Public housing in Australia
[4][5] There are also moves towards privatisation and transition into community and social housing models, reinforced through government policies which aim to sell large amounts of public homes into the private market.
Since the early 1990s, departmental restructuring under the Kennett government relegated its status to the "Office of Housing" within the Department of Planning and Development.
The inner-city public housing is mostly found in Melbourne, Sydney and to an extent, Perth, with a high-rise tower block development in Stainforth Court,[10] Hobart.
Since the late 1990s, the Victorian government has embarked on a process of redeveloping its inner-city estates with a mix of public and private housing.
Some of the low-density housing has been sold off over the years to long term tenants, and some has begun to circulate on the private property market at high prices in gentrified suburbs such as Port Melbourne.
[21] In addition to the rising level of poverty, the lack of new housing stock in Australia left an unprecedented number of workers left powerless in the face of merciless private landlords who at the time had the legal right to take as ransom the belongings of renters to cover unpaid rent and rapidly deteriorating living conditions.
[22] This resulted in a significant amount of urban renters turning to informal settlements and "slums" for shelter, such as Melbourne's Dudley Flats.
The state of the housing system nationwide and the squalor in which those who were subject to it lived drew protests from the working class and the criticism of reformists from various backgrounds.
The Australian Labour Movement laid the blame for the poor social conditions of the 1930s in the capital cities squarely at the feet of the private landlords as well as the state and Commonwealth banks, which were popularly understood to also have played a critical role in the 1890s economic crash.
[23] Resistance to evictions during the 1930s, which involved tactics ranging from demonstrations to the occupation of real estate offices and homes, led to the introduction of government rental assistance in some states and fuelled demands for public housing.
[24][25] From the political right, there was slowly amounting pressure to reclaim the slum sites (often formed in seaside areas in Australian capital cities) for more economically productive activities.
[29] In the case of Victoria, Methodist social reformer Frederick Oswald Barnett during this period was particularly influential in creating wider popular concern (as well as voyeuristic interest) in the awful condition of the slums in Melbourne.
These reports uniformly pointed to the proven inability of finance schemes directed towards home ownership to improve the housing system for the working class.
In 1956, the Liberal-Country Coalition Prime Minister Robert Menzies renegotiated the 1945 CSHA, sounding the death knell to the golden age of public housing in Australia.
