tattoos and so on.

Trivia aside, the shabby state of leadership and lack of sensible policy in this country suggests we all make a short list of important issues about which we feel outraged.

If you come up with more than three major items involving bad policy, prevarication, procrastination or short-term-ism, we need a change of government.

1/ #KidsoffNauru: This has become such a crisis doctors are signing an open letter to the PM; a coalition of humanitarian organisations have given the Federal Government a deadline to get 80 kids (and their parents) off Nauru. About a third of the child refugees left on Nauru are showing signs of Traumatic Withdrawal Syndrome. It is no longer OK to say it is a matter for the Nauruan government and its contractors. Whether these children are brought to Australia by November 20 or not, this has been an appalling outcome of the Federal Government’s refugee policy and should be judged so at the ballot box.

2/ Climate Change: A panel of 91 scientists has definitively told countries what they need to do by mid-century to avert the worst effects of global warming. Our Federal Government’s response to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (which recommends phasing out coal power by 2050), was predictable. Deputy PM Michael McCormack (who may one day rue uttering these words), claimed that renewable energy could not replace baseload coal power. He said Australia should “absolutely” continue to use and exploit its coal reserves, despite the IPCC’s dire warnings the world has just 12 years to avoid climate change catastrophe. The Guardian quoted Mr McCormack as also saying that the government would not change policy “just because somebody might suggest that some sort of report is the way we need to follow and everything that we should do”.

3/ Homelessness and the cost of housing: You might dimly recall Bob Hawke’s rash promise in 1987 that no Australian child would live in poverty by 1990. Three decades later the goal is as unattainable now as it was then. Even when you take into account that Hawke mis-spoke (the script said no Australian child need live in poverty), it was an empty promise. Nine prime ministers later, close to 731,000 Australian children are living in poverty.

The official homeless figure at the 2016 Census was 116,000, with about 7% (about 8,000 people) said to be ‘sleeping rough’, defined as on the street, on a park bench, under bridges and overpasses, in their cars or in makeshift shelters. These statistics damn all sides of politics, worsening through a period in which there has been no meaningful increase in unemployment benefits or disability pensions.

Meanwhile, property investors continue to borrow money and claim expenses (notably interest payments) against rental income. In 2014-2015, 1.27 million property investors (12% of taxpayers), reduced their personal income tax through negative gearing. No government has yet had the guts to scrap negative gearing or change it in any way.

Economist Greg Jericho analysed a huge Tax Office data dump to glean a few insights – most importantly, 27% of taxpayers claiming on rental properties are in the $80k to $180k tax bracket (and another 8% earn more than that). Furthermore, just over 3% of taxpayers own six or more rental properties. The proportion that own more than one house has been on the increase in recent years.

It’s all too easy to raise other concerns, such as: Adani, Great Barrier Reef, Fracking, the threat to job security for gay teachers and even the Opera House furore (smokescreen that it is).

(Wow, that sure puts my forgetting the towels into perspective. Ed)

Housing affordability and the empty homes scandal

housing-affordability-empty-houses — Housing affordability in world capitals. Photo of Melbourne’s Southbank by Ashley Rambukwella flickr CC https://flic.kr/p/KfdUMR

The inspiration to start writing (again) about housing affordability came from left field. I was sitting back enjoying an American roots band, The Brothers Comatose, at the Blue Mountains Music Festival in Katoomba. Lead singer and front man Ben Morrison introduced the band, saying they were from San Francisco but maybe not for long. “The price of houses is crazy there (man) and most of the musicians I know are moving out because they can’t afford to live in the area.”

“Maybe we could move here,” he suggested, and the audience groaned, knowing that housing affordability is just as big a problem in Sydney and surrounds as in San Francisco, Vancouver, New York or Paris.

“Can we sleep on your couch?’’ he jested, before doing what musicians do to avoid thinking about the cost of living. Great band, by the way (check out this bluegrass old-style tune around one microphone).

Morrison’s complaint rang true – I did a modicum of housing affordability research which quickly showed that the median price of a house in San Francisco’s Bay area clipped $US1.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2017. The California Association of Realtors Housing Affordability Index shows that it would cost $US7, 580 a month to service the mortgage. The average monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $US3, 441.

Housing affordability is a myth in Vancouver, Canada’s biggest West coast city. The 14^th annual Demographia affordability study ranked Vancouver the least affordable among 50 American and Canadian cities. Internationally, it is ranked the third least affordable city among 293 locations around the world (Sydney was 2^nd). The British Columbia Provincial Government has made several attempts to rein in the city’s galloping real estate prices, including a 15% tax on foreign nationals purchasing metropolitan real estate. Another new measure attempts to tackle a problem that plagues Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s housing affordability problem cities.

