Giving in to the Madness of Christmas

I didn’t want to wish anyone on Twitter Happy Christmas (or happy holidays) this year. I had to force myself.

It’ s not that I don’t want them to be cheery. It’s just not how I’m feeling, politically speaking any way.

Christmas is always a strange time for the sanest of us, let alone those with an anxiety disorder or other condition.

As my doppelganger FCM I’ve had a Twitter account for a few months now. It consists mainly of links to articles about the terrible things going on in the world, with some interesting literary snippets thrown in.

In the lead-up to Christmas this year I felt such a strong need to stop the political hectoring, the calling out of bad behaviour, the keeping up to date with it all. Such an overwhelming desire to withdraw and to give in to the madness of Christmas.

Yet the world didn’t stop being messy and tragic. New tragedies kept happening. Some were human made, others less obviously so.

The unpredictably bizarre injustices of the Abbott government have had an effect on so many Australians this year. No-one likes Tony Abbott much, not even Liberal voters, and these days his Treasurer, Joe Hockey, is just as reviled.

On 22 December, just days before Christmas, Abbott announced that Scott Morrison, who as immigration minister removed the obligation that Australia follow the refugee convention, and set off a scale of death, torture and misery in the gulags  detention camps that put Australia to shame, will now be our Minister for Social Services.

To paranoid lefties like me this seemed a cruel joke, both in its substance and its timing.

Tragedy continued internationally. In Missouri yet another black teenager was shot by police. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from their homes, and at least 24 killed, following massive flooding in Malaysia. A plane carrying 162 passengers from Indonesia to Singapore went missing mid-flight, and the wreckage has since been found with all passengers presumed dead. The international community has continued to ignore the plight of the more than 1 million refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria.

Yet the need to withdraw from the fray, at least partially, has continued. My Christmas depression this year was partly just a response to the hullabaloo of Christmas itself, which seems to be a little more disconnected from reality, a little more surreal, every year.

There is such a yawning gulf between the hectoring cheerfulness of the relentless carols and the mad spending of the crowds on the one hand and my own state of mind on the other that it produces an odd lurch into alienation.

But like birthday depression, I suspect much of what passes for Christmas depression is unacknowledged grief, which is rampant in our society. In A Life at Work, Thomas Moore talks about the difference between the human soul and the human spirit. The soul seeks the past, the familiar, and is rooted in the earth. The spirit seeks out the new, the unknown, creativity and challenge.

Christmas is a time in which the soul demands to be heard above the din. At Christmas, even more so than at birthdays in my experience, the soul longs for the certainties of the past. Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself driving past my old place, which I moved out of in May, several times. I realised that it was the first Christmas I’d spent away from the place for ten years, and my first Christmas at my current flat. My soul was yearning for that connection with past Christmases.

But perhaps notions of unacknowledged grief are just scratching the surface when it comes to the kinds of funk people experience on holidays, birthdays and anniversaries. I’m reading Horse Boy, an inspiring book about how an autistic boy was healed of many of his worst behaviours by a combination of horse riding and a series of gruelling healing rituals by Mongolian shamans.

This book has made me wonder whether my understanding of spirituality and its repression in the West has been incredibly shallow. The spirituality of the Mongolian shamans seems to allow them to harness powerful forces for healing that put our Western alternative healers to shame. The scale of what we have lost in modern life suddenly seems so much larger, and is perhaps the reason for all the mental illness we are experiencing.

Yet there’s no need to ditch the scientific method that has created such leaps and bounds. If science had an open enough mind to explore what was going on when the shamans healed Rowan Isaacson, whole new areas of study could be established.

They might include an expansion of human psychology. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs was an important milestone but perhaps it should also include the need to connect with the forces of the Earth and to balance them within ourselves. No wonder even the sanest of us goes a bit mad at Christmas. (In fact there have been studies of shamanism in relation to Western notions of mental illness. However, my sense is that interest in shamanism is still considered flaky within the mainstream psychiatric community.)

But as usual I’m getting ahead of myself. My challenge for Christmas this year was just to let go. Not try to change my rellies, or escape the boring bits, or get angry because our family never – I repeat never – gets around to eating lunch before 3 pm by which time my blood sugar is lower than Scott Morrison’s ethical standards. What else was there to do but play that daggy Christmas carols CD, break open the Christmas crackers, put on the tissue-paper hat that never fits properly and read out the dumb joke? I just let the whole circus roll.

Okay, so there was one conflict towards the end of the night but it arose from another family member’s angst, not mine. I’m not wearing it!

Happy new year to everyone out there in blog land.

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Slightly Nutty Uploads New Book Cover

Exciting news - I've given my blog compilation a new cover!

These blog entries have all been lovingly edited and cleaned up and handpicked for your delectation.

Okay, well perhaps more exciting things have happened in the world. But I did the cover all by myself, and with a photo sourced from the creative commons, no less.

Oh I hate selling. I am not good at it. It goes against the very fibre of my being, unless I am selling for someone else.

You can buy it here. Or here if you're in the UK. Find out more about it here. Okay I'm out of here.

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Slightly Nutty and the Election of Doom

Australia has an election coming up this Saturday.

As a progressive and Greens voter as well as an anxiety sufferer, I am feeling a creeping, lonely, doom-laden dread of the future. I could be on the rotor, a funfair ride in which the floor drops away and you’re left clinging to the sides, pinned there by the furious spinning of the barrel.

