CHinese International called on to support low rent housing in Australia

trotskyistplatf

In the PRC, Hu Jintao and Li Keqiang are pushing forward a program to build 7.7 million low-rent public housing units in urban areas and 2.2 million units in rural/mining areas by 2011. But in Australia, despite its wealth that derives from its tremendous natural resources and very low population, little is being done to provide low cost housing for the poor.

As a result the last census in Australia in 2006 recorded that there were 105,000 homeless people. Given that Australia's population is 65 times less than China's, this is in proportionate terms equivalent to having a homeless population of 7 million in China. Worse still the homelessness numbers in Australia have grown quickly since this last census due to the higher unemployement and underemployment caused by the recession in the capitalist world.

The main problem is that the capitalist "free market" does not provide enough low cost housing units. This is because developers can make more money building expensive houses for the rich than they can building affordable dwellings for the poor. That is why there needs to be a big amount of public housing to make up for the huge shortfall of low cost accomodation.

The shortage of low rent public housing in Australia means that landlords in the private sector can charge high rents and can ill treat tenants who have nowhere else to go. Also for each low rent private dwelling advertised there will be 20, 30, 40, 50 or more people applying for the tenancy. If the landlords are prejudiced against certain racial or social groupings, people from these sectors will have problems getting a dwelling to live in. Single mothers, the poor, Aboriginal people and working class people from "ethnic" minorities thus have difficulty obtaining rental housing in Australia. International students from China and India studying in Australia are also affected by these problems.

That is why activists in Australia are organising a united-front rally on Thursday November 5 at 4pm outside the offices of the Minister for Housing in Sydney (111-117 Devonshire Street - 2 minutes walk from Central Station) to demand a massive increase in public housing.

International students from China are invited to participate in this protest. Although international students are not eligible for public housing in Australia, an increase in the supply of low-rent housing would greatly lower the exorbitant rents they face in the private rental market and would make it harder for landlords to discriminate against them.

Here is the call for the rally:

Poor People, Single Mothers, “Ethnic” People and

Aboriginal People Are Sick of Having Their Tenancy

Applications Knocked Backed By Landlords and Agents

That is why we are going to demonstrate to demand that

the Federal Government:

Massively Increase

Public and Community

Housing Places!

Rally at 4pm,

Thursday, November 5

Outside Minister for Housing Tanya Plibersek’s Office

111-117 Devonshire Street (Elizabeth St Corner)

- A short walk from Central Station Devonshire St. tunnel exit

Endorsed By: Each & All Stronger Together - EAST (housing and community

activist group), Social Justice Network, Sydney District Committee of the

Communist Party of Australia, International Federation of Iranian Refugees,

Justice Action, Trotskyist Platform (rally initiator)

For information call 0417 204 611

• The 20,000 social housing (public and community) dwellings that

the government promises to build over four years is woefully

inadequate. The queue for public housing is many times this

number and some people have been waiting ten years to get a

spot!

• The only time that the government seems to really plan more

public housing funding is when it wants to use that as a means

to undermine Aboriginal-administered community housing.

Such racist attacks must stop now! Stop starving Aboriginal-administered

community housing of proper funding! Provide

Aboriginal-administered community areas with the basic public

services that most other citizens take as a right!

• As well as providing more places, the government must provide

funding so that existing community and public accommodation

can finally be properly maintained and renovated.

• Also unjust evictions and threats of evictions from public housing

must stop now!

• The terrible social housing shortage means that many people

are squeezed into housing arrangements they don’t like. With

an ever increasing number of people being thrown out of work

or having their employment hours slashed due to the economic

crisis, this situation is only getting worse.

• Without adequate affordable public housing, private landlords

are able to drive up rents.

• The shortage of affordable rental dwellings means that prejudiced

private landlords and estate agents are able to have the choice of

refusing prospective tenants who are either Aboriginal, poor,

single mothers, non-white “ethnic” people or international

students.

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for updates on this rally call go to trotskyistplatform.com and click the icon on the top right hand corner.