The BC government conducted a survey which found that 8,481 houses in Vancouver were unoccupied during a six-month period. That’s 4.6% of the housing stock. Now the government is going to levy a tax on people who own houses and don’t occupy or rent them. The tax will be calculated at 1% of the assessed value. So the owner of a two-bedroom condo in Vancouver valued at $900,000 and deemed to be unoccupied will pay the BC government $9,000 a year.

Meanwhile, the housing boom in Vancouver is on the downturn, according to the Vancouver Courier, and they should know. Still, with a median house price around $3 million (Dec 2017) and condos going at $1 million apiece, it’s maybe time for that bubble to lose some air.

Meanwhile Down Under, house prices keep rising

Melbourne and Sydney made into Demographia’s top 10 list of the least affordable cities in the world. Sydney’s median house price of $1.11 million assured it of that invidious claim. Demographia ranks middle income affordability using a price-to-income ratio. Anything over 3 is rated unaffordable. On this basis, some of the world’s most affordable towns included Youngston, Ohio (1.9), Moncton, New Brunswick (2.1) and Limerick, Ireland (2.2). There are no affordable Australian cities on Demographia’s watch.

The least affordable city is Hong Kong (19.4) then a gap to Sydney (12.9) and Vancouver (12.6). Melbourne (9.9) is slightly more unaffordable than the aforementioned San Francisco (9.1).

Studies have shown that Melbourne is one of the big culprits in hiding empty houses among its residential property stock.

Australia’s 2016 Census showed that 11.2% of Australia’s housing stock was described as unoccupied on Census night. Empty property numbers were up 19% in Melbourne and 15% in Sydney compared with the 2011 Census. This growing anomaly is a global trend in the world’s biggest cities which have allowed rapid apartment developments.

Just why 1.089 million houses and units were unoccupied on Census night is hard to explain. But it probably suggests the owner/s were not in need of rental income and would rather keep the place in mothballs for use when the wealthy owners or friends and relatives visit (for the Australian Open, Melbourne Cup or the Grand Prix) or are relying on capital gain without the need to bother with tenants.

Hal Pawson of the University of NSW wrote in The Conversation that the spectre of unlit apartments in Melbourne’s night sky prompted the Victorian government to introduce an empty homes tax. Like Vancouver, this is levied at 1% of the property’s value. Similar taxes have been introduced in Paris and Ontario. Mr Pawson, Associate Director – City Futures – Urban Policy and Strategy, City Futures Research Centre, Housing Policy and Practice, UNSW, (try getting an acronym out of that. Ed.) says the Melbourne tax only applies to inner city and middle suburbs and, there are ‘curious’ exemptions for foreign nationals with under-used second homes.

The flaw in the scheme is that it relies on self-reporting. Pawson says the lack of reliable data on empty homes is a major problem in Australia.

Census figures substantially overstate the true number of long-term vacant habitable properties because they include temporarily empty dwellings (including second homes).

Prosper Australia uses Victorian water records to estimate that about half of Melbourne’s census-recorded vacant properties are long-term “speculative vacancies”. That’s 82,000 homes. A similar “conversion factor” to Sydney’s census numbers would indicate around 68,000 speculative vacancies.

Labor Opposition shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen has proposed a national tax on homes left empty for six months or more.

Pawson says these “cruel and immoral revelations” come at a time when 400 people sleep rough in Sydney every night and hundreds of thousands more face overcrowded homes or unaffordable rents.

He says Australia has a bigger problem in terms of under-utilised occupied housing. Australian Bureau of Statistics survey data shows that, across Australia, more than a million homes (mainly owner-occupied) have three or more spare (read unused) bedrooms. A comparison of the latest statistics (for 2013-14) with those for 2007-2008 suggests this body of “grossly under-utilised” properties grew by more than 250,000 in the last six years.

While authorities are grappling with the issue and how to perhaps tighten foreign ownership laws, the ANZ Bank did its own survey. Foreign buyers were playing an increasing role in spurring demand for new houses and apartments, it found. The ANZ analysed Reserve Bank data to conclude that in 2015-2016, foreign investors bought between 30,000 and 60,000 dwellings in Australia. This equates to 15% to 25% of all new dwellings, 80% of which were apartments, which can be bought ‘off-the-plan’.

There is good reason to suspect that the new apartment markets in Hong Kong, Vancouver, London, Paris and other desirable world capitals are underwritten to some extent by foreign nationals (including Australians).

The problem which could arise, say in the case of a global recession, is what happens in cities like Melbourne and Brisbane where foreign investors have bought up to 35% of new stock, if these owners are forced to sell.

Not to worry, most big box discount stores will give you a large cardboard box in which to live. The dumpster bins behind shopping centres have perfectly good food that’s just been chucked out because it has passed the use-by date.

Trust me.

FOMM back pages

Travel safe this weekend, people