Homelessness Explodes in Australian Cities

tents-and-homeless

19-12-2023: Video footage of people living in tents in the major Australian city of Brisbane recently exposed the dire state of the housing and cost of living crisis. A passing cyclist took the footage of a new tent city appearing along the river in West End, which was picked up by the mainstream media. According to the census conducted in 2021, 122 000 individuals in Australia now experience homelessness every night, while in Queensland the number of people experiencing homelessness has increased by 22% in the last five years.[1] In nearby Musgrave Park, 50 homeless people had to be moved into temporary accommodation last May to make way for the famous Paniyiri Greek Festival.[2] But not all homeless people are so lucky to even receive temporary accommodation. Brisbane City Council staff have been reported to be removing tents from inner-city parks and dumping them, leaving some people without a home to return to. A Musgrave Park resident told the Brisbane Times “..that’s all you’ve got in life, and they take it off you and dump it”.[3]

Covid quarantine shelters?

In response, Brisbane’s Lord Mayor put forward a proposal to turn a Covid detention centre (“quarantine facility”) at Pinkenba into a 500-bed emergency accommodation facility. Adrian Shrinner claimed that the facility was not purpose built for crisis housing, but it was “better than living in a car or a tent”.[4] The fraudulent “Covid pandemic” was in reality a deliberate shutdown of the economy in a desperate attempt to re-start a floundering production for private profit system which is in an intractable crisis. Unprecedented political repression on the basis of blatantly unscientific motives was meted out against working people and the poor, while millionaires and billionaires added to their wealth portfolios. The cost-of-living crisis afflicting Australia and other Western countries which is now driving even more homelessness is inextricably linked to two years of engineered partial economic collapse via absurd and harmful lockdowns combined with hundreds of thousands of job losses due to unconscionable vaccine mandates with an untested and potentially deadly formula. Housing was already nigh-on unaffordable for many before lockdowns, and now some are simply priced out of access.

Housing should be a basic right, but it is treated as a commodity under modern capitalism. One of the more concerning outcomes is the fact that older women over the age of 55 now make up the fastest growing cohort of those who are homeless in Australia.[5] There are many factors which contribute to this appalling situation, including a shortage of affordable housing, an ageing population, and a significant gap in wealth accumulation between men and women across their lifetimes. Women tend to accumulate less superannuation, due to working part time or casually throughout their lives and taking time out of the workforce to care for family members. There is also age discrimination in employment, plus an increasingly unaffordable private rental market.[6] The fact that housing is treated as a “market”, rather than a human need, in itself inevitably generates homelessness for the “have-nots”.

The “Lucky Country”

For some time after Donald Horne wrote the book The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties, the nickname of the Lucky Country stuck for decades afterwards.[7] In the 1960s, the “great Australian dream” of home ownership was certainly achievable for the vast majority of the working class. Yet this was just one effect of the post-war boom in the West, where capitalism was able to expand from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, and this period ended decades ago. During that time, the ruling classes in the West also felt compelled to offer something to counter universal home supply for workers in the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). With the USSR now long gone, in a certain sense the “socialist demon” has been replaced by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Today, Western corporate media propaganda against the PRC is at saturation level, as they attempt to counter news of the PRC’s stupendous and decades long economic growth with nonsensical claims of the “threat” of China. The “Lucky Country” is dead, replaced with dangerous war provocations against the PRC.

In fact, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural development in the PRC plans to build 6.5 million government-subsidised rental apartments in 40 major cities by 2025, benefiting 13 million people.[8] In a country of 1.4 billion people, nearly 90% of its people are homeowners. Even in the neighbouring Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), with far fewer economic resources than the giant PRC, an astounding 88.1% of the population owned their own home, putting Vietnam in the global top 10.[9] While Australian workers endure a daily struggle against a sharply rising cost of living crisis, the average cost of living in the Laos People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR) is 45.5% lower and average rents are 32.8% lower than the corresponding figures for Australia.[10] In the much maligned DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – “North Korea”), Article 25 of its constitution guarantees all working people the right not only to housing, but also to food and clothing.[11] On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, in the Republic of Cuba, 85% of Cubans own their own homes.[12] While it is the case that many homes are in poor repair, the harsh economic conditions would be largely alleviated if the crippling six decade long economic blockade imposed by the US government was lifted.

Despite some differing circumstances, it is clear that homelessness as such is unknown in those states which have overthrown capitalism, and have embarked on a path towards socialism. This fact indicates that for working people in the West to similarly ensure they no longer have homeless people living on the streets, or in tents or in cars, a revolution which places the proletariat in power is required. To be sure, political decision-making power in the PRC, the SRV, the DPRK, the LPDR and Cuba is restricted to conservative and bureaucratic Stalinist castes which value coexistence and collaboration with imperialism above even the welfare of “their own” working classes. This is one reason why these misleaderships capitulated to the West with its nefarious “Covid pandemic” narrative. To retain legitimacy, however, these bureaucrats must be seen to address critical issues such as housing, and public ownership of the major means of production combined with a planned economy enables them to do just that. What is required are socialist revolutions in the West, combined with proletarian political revolutions in the East, to enable workers in power to forever end the scourge of homelessness.

Workers League

www.redfireonline.com

E: workersleague@protonmail.com

[1] www.australian5.com/2023/12/07/heartbreaking-footage-showing-growing-tent-city-in-major-australian-capital/ (13-12-2023)

[2] www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/brisbane-housing-crisis-as-50-homeless-people-moved-from-musgrave-park-amid-pinkenba-facility-pledge/ar-AA1b80lX (13-12-2023)

[3] www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/council-staff-thought-empty-tents-where-homeless-lived-were-abandoned-20231031-p5egc9.html (13-12-2023)

[4] www.mandurahmail.com.au/story/8194427/push-to-turn-covid-facility-into-homeless-shelter/ (13-12-2023)

[5] www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/age-discrimination/projects/risk-homelessness-older-women (13-12-2023)

[6] www.mercyfoundation.com.au/our-focus/ending-homelessness/older-women-and-homelessness/ (13-12-2023)

[7] www.australia-explained.com.au/history/the-lucky-country/ (17-12-2023)

[8] www.gov.cn/policies/policywatch/202202/14/content_WS6209be64c6d09c94e48a5045.html (17-12-2023)

[9] www.e.vnexpress.net/news/perspectives/the-housing-paradox-in-vietnam-4565703.html (17-12-2023)

[10] www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=Laos (17-12-2023)

[11] www.ncnk.org/sites/default/files/DPRK%20constitution%20%282019%29.pdf (17-12-2023)