It is fascinating how this vertiginous feeling replicates what my father must have felt when the Australian Labor Party achieved power in 1972, even though the objects of our dread could not be more different. The apple never does fall far from the tree (damn that silly tree!)

Dad, a Catholic of Irish descent, was and is terrified of communists, whom he believed at the time had overrun the ALP. While I was growing up he was active in the DLP, a right-wing Catholic party whose fear of reds, single parents, the pro-abortion lobby and environmentalists was only slightly ameliorated by its contradictory rejection of large corporations and poverty. Up until Whitlam was elected, the DLP had held the balance of power in the Senate, keeping Australia in conservative hands for over two decades.

Now there is a new threat on the horizon. Tony Abbott, leader of the Coalition, will almost certainly achieve power on Saturday, booting the ALP out of power. Although he is a member of the Liberal Party – the conservative party in Australia – Abbott is part of the landed Catholic gentry and culturally close to the DLP.

Abbott’s misogyny

As far as personality goes, Abbott has little traction. It is fascinating that, with all the stuff-ups and musical-chairs-style leadership changes in the ALP, along with the fact that Murdoch is using his media empire to boot Kevin Rudd out of power, Abbott is not slated to win by a landslide. In fact most people don’t like him much – they just find him less reprehensible than Rudd. If Rudd finds it hard to keep his temper, Abbott is a long-time bovver boy, still haunted by his own violent tactics as student politician at Sydney University.

Abbott is also a right-wing Catholic who until recently was widely seen as a committed misogynist and opposer of women’s rights, most importantly abortion rights. His remarks about women have returned to damn him again and again – they include such gems as ‘abortion is the easy way out’, ‘[virginity] is the greatest gift you can give someone’, the idea that women do not have an absolute right to withhold sex, and, on the carbon tax, ‘What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing is that if they get it done commercially it's going to go up in price’. It’s no surprise that there is a recurring theme in the media about women not trusting him.

Abbott was health minister in the Howard Coalition government from 2003 to 2007; during this time he opposed the abortion drug RU486, and tried to restructure Medicare so as to ban funding for abortion.

A DLP member, John Madigan, is now in the Senate and there is a possibility that after the election he might share the balance of power in the Senate with other conservatives – he has openly expressed his desire to restrict abortion (he rang up here once, wanting to speak to Dad!)

Abbott’s team have moved heaven and earth in recent years to change his entrenched image. ‘Do you want to know how God turns a man into a feminist? He gives him three daughters’, was wife Margie Abbott’s challenge when she threw down the gauntlet at her first political function, a business lunch in western Sydney in October last year.

I have to laugh at this – my dad has five daughters and no sons, and Dad and the word feminist don’t sit comfortably in the same sentence.

It’s not women per se that men like Abbott and my own dad fear, I realise now – it’s powerful women.

The conservative agenda

But my fears for women’s rights under Abbott sit alongside more well-defined concerns. Abbott has pledged to ditch a price on carbon and will make things even more nightmarish for asylum seekers than the sociopathic policies of the ALP are currently doing. There is also the possibility – albeit probably not in a first term – that he would work behind the scenes to reduce penalty rates and increase the consumption tax. He is also touting a paid parental leave scheme that would pay some wealthy women the equivalent of their wages up to $75,000.

The ALP hasn’t been a progressive party since the late eighties, but despite its egregious sins the question of whether life for all but the wealthy will be worse under a Coalition government has to be a qualified ‘yes.’

I can still remember the shock that Howard’s ascension to power in 1996 had on progressives; I recall bumping into someone I knew in the car park of the local shopping mall the day after the election and commiserating with them about our fears for the future. Things were quiet at first, but once Howard had grasped that he could win over the battlers by generating fear and gagging charities, he never looked back.

My fears about coalition rule are partly based on selfishness about how bad I’ll feel about the plight of others. With my excessive identification with the powerless I will ache every time I hear of some new cut to services or welfare payments.

But I am also frightened for myself, and for my own security. What will Abbott do to me and my life? Will the conservatives come for me in the dark, stealing the tiny bit of financial certainty the government metes out to me? If I am one of the unfortunates who takes a hit to pay for the Coalition’s seventy-five-thousand-dollar gifts to rich pregnant women, how will I cope emotionally, let alone financially?

And I am scared and saddened for my country. During this election campaign the major parties have all but ignored aged care funding, homelessness and the plight of the poor – only the Greens have focused on these issues. Yet there is a small chance that if Rudd were to be elected he would finally get around to increasing Australia’s shamefully low dole rate, and reverse Gillard’s disastrous decision to move around 800,000 single parents, mostly women, onto the dole. In other areas such as asylum seeker policy the ALP has become an appalling imitation of far right parties such as One Nation, and the ALP’s ‘commitment’ to climate change policy is greenwash at best.

My one comfort? The Greens’ approval rating seems to have risen slightly, proving the pundits wrong.

Enough for now. I’m off to throw some Greens brochures into the letterboxes of the rich and self-focused of Toorak. Exercise, you see, is an excellent antidote to Politically Induced Depression.

BTW I have done absolutely no doctoring to the photo above - it's just naturally weird, and all part of the attempt to show the public what a powerful woman Margie Abbott is!

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Time and time again

Human beings are hardwired to regret. One of the most pernicious regrets is that of lost time.

Do the following statements sound familiar? We learn from our mistakes. Even suffering brings growth. If we take a wrong direction it provides valuable feedback that can enable us to make a better decision the next time. Similarly, if we are too frightened to act in case we make a mistake, then that defeats one of the main purposes of life, which is to learn.