For more information call 0417 204 611, email: trotskyistplatform@gmail.com

Note that although this rally is being initiated by Trotskyist Platform, a communist group in Australia (one that is also sympathetic to the PRC), it is a united-front rally that will include people from a range of quite different political persuasions. So you do not necessarily have to agree with the overall political stance of any one group involved to participate in the action - you only have to agree with the demand for more public housing.

Chinese International students in Sydney please join this rally!
Help the poor in Australia to gain places to live in!
Achieve lower rents, better housing conditions and more access to affordable units for yourseves!

trotskyistplatf

[url = http://bbs.m4.cn/forum.php?mod=redirect&goto=findpost&pid=2930069&ptid=204361] 1 # [/ url] trotskyistplatf [/ i] [/ b]

Here is the rally call:

trotskyistplatf

[url = http://bbs.m4.cn/forum.php?mod=redirect&goto=findpost&pid=2938131&ptid=204361] 2 # [/ url] trotskyistplatf [/ i] [/ b]

Here is an article associated with this post. It is about homelessness in Australia and the terrible shortage of accomodation available to low-income earners.

Please note that Australia's population is 65 times less than China's. So when you want to see what Australian figures (example for homnelessness) would mean in China you have to multiply the figure by 65 times.

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As Homelessness Rises, Rudd's Regime for The Rich Is

Barely Different from Howard's in Its Neglect of Low-Rent Accommodat ion

Massively Increase Public Housing!

October 22: He had only one purpose. The 22 year-old only had one ambition when he walked up to

a police station to throw a rock through the windscreen of a nearby patrol car. The man also had just

this same singular thought on his mind when he immediately then strolled into the police station to

turn himself in. His sole aim was ... to go to jail! To go to jail so that he could get out of the cold. To

go to jail so that he could at least get some sort of meal. You see, the man was homeless with no job

and no money. A story from the Great Depression? No, a story from four months ago! An incident in

Calcutta? No, an incident right here in Sydney at the Glebe police station. The man, Lionel Kauone,

became homeless after he had to leave the boarding house in Auburn that he was living in after he

ran out of money. Kaoune had no prior criminal record and when the clean cut man appeared in the

Parramatta Bail Court, his Legal Aid solicitor followed Kaoune's directions by asking that his client

be kept in custody.

How can something like this be happening in a country as rich as Australia? In a country where

a small population combined with gigantic land and mineral resources has produced one of the

highest average wealth levels in the entire world. Well, the reality is that this country's capitalist

system has created a society of haves and have-nots. This is a society where much of the wealth

is grabbed by a small number of extremely rich tycoons who live in obscene luxury. For example,

Australia's fifth richest man Clive Palmer owns, among other luxuries, three luxury private jets, two

helicopters, several personal homes and a few lavish boats. Earlier this year Palmer gifted his 15

year-old daughter a 30m luxury yacht worth $ 5.3 million! Meanwhile, this country's seventh richest

man John Gandel lives in a three storey, 35-room mansion in Melbourne's Toorak. Yet alongside such

opulence, most working class people do it hard while those on the lowest income levels often lead a

life of deprivation. Nowhere is this more striking than in the numbers of homeless people. At the time

of the last census in 2006, nearly 105,000 people in this country were homeless. Of these people,

over 34,000 were under the age of 18 and over 12,000 were children under the age of 12. Of the

recorded homeless, 16,375 people were actually sleeping on the streets or in parks on census night.

Others were in emergency accommodation of various types, many doing the rounds from government

crisis housing to sleeping in cars or at friends' places to being cast out into the street and then back

into emergency accommodation.

Kevin Rudd - just like John Howard before him - loves to lecture other countries about "human

rights. "Yet it is the right to shelter, alongside the right to eat, which is the most basic of rights that

should be accorded to every human being. This right does not exist in "democratic" Australia.

Often Australia's homeless are families whose breadwinners have lost their jobs. In some cases people

become homeless because a physical disability or mental illness limits their chances of employment

or social support. Many homeless people are women - often with their children - fleeing domestic

violence. Indeed, all the groups in society who face discrimination are overly represented in homeless

statistics. An Aboriginal person is almost four times as likely to be homeless as a non-indigenous

person - indigenous people make up 9% of the homeless numbers despite being only 2.5% of the

population.

In a just society, any improvement in overall national wealth would go first to the most needy. However,

in Australia the opposite has happened during the recent mining boom. Thus, in the period from the

census in 2001 to the one in 2006, the homeless population actually grew by nearly 5,000. Since

then the situation has become even worse due to the global economic crisis. As business owners lay

off workers and slash the number of hours they call up casuals for, more people simply can't afford to

rent the units they had been staying in. It is true that due to the strength of China's socialistic public

sector which has held up Australia's lucrative China-bound exports, unemployment levels here have

not risen as fast as in other capitalist countries. Yet the official unemployment rate which counts a

person as employed even if they work as little as one hour a week hides the true story. On top of the

official unemployment rate of 5.8% is an additional 8.1% of the workforce who are working less

hours than they want to (according to August 2009 Australian Bureau of Statistics figures.) This

latter underemployment rate has ballooned out by 50% in just a year so that now 1.5 million people

in this country either can't get any work or are working less hours than they want to. When you add

to this figure the discouraged job seekers who are not counted in unemployment figures because

they are not actively looking for work and include those who have involuntarily gone into full-time

parental care or study because jobs are not available, the real unemployment / underemployment rate

is about 20%. Of this one in five of the workforce who are in an employment crisis, a fair chunk has

to battle to maintain a stable home to live in. And with people in such dire financial situations and

affordable rental accommodation so scarce, the difference between being homeless and having a

guaranteed roof over your head is frequently an event you don't even have the slightest influence on.

Like the landlord of the unit you were renting deciding to sell his property or move back into it. Or

the owner defaulting on his mortgage. Or the place you were renting being in such a terrible condition

that the building is condemned.

There are no overall statistics about the increase in homelessness since the 2006 census. However,

charities have noted a huge rise in the number of people seeking emergency assistance. St Vincents

de Paul has recorded a six-fold increase in homeless families looking for help, the biggest increase

in 120 years (Daily Telegraph, 25 May.) In some cases, people in desperate need find that welfare

agencies are too overloaded to find emergency accommodation for them. After the humiliating

experience of having to beg for a place to sleep, they get turned away on to the street or are at best

given a tent to sleep in. This is just one of the kind of stories of human suffering resulting from the

housing crisis. There are many others. At Sydney's Central Station, single mothers with their children

lug around suitcases as they transit from one crisis accommodation in search of another. In Darwin,

poor elderly people, dejected and frightened, live in sheds.

No "Fair Go"

In this "fair go for all only if you're rich"-society, the state institutions see the poor not mainly as

human beings in need but as a burden who should be monitored to stop them "cheating the system."

Thus, homeless people in temporary crisis accommodation have to go through a nerve-wracking

weekly "assessment" to see if they are still eligible for such accommodation. Often, families are

repeatedly moved from one caravan park, hostel or motel to another. With emergency accommodation

in Sydney filled up, many are being herded into the Blue Mountains. The constant moving makes it

nearly impossible for children to attend school, for adults to attend job training or for families to build

any meaningful social support network. A typical experience is that of Steve and Doris whose story

was told on ABC Radio's AM program (July 9) last winter:

Nightime temperatures in Sydney's western suburbs are expected to drop to four degrees Celsius

but Steve and Doris don't know where they and their three toddlers will be sleeping.

"Tomorrow we don't know where we're going to be. And you look at your kids and then they ask you

where are we going? Where we going mum? Where we going to dad? "said Doris.

For the past week, the state's housing department has put the family up in a caravan park in

western Sydney.

Steve says they have been homeless for about 10 months.

"Our house was sold from us, we were renting the house, and we moved in with family, and we

couldn't stay with them, so we moved out and stayed in cars and so forth, "he said.