All of these things are true. However, it’s also true that some mistakes come at a great cost, and that some decisions have serious adverse consequences. We don’t always get a second chance. These are hard truths that I believe some new age spiritualities do not take account of.

One of my earliest heroes was the melancholy Leo Sayer, surely the forerunner of today’s emo. ‘I’ve wasted, wasted, so much time / walking on the wire’, he wailed on one of his early and greatest hit songs, ‘The show must go on’.

For me, the hardest thing to put up with in my present life is that, from my own reckoning, I ‘waste’ huge swathes of time, especially compared with my idealised image of what someone with my degree of intelligence ‘should’ be doing. Inevitably I link this wasted time with the present structure of my life, which is the result of mistakes made years ago, when I was literally a different person from the one I am now.

I’ve long forgiven the wasted time of my late teens and twenties, when I didn’t know any better. But in my early and mid-thirties, when I’d started to recover from an eating disorder and gain some sense of engagement with reality, I continued to make some decisions that I knew at the time were unnecessarily timorous. The mistakes I made then led to wasted time that to some extent continues into the present.

This doesn’t mean that I never have valuable experiences. It does mean, however, that I miss out on many important aspects of life and I don’t work nearly as much as I’d like to.

Most of the time I can live with regret about the past – it’s gone, and I know I can’t change it. It’s the continued wasting of the present, the seeming unavoidability of that waste, that’s difficult. And this also relates to the realities of ageing and living alone. I can learn from my mistakes, but the fact is – to be perfectly blunt – at 47, it feels as if I’m literally running out of time.

There are three fronts on which the time appears to be washed under the bridge by forces I can’t control: not working enough because of fear of others, and therefore not being able to shovel money away for a more secure and fun lifestyle (own house, holidays, old age, more music, theatre, expensive clothes, money for good causes); through depression and anxiety not ‘improving’ myself enough ‘culturally’, with appropriately highbrow music, film, and literature; and through having my literary creativity curtailed by the ‘failure’ to achieve an emotionally and socially fulfilled life (the blog has helped a bit with the creativity).

I envy people who write successful books out of the horrors of mental and physical illness or addiction because it seems to me that they have somehow recuperated the ‘lost’ time, made meaning of it and created something new from it. Not only do they help themselves by writing their story down and shaping it into narrative, but they help many others by sharing their story and offering hope. They may also gain financially from sharing their suffering in a way that chimes with others.

I fully understand that I am clinging onto an idealised version of myself. If I had a family I would probably be overly busy, but much of that busyness would involve mundane tasks. I’ve always had a morbid fear of being a female parent, and being given the role of self-sacrificing ‘mother’ instead of equal partner in the parenting enterprise – I look at my sisters, all of them mothers, and simply don’t know if I am better or worse off than they. But fathers also get lost in the mundane – I think of the hours my brother-in-law spends ferrying his kids to footy and basketball.

Yet even amidst the ennui and chronic exhaustion, as a parent I would be able to tell myself that I was achieving a valuable long-term goal – the continuation of the species and the nurturing of tomorrow’s taxpayers and, hopefully, stewards of planet Earth. And my brother-in-law probably uses at least some of that driving (and game watching) time to bond with his children.

As well, the wound of loneliness sometimes requires the antidote of bad television rather than the intellectually stimulating read that some busy parents, including mothers, might crave. At times, such parents might envy the likes of me, free of the never-ending drudgery and pleas for attention. But they might find me curled up in a ball bewailing my fate as I watch Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares rather than poring over the Collected Works of Charles Dickens as Beethoven’s Ninth thunders in the background.

Obsessed with time management

My fear of wasting time also relates to the mistaken belief that not doing something productive is somehow sinful. I certainly didn’t pick that up from my Catholic upbringing. Instead, this fear stems from the time when I was completing my Masters thesis in the late 1990s. I was on a scholarship, studying full time, and surrounded by successful people who gave papers at conferences, tutored, learned French to improve their understanding of theory, and attended reading groups.

At the time, to my way of thinking the pursuit of knowledge easily trumped consumerism, materialism and any sort of interest in popular culture, and from my lofty, poverty-stricken heights I looked down scornfully on anyone who did not value intellectual endeavour, seeing them as sadly deluded. I spent hours in the library brushing up on theory, much of which has now long since vanished from my mind.

But the sense of directedness I saw in the high achievers was pervasive. I remember one day glancing behind me at the library queue and noticing my supervisor further behind me in the line, waiting to have a book checked out. She poked her head around to scan the queue and, with a quick jerk of her body, abruptly left. I still remember what that momentary action indicated to me: the instantaneous weighing up of the time she would lose in the queue compared with the convenience of having access to the book. This suggested someone whose life had no spare seconds, who was so full of purpose and responsibilities that time management meant the difference between ongoing achievement and mere striving.

So in the couple of years following my Masters I would use every minute of spare time ‘productively’, by, say, reading small cards on which I’d drawn kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) while waiting forlornly at a city bus stop on a biting cold winter’s afternoon.

And before I started editing, and during the times when the work dried up and I was coaxing survey responses from reluctant telephone interviewees, I’d surreptitiously go over Japanese sentences while waiting for respondents to pick up the phone. Eventually the supervisors noticed and, despite my high success rate in obtaining telephone interviews, ordered me to stop. This caused me unseen angst; I couldn’t just relax and let the time be spent simply making enough money to live on. I was obsessed with ‘improving each shining hour’.

At its height, this fear of wasting time would have extended to, say, the idea of socialising with people who I didn’t have much in common with (ie my relatives!). But one gift of my social phobia, and the exploration I’ve done in trying to understand it, is that I now see those everyday interactions as being vitally important.

There are two reasons for this: they're good for mental health generally, because as humans we need to interact with others and feel safer when we’re with others, and particularly our ‘pack’; and because they provide me with valuable exposure practice for my social phobia.

So to some extent regret about wasted time is something I live with. Slowly I’ve begun to realise that the moment, even in its occasional awfulness, even when not filled with mental exercise, has its own integrity.

I could learn kanji till I was blue in the face but it would be useless, a waste of time, unless I was attending a Japanese class or had a reason for learning it such as a planned visit to Japan. Neither of these situations applied, so the keeping up with my Japanese study became, in the end, a waste of time rather than a good use of it.

The concept of mindfulness helped me understand this. Mindfulness involves becoming an observer of the self – one’s thoughts, perceptions, feelings and current actions – in order to move into the present in a more profound way. When I divide my attention too much (writing my diary while watching tele, for instance) I’m subtly diminishing my experience of time, indeed of life. While trying to save time, I may actually be wasting it.

I love good thrillers and I need to spend some time vegging out on weekends. But I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to decent thrillers at my local video store. So last weekend I ended up on a Saturday afternoon watching one of the worst klunkers ever made, Cold Creek Manor with Denis Quaid and Sharon Stone.

There literally wasn’t a scary moment in it; it could have been parody if it hadn’t been so dull and lacking in humour. It made me wonder about the technical aspects of thrillers – why some work and some fail spectacularly. But perhaps the most important thing for me to do was to actually pay attention to the film, observe and follow the creaky plot, and try and work out why it failed, rather than just having it on as background to my random thoughts.

Another reason why unstructured time is vital is that it refreshes the mind and enables creativity. Late one afternoon I took my seven-year-old niece to the park, supervising as she mucked around on the play equipment. For quite a long time she half-lounged on a swing, moving slowly back and forth as she gazed into space. This natural ability to enjoy mental downtime is too often mistaken for laziness. But it's the space in which new ideas and creative breakthroughs hatch themselves.

A book on worry that I read recently goes further than advocating basic mindfulness. In The Worry Cure, Robert R Leahy provides useful advice for incessant worriers who are busy dreading what the future might bring. One of his suggestions is that once you’ve brought yourself back to the present moment using mindfulness, you can add value to the moment, make it count.

I love this idea because it extends the concept of mindfulness so effectively. You bring yourself into the present, become aware of your body, breathing and perceptions; then you do something to improve the present, even if it’s just subtly. This could be something insignificant, like savouring a cup of tea, putting some music on (Beethoven’s Ninth?) or taking the kids for an ice cream.

Using intuition is also important to me in combatting my fear of wasting time. In the past I was constantly using my will to forge ahead; now I use intuition to decide whether something’s worth spending energy on. Anything that feels right can't really be a waste of time.

Being busy for the sake of it can actually cause harm. Former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s political demise provides a cautionary tale. Rudd seems to have been unable to stop work, to delegate, and he also caused great harm to his staff because he unapologetically worked them to the bone, no doubt causing havoc with their family lives.

‘A staff working year is probably like a dog year, that is it's probably worth seven years in normal life’, he was quoted as saying in The Daily Telegraph of 15 April 2010. That report also stated that he had lost 28 staff, presumably since coming to office in late 2007.

The coup that ousted Rudd in favour of Julia Gillard occurred for many and complex reasons, but the refusal to delegate seems to have been one of them. I sympathise with Rudd and wish fervently that the party had given him an ultimatum months ago rather than cruelly dealing the death blow – but I can’t help seeing in his fate a grim warning about the effects of overwork!

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Scuttling social justice – Julia Gillard and the 2010 federal election

Australia is going to the polls in a month’s time. Julia Gillard, the Australian Labor Party prime minister, looks set to win. But, in playing so clearly to middle Australia, she is using her considerable political talent to further drag the ALP away from some of its primary responsibilities: the upholding of human rights and support for the disadvantaged.

For the benefit of overseas readers, Gillard, then the deputy prime minister, shocked Australia when, following weeks of Kevin Rudd suffering in the opinion polls, she deposed him in an unforeseen overnight 'coup' on June 23–24; knowing he no longer had the numbers, Rudd stepped down rather than face a leadership ballot.

It may be that the coup wasn’t quite as sinister as it must have appeared to international observers, despite the involvement of faceless union officials and the fact that Gillard got multinational mining companies onside by ending a terrible imbroglio over mining tax soon after taking power. Rudd appears to have been stuck in a compulsive, controlling, workaholic state that he was unable to shed – some have hinted at mental health issues, and it was impossible not to anticipate the advent of some sort of personal crisis.

The event was notable regardless, being the first time in Australian history that a first-term serving prime minister had been deposed. And, as most people know, Gillard became Australia’s first female prime minister.

An election was due anyway, but Gillard was always going to call it early because she wanted to rule as chosen prime minister, rather than being seen as a pretender. Now a snap election has been called for the 21 August.

There are a few things I’ve been dying to write about Gillard ever since her surprise ascension.

Like some others, I hoped that she was more radical than she appeared, and that with Rudd out of the way she would take some simple progressive steps such as allowing gay marriage (Rudd’s a god-botherer and has always opposed this; Gillard is an unmarried atheist with no kids).