"We were in cars sometimes three nights in a row, sometimes we were in there for longer. But

there's times where, you know, through generosity of friends and so forth, they'd let us stay at their

place for one night or two. "

Doris says she tried to get into refuges but couldn't find anywhere that would take the whole family.

"They turned around and said to us, 'We can take you in, only you and your children, but we won't

take your husband '. That was really devastating, "she said.

Every day for the past few months Doris and Steve have been applying for rental properties in

Sydney's western suburbs but with no luck.

Although Steve recently lost his job, he says their rental history is excellent.

"Over the last three to four months we've put in well over 60 to 80 applications, and each application

comes back the same response, which is declined, and most of the times they'll just tell us that it's

due to landlord picking someone else instead of us, "he said.

.... "This could happen to anybody else in Australia at any stage and people don't realise that."

For every person that is homeless there are many, many more working class people who are just

one pay cheque away - or a single ruthless boardroom decision to slash jobs away - from the same

fate. About 1.1 million households spend over 30% of their income on housing costs - the majority

of whom are renters. About two in three low income renters fall into this category. And if you don't

have much income and more than 30% of it is being taken in rent, then you do not have too much

left for food, medical bills, electricity and transport let alone any money for clothing and dental costs.

Aboriginal people are the most ground down by this unfair housing "order," especially those living in

urban areas. A quarter of city-based indigenous people, not on rent assistance, were spending over

half of their income on rent or mortgage instalments.

The problem is not only the starkly unequal distribution of income in this country but also the terrible

shortage of low-rent accommodation. Thus, many people going for low rent private accommodation

find that there are 20, 30, 40 or even more people vying for the same dwelling. In such a situation,

whether the landlord is an upper-middle class "mum and dad" property holder or a high-flying

developer, he is going to give the tenancy to the most relatively affluent applicant. That only adds to

the difficulty that poor people face in finding accommodation. With so many people competing for the

few low-rent dwellings available, many landlords won't give people on social security benefits even

a look in to a rental property. Single mothers, too, have found that once an estate agent hears that

she relies on child support payments or single parenting payments to get by, she is thrown out of the

running to claim a vacant tenancy....

For whole of this article please see attached

trotskyistplatf

3# trotskyistplatf

Here are some key excerpts from the above attached article on the homelessness/affordable housing crisis in Australia. These excerpts include portions of the article especially relevant to Chinese netizens.

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The “Free Market” Fails … Again

At the same time as there is a drastic shortage of low rent dwellings, the opposite is the case for upmarket

dwellings....

So why this big disparity? Well, the fact of the matter is that investors can make more money renting

to rich people seeking luxury accommodation than they can renting out to people struggling to make

ends meet. And since the sole consideration that investment decisions are based on in the capitalist

“free market” is the $, there are not enough low cost dwellings being built. For the propertied classes

this arrangement presents no problem. Many upper middle class “mums and dads” have become

rich from the skyrocketing sale prices of their rental properties, assisted in good part by the various

tax concessions and government grants given to property investors. Meanwhile, sitting above the

“mums and dads” are the big-time developers. And they have been raking in a killing. Take a look at

Australia’s rich list and you will see that a good number of people in them have snared the majority of

their wealth from property investment. Australia’s third richest person, Harry Triguboff, has extracted

a $3.7 billion fortune largely through his Meriton Apartments. Meriton builds high-end dwellings

and rent out 3200 apartments. Those apartments make no contribution whatsoever to helping low

and middle income people find affordable rental accommodation – these luxury apartments all have

rental rates of between $150 to $800 per night! Meanwhile, Australia’s tenth richest man, arch

union-buster Len Buckeridge, owns this country’s biggest home builder, the Buckeridge Group of

Companies (BGC.) The fact that this home building company is supporting a man with a $1.95

billion fortune is hardly good news for tenants. The hundreds of millions going into the tycoon’s bank

accounts have to be paid for through higher home prices, which in turn spells higher rents for tenants

of those dwellings that happen to be rented out.