It was difficult not to assume, or at least hope, that Gillard would be a little more radical simply because she was a woman. Having slogged her way to the top in a male-dominated party, surely she would have empathy for the marginalised, and go into bat for them once she got into power? My hopes were ill-founded – Gillard soon stated unequivocally that she had no plans to legalise gay marriage.

This should have been no surprise – Gillard as education minister and minister for workplace relations was disturbingly reactionary. Despite her frequent eloquent pronouncements on her commitment to education, she seems to have done absolutely nothing to reduce the glaring inequities of Australia’s education system, a two-tier system that blatantly favours private schools and suffers from hopelessly complicated federal–state funding arrangements.

Gillard specialised in gimmicky, hugely expensive policies that caught the attention of the media as they were designed to do, before at least partly crashing and burning on their ineptitude and lack of groundwork; but she did absolutely zilch to reduce the system’s glaring inequities.

The building and computers-in-schools programs that characterised her tenure were open to the most obscenely wealthy private school, despite the fact that public education has been severely underfunded for years in Australia, resulting in rundown schools and inadequate teacher numbers and support services. The aim of the building program was partly to stimulate the economy, but, writing in The Age, Kenneth Davidson said that ‘Funding directed to maintenance upgrades according to the greatest needs would have had the same economic stimulus impact dollar for dollar and a far bigger pay-off in terms of equity and efficiency’.

Moreover, the public schools were disadvantaged in their access to the building program because they had much less choice compared with the private schools about exactly what was to be built, and no ability to negotiate the cost, resulting in ‘inflated costs and dubious projects’.

With regard to the computer program, private schools benefited while some government schools couldn’t afford to pay for the infrastructure that extra computers would entail.

Moreover, in her determination to impose a national test (NAPLAN) on skills such as literacy and numeracy and a website that would allow parents to compare the relative performance of schools, Gillard fought with the overworked teachers she should have been supporting – teachers who feared that the website would lead to the creation of divisive league tables, and that the expertise of teachers working with students with specific needs would be overlooked.

Also, Gillard had been part of the ‘gang of four’ that replaced Cabinet government under Rudd. The Cabinet still sat of course, but apart from Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, Treasurer Wayne Swan and Gillard, they were mainly asked to tick the boxes.

This anti-democratic tendency, a recipe for poor government, was part of the reason why MPs were willing to vote Rudd out; but I didn’t realise until after the ‘coup’ that it was Gillard, as part of the ‘gang of four’, who had urged that controversial emissions trading legislation be deferred until 2013 – a decision identified with Rudd at the time, and that had signficantly contributed to his poor showing in the opinion polls.

Perhaps the most shocking development since Gillard’s win has been her willingness to use the issue of asylum seekers as a political football. This was evident in the speech she gave on the issue on 6 July, when she signalled the possibility of a regional processing centre for refugees to be established in Timor L’este (using, incidentally, the inappropriate title ‘East Timor’).

But it’s become even more blatant now the election’s been called. In fact, ‘stronger borders’ is one of the key catchphrases on the ALP’s first television election advertisement featuring Gillard. Even before her asylum seekers speech, she was talking about ‘good migrants’ like her parents, with the strong suggestion that there was another sort of migrant that people were right to abhor.

This is simply astounding. I won’t go through the history of the issue, but since the Tampa incident in 2001, which saw the introduction of the notorious Pacific Solution whereby asylum seekers were removed to the island of Nauru for their claims to be processed, these vulnerable people have suffered to keep Australia’s politicians in power. And now the ALP, already accused of trying to please everybody on the issue, are indulging in shameless dog whistling, much more so than they did under Rudd.

Some progressives claimed that Gillard’s asylum seekers speech was nuanced and not as politically insidious as the selective media quoting would have it appear. It’s true that in some ways Gillard was trying to have it both ways – stating that those wanting greater border protection should not be labelled racist, any more than those concerned about children in detention should be labelled bleeding hearts. Responding to earlier criticism by refugee advocate and respected lawyer Julian Burnside, QC, she said:

… in the context of our migration program, the number of asylum seekers arriving by boat to Australia is very, very minor.

It is less than 1.5 per cent of permanent migrants each year; and indeed it would take about 20 years to fill the MCG with asylum seekers at present rates of arrival. This is a point well made.

On the second point [Burnside] is very, very wrong. It is wrong to label people who have concerns about unauthorised arrivals as ‘rednecks’.

Of course, there are racists in every country but expressing a desire for a clear and firm policy to deal with a very difficult problem does not make you a racist.

Elsewhere in the speech she affirms as an organising principle of asylum seeker policy ‘That people like my own parents who have worked hard all their lives can’t abide the idea that others might get an inside track to special privileges’.

This rhetoric is erroneous. It strongly suggests that the opinions of those fearful of the boats are every bit as well-informed and worthwhile as those who are steeped in the issue and have serious legal and moral concerns about government actions. And it completely ignores the fact that the role of a leader is to educate and lead rather than to pander to the whims of the least educated and politically aware; and to set an example and produce a vision that can make the nation more cohesive, not less.

Those criticising Gillard for aiming her narrow policies straight at the seats most under threat in Sydney’s west are fully justified. She should be explaining to the electorate the push factors that bring the boats here, and eliciting Australia’s collective compassion – the kind that erupted so forcefully after the January 2009 Victorian bushfires.

More generally, Gillard is encouraging voters to see this election as being all about themselves and their needs, rather than promising to look after Australia’s most disadvantaged, surely one of the major remits of any labour party worthy of the moniker? She has said that voters will choose the policies most useful to them and their families, encouraging the continuation of the solipsism that thrived under Howard.

Gillard has great charm and verve, and, it’s indisputable that since Labor’s coming to power in 2007 the conviction, authority and intelligence she has managed to project in speeches and interviews has only increased, despite the rubbish that so often spouts from her mouth.

But let’s be clear: there was nothing progressive about Rudd’s Labor party, and there’s nothing progressive about Gillard’s. Below are just a few examples of straightforward social justice actions Rudd and now Gillard have failed to take, apart from not allowing gay marriage. Not all of these would have involved the magic millions or billions that both these politicians love to announce; but they would have produced greater social justice for Australia’s most needy as well as improving environmental outcomes.

* No carbon tax

* No mandatory staff–resident ratios in aged care homes (such ratios exist in hospitals and child care centres), leading to a shocking lack of skilled nursing care and other staff for frail, ill aged people. This is despite a 2009 Four Corners report in which the Minister for Ageing, Justine Elliot, promised that the government would consider the issue as part of its review of aged care funding. In May this year the NSW Nursing Association had to call for such mandatory ratios – all the government had offered in the 2010 budget was ‘$500,000 to conduct a research study on staffing levels, skills mix and resident care needs in Australian residential aged care facilities’.

* No rescinding of the regressive changes to education funding made by Howard. These gave more money to wealthy private schools at the expense of government schools.

* No real increase to unemployment benefit (Newstart allowance), which has long given up even attempting to adequately cover the excessive costs of market rents. Because increases are measured against inflation and not male wages as the pension is, the dole will continue to decrease in value against the pension. The May 2010 budget refused a request by the Australian Council of Social Service for an increase of $42 a week for the Newstart allowance; this request was ignored. But in refusing the increase the government was also ignoring its own Henry report on taxation, which stated that ‘a single person relying on an unemployment allowance is well below the OECD benchmark for poverty’.

* No attempt to ditch the 30 per cent government rebate on private health care. Instead the government tried to make the 30 per cent rebate means tested (the rebate results in all taxpayers subsidising, for example, dental care for the wealthier while there is no national dental scheme for the poor, whether or not they pay tax. The bid to means test the rebate failed anyway because of a hostile Senate, partly the result of a preferences deal Labor had done with the conservative Family First).

* No change to the shocking lack of residential and respite places as well as educational services for children with severe disabilities.

* No change to outrageous tax breaks for property owners, with the result that tax-paying renters subsidise the wealthy. Negative gearing, which enables property investors to claim losses on their investments as a tax deduction, has encouraged property investment, thus helping to lift the cost of housing out of the reach of first home buyers. Home owners who live in their homes are exempt from capital gains tax.

* Not withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan. Despite the bravery and skill of our troops, Australia’s involvement in this war serves the sole purpose of maintaining the relationship with the US, which is supporting the very same corrupt, greedy warlords whose mass murdering, raping and pillaging contributed to the rise of the Taliban.

Despite this dereliction of duty, the government boasts about the tax cuts it has managed to budget for, while promising to bring the budget back into surplus within three years – on the backs of Australia’s most needy and marginalised, truly the forgotten ones in this election.

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The Age newspaper loves Greens policies, but hates the Greens

This blog entry is a letter that I sent to the Age newspaper this morning, objecting to the newspaper's coverage of the Greens on the previous Saturday. For overseas readers: the Melbourne Age has always been a progressive newspaper but struggles to maintain its role under the current management of its owners, Fairfax Media.

Last year the ALP government failed to get its legislation for an emissions trading scheme (ETS) through the upper house. The scheme was never popular with progressives but was even worse after amendments made following negotiations with the main conservative opposition (the government refused the Greens suggestion of a carbon tax).

With an election due around November this year, the ALP has shelved any reintroduction of the ETS until 2013. Two columnists in Saturday's Age managed to have a go at the Greens for opposing the legislation in the Senate.

I’m writing a general letter of objection to the coverage of the Greens and their policies on global warming in the Age of Saturday 1 May 2010, but also directed at the two columnists concerned, Tony Wright and Ross Gittins. Tony Wright’s column appeared in the Insight section of the paper and Ross Gittins’s appeared in the Business Day section (the business commentators seem to be Fairfax rather than Age journalists – this in no way lets the Age off the hook). For the record, I’m not a Greens member but I support and vote for the Greens.

It’s fascinating that the only direct endorsement of the Greens’ carbon tax proposal is not only buried in the business section of that edition, in Paddy Manning’s column, but seems to have produced a flurry of opposing opinion by other columnists (a spurious attempt at ABC-style ‘balance’?). Manning’s endorsement is also months after the fact – I’m not objecting to the views of this columnist, but to the Age’s willingness to publish a point of view that supports evidence-based policy only when that support is given far too late to matter.

In contrast, the coverage of the Greens in the columns by Gittins and Wright would have conspiracy theorists who fear anti-Greens censorship tearing up their Age subscriptions. It seems that the Age wants to have it both ways: present itself as a progressive paper by criticising government and opposition policies; then trashing, or more usually ignoring, the one party that offers a clear alternative. The ethos seems to be: ensure business as usual while enabling readers to feel vindicated in their anger about the complete inability of the large parties to pursue policies that are genuinely in the national interest.