Australia’s housing system truly allows the wealthy to ride ever higher and higher. However, for low

income households, the current system means a massive shortfall of 251,000 in the number of rental

dwellings that are affordable and available to them. How can this shortfall be overcome? Well, the

profit-driven private sector has thoroughly proven itself unwilling to and incapable of solving the

problem. The only solution, then, is for the public sector to step in and provide a large amount of

low rent accommodation. Yet, Australian governments have undermined public housing. Even as the

population grew and the shortage of low rent accommodation ballooned out, the supply of public

rental housing has been slashed from 372,134 in 1996 to about 338,000 in 2008. From 2001 until

2008, the proportion of people in public housing has dropped from 4.9% to under 4%. Yet even now

some privatisation of public housing continues. Just 4 months ago, the NSW government started

auctioning off 16 public housing properties at Sydney’s Millers Point. There urgently now needs

to be built a mass working class-centred campaign to demand a big increase in public housing.

.... Even in the existing workers states in the world – all of which are deformed in various ways by the

hostile encirclement of world capitalism – we can see some of these advantages of a socially-owned

economy. For example, in the Peoples Republic of China, for all its partial concessions to capitalism,

the state has started building a total of 9.9 million low-rent public housing dwellings to be completed

by 2011. Nearly ten million public housing dwellings! Now one can, of course, point to the fact that

China’s huge population makes every figure related to that country sound big. But even if we take into

account that China’s population is 65 times greater than Australia’s, we still find that China’s public

housing program is proportionately equivalent to building an impressive 152,000 units in Australia.

This, in three years, is almost eight times more than what the ALP [Australian Labor Party]
government will be doing for social housing in four years! Furthermore, the public housing program of socialistic China is even

more striking when you consider that China is per head of its population still six times poorer than

Australia (China is still pulling herself up from the terrible poverty and colonial subjugation of her

pre-1949 capitalist days).

The reason that socialistic China is able to achieve such a public housing program is that the

decisive sectors of its economy are under state ownership or state control. This includes not only

its biggest home builder, China Vanke corporation but also the biggest steel and cement companies

whose products would be used in housing construction. Due to the control of these enterprises by

the working class people’s state, these enterprises can be commanded to meet the ambitious public

housing construction program even though building such low cost dwellings would not be the most

financially profitable way for the various enterprises to use their resources.

If the working class in a rich imperialist country like Australia were to take power, it would be able

to harness even more resources to develop housing and other social programs than the likes of Cuba

and China currently can. Of course, when the working classes in the West finally seize state power

one of their first duties would be to render assistance to the long embattled socialistic states in Cuba,

Vietnam, China and North Korea.

trotskyistplatf

Below is a statement by Australia's powerful CFMEU construction workers trade union in support of this rally for much more public housing in Australia:

Construction Forestry Mining & Energy Union

Construction & General Division

New South Wales Branch

12 Railway Street Lidcombe

Postal Address: LOCKED BAG 1, LIDCOMBE NSW 1825

Phone 02 9749 0400

trotskyistplatf

Here is excerpts from the statement by the Australian trade union about the terrible housing crisis in Australia. The statement was sent in solidarity with the November 5 rally in Sydney to demand a massive increase in public housing in Australia.

Dear Supporters for an Increased Public Housing Program

I want to congratulate the organisers of today’s rally.

... since the mid-1970s, successive Governments have failed to adequately deliver sufficient

public housing for those in our society who need such shelter.

There is also a “Developer Strike” on at present, with 33,000 NSW Housing Lots already zoned and

serviced, but these remain undeveloped - because it is not profitable to do so.

Wages have failed to keep pace with housing costs. From 1986-2007 earnings doubled, but house

prices went up by 5 times. Deregulation of the Labour Market has put more low income earners into casual and part time work,

and forced other workers into sham contracting arrangements which has increased the need for public

housing. Rental stress is set at 30% of income. However, many low income renters pay well over that figure.

The CFMEU will consistently call on all Governments to focus on this most urgent issue, and to

ensure there is an adequate supply of Public Housing for those in need.

Yours in Unity

PETER MCCLELLAND

State President