The media is part of this deterioration in our democratic process. One of the problems is that journalists such as Wright and Gittins have taken on, to some extent, the twisted mindset of politicians. According to this mindset, there are two realities: what’s actually going on in the world; and the need to create an impression of government activity and relevance through spin. This second, alternative reality, born of the Canberra hothouse, is considered by the politicians to be far more important than actual reality, and is one of the major reasons the Labor government has failed to move effectively on just about every issue it has tried to tackle.

Unfortunately, some journalists also come to view this alternative reality as far more important than the real world. It is certainly much more beguiling, because it’s far easier to commentate a never-ending football match than to take a strong stand on matters such as democracy, human rights and social justice.

Take Wright’s column. He starts off in the real world, by giving an impassioned description of a recent Catalyst program that highlighted the effects of global warming on Antarctica’s ice sheet. He then turns his attention to government and opposition behaviour towards climate change, bemoaning the fact that ‘hardly anyone seemed to give a stuff’.

It would be logical for Wright to support the policies of the party that has done far more than either of the larger ones to both alert Australians to the true extent of the dangers of global warming, and to offer policies and targets that actually square up with the science and set us on the road to a renewable energy industry. But in his upside-down version of reality, the version he’s absorbed from the political spin-merchants, the leader of this party, Bob Brown, is an irrelevant ideologue. And the only one left with real integrity is the man who, at the time when the government’s climate change policy was being negotiated, made what was already a dog of an emissions trading scheme even worse – Malcolm Turnbull:

Bob Brown’s Greens … well, they just kept being the Greens, complaining that the government hadn’t taken their proposals seriously, which is another way of saying that they had played themselves out of the equation.

About the only politician of simple integrity still standing was Malcolm Turnbull.

This is outrageous. In implying that Bob Brown lacks integrity, Wright is denouncing one of the few politicians in the federal parliament who actually has any. (Brown’s opposition to unfair increases to parliamentary salaries is just one example.)

In contrast, Turnbull’s principles in relation to the ETS, principles which Wright lauds to the skies, were based on ensuring that the coal industry continued to flourish in Australia till kingdom come.

It’s disappointing for a reader to feel she is more cluey than the paper’s national affairs editor. The ETS (both pre- and post-Coalition versions) was a dog because:

• it offered compensation to polluters, doing the opposite of what an ETS should do, which is to encourage alternative energy, not to enable ‘business as usual’. The Age itself has reported that most of the compensation specified in the ETS legislation was unnecessary

• it locked in, for the long term, both this compensation and a low emissions reduction target, with the distinct possibility that if the government increased the pathetic 5 per cent target, it would be liable for a commensurate increase in compensation to the polluting industries

• the 5 per cent was a furphy anyway, because much of the reduction would have been obtained from investment in overseas carbon sinks

• the 5 per cent was an absolute target, discouraging citizens from making their own changes – for example, if I had switched my electricity supply to green energy, that would have increased my electricity provider’s ability to pollute elsewhere

• no one understood it!

Eminent climate scientists agreed that the ETS would be useless, as the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Wright knows that the Greens were never merely naysayers, but offered a positive alternative, a carbon tax that might have squeaked through the Senate with the support of at least one of the two renegade Liberals and Nick Xenophon. Wasn’t the carbon tax option preferable to what’s happened now, with any action on carbon emissions being shelved till 2013?

This style of commentary illustrates the dangers of political commentators having the main say on climate change in the mainstream media. If the Age is to be relevant it needs to have a qualified science writer weighing up the parties’ climate change policies, not glorified football commentators like Wright.

Let’s now turn to Gittins. He makes an astounding claim in his column, yet doesn’t even attempt to back it up:

But why did the Greens pretend that 5 per cent was nothing when they must have known it wasn’t true? Because it didn’t suit the line they were running. It proves that the ever-virtuous Greens as [sic] just as capable of lying with statistics as the mainstream parties are.

Gittins produces no evidence to ‘prove’ that the Greens are ‘lying with statistics’ – he simply makes the assertion.

In considering the 5 per cent target too low, the Greens were merely listening to the climate scientists. The 5 per cent target has absolutely no relevance to climate science.

Similarly, Gittins seems to think that judging emissions reductions using per capita (head of population) measures would be a good thing. This is simply ludicrous because it would make targets meaningless as far as the actual climate is concerned. (In fact, the pollies would love it if they could use such standards to measure reductions in emissions, especially given Australia’s increasing population, and a couple have tried to do this.)

Again, it’s all about politics, not reality. Tony and Ross, isn’t ‘the greatest moral, environmental, economic and scientific challenge of our time’ worth more than a 5 per cent emissions reduction (on 2000 levels, by the way) and a bag of gold to the big polluters?

A newspaper in which the ‘ever virtuous’ Greens are treated with contempt because they’re more truthful, and the coal-friendly, Machiavellian Turnbull magically becomes ‘the only politician of simple integrity still standing’ may be terminally endangering its reputation as a progressive force.

It’s a shame, because the Age could be building strong customer loyalty based on an unswerving progressive vision, and on a genuine interest in engaging with its readers, rather like the UK’s Guardian. Instead, it seems almost entirely concerned with the advertising revenue it receives from the large parties. Many readers have already migrated online to sites like Crikey and New Matilda in response to the Age’s inability to respond adequately to the slow dismantling of democracy that Howard began and that Rudd has continued to engineer.

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Money for nothing: the Climate Pollution Reduction Scheme and the ascent of Abbott

I’m writing about an emerging form of mental illness that has recently been identified by mental health professionals, and that I think I may be suffering from: politician induced depression, or PID. It’s been found in dictatorships for decades, but in recent years has turned up in increasingly endemic proportions in Western countries like Australia.

The main symptom is a growing despair that is activated every time the sufferer sees or hears a politician speak. Treatment consists of graded exposure to current affairs programs and radio news broadcasts, plus compulsory reading of books such as Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy. Membership of the Greens is also recommended but not mandatory. As a final resort, sufferers are urged to run for parliament.

I’m only half joking. Australia these days is a hot place, and our capital cities are no exception. The evidence of climate change is everywhere, but all the pollies care about is keeping the coal industry onside.

I complained recently about a November heatwave in Melbourne – actually there were two mini-heatwaves, and the temperature reached 38.2 on 20 November before the cool change brought some rain.

But that was nothing compared to what the rest of the country was facing. In New South Wales, weather records were broken as some places reached 45 degrees. Meanwhile, South Australia’s equally giant heatwave saw eight consecutive days of over 35 degrees, between Sunday 8 November and Sunday 15 November. During the heatwave, maximum temperatures in parts of South Australia also nudged 45 degrees. On 19 November, Adelaide’s temperature reached 42.8 - the city’s hottest day ever recorded for November.

During these heatwaves catastrophic fire warnings were issued in both states. Dozens of bushfires swept across both South Australia and New South Wales, including Sydney’s northern outskirts; at different times in each state, at least 100 fires were burning.

There were also bushfires in Victoria and even one in Tasmania, which is known for its chilly weather compared with the rest of Australia.

And this was before summer had actually begun.

A climate scientist with the Bureau of Meteorology, Dr Harvey Stern, said that there was a ‘high chance’ that the hot weather that swept New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria was connected to climate change. As well as giving the world a sneak preview of what they can expect from global warming in the next few decades, Australia is currently the highest per capita producer of emissions in the world, so we really need to get our act together.

Climate capers
Meanwhile Australia’s politicians have been fiddling while the country literally burns. The two main party groups, the governing Australian Labor Party and the conservative Coalition (Liberals and the rural-based National Party) have been taking part in what amounts to a faux battle about climate change. The battle has resulted in zero action on climate change but huge media furore over the fall of Coalition leader Malcolm Turnbull (pictured above), yesterday replaced by the right-wing Catholic Tony Abbott.

Because he does not have a majority in the upper house, ALP leader Kevin Rudd had been trying to negotiate with the Coalition a deal that would enable the passing of his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) before going to the climate summit at Copenhagen. The CPRS is in the form of an emissions trading scheme.

Former Coalition leader Malcolm Turnbull and some members of the Coalition had been in favour of passing the Scheme, complete with amendments the Coalition had negotiated with the ALP, in time for Copenhagen. But a noisy minority of right-wing Coalition members were building up a simmering resentment towards Turnbull.

The fact is, in this sunburnt country, many of these renegades don’t actually believe that human-induced global warming exists, or they seem not to care, and they’ve publicly declared their stance. Basically they were trying to steal the glory from Rudd at Copenhagen, and to respond to Rudd's own move to the right by moving even further to the right than he has.

The anger of these renegades finally resulted in a dramatic change of leadership yesterday to Tony Abbott, who won by the narrowest of margins. This win was unexpected, as Abbott, a former health minister in the Howard Coalition government, is unpopular with voters, particularly women.

Turnbull was hoping to get the amended legislation passed in the Senate before his leadership showdown, but it wasn’t to be. With Abbott as leader, just hours ago the Senate formally rejected the legislation. This means that Rudd won't be able to take his CPRS to Copenhagen as a fait accompli. But it also enables the government, if it so chooses, to dissolve both houses of parliament and call an early election.

The great irony is that the ALP and all parts of the fractured Coalition have actually been on the same side all along – that of doing very little to mitigate climate change, and keeping the big polluters, particularly Australia’s powerful coal industry, happy. It’s difficult to understand how the international community could have been happy about the CPRS Rudd would have have taken to Copenhagen if the Senate had passed it. In fact, a recent article in The Guardian slams Australia’s record and current action on cutting emissions.

In negotiating CPRS amendments with the Coalition (Coal – ition?), and indirectly helping to precipitate their leadership crisis, Rudd made an extremely poor scheme even worse. He also demonstrated he would do anything to avoid negotiating with the Greens.

Disturbingly, the media have been reporting the leadership drama with the focus entirely on the politics rather than the planet. They’ve allowed Turnbull to portray himself as someone willing to sacrifice his prime ministerial aspirations for the principle of taking action on climate change. No-one in the mainstream media so far has directly challenged this breathtaking deception.

Meanwhile, the actions of the renegade Coalition members have enabled Rudd to pretend to the confused electorate that he’s their climate saviour, when the opposite is the case. Rudd might have got somewhere with his CPRS if he’d negotiated with the Greens, who have five members in the Senate, and independent senator Nick Xenophon, who at least believes in climate change (ironically, today in the Senate two disaffected Liberal 'wets' voted with the government on the amended CPRS; if these two Libs and Xenophon had supported a CPRS influenced by the Greens, it could have passed). Rudd chose instead to negotiate with a right-wing party that did nothing to mitigate climate change during its 11 years in office. And in the end it betrayed him, after giving him its word it was negotiating in good faith.

Despite all the spin, and the media focus on the Coalition in the last week or so, Fran Kelly reported on Radio National on 30 November that support for the ALP had dropped slightly, accompanied by a slight boost in support for the Greens. This suggests that at least some voters were unhappy with the further weakening of an already compromised CPRS that the Coalition's amendments would have led to.

Locking us into doing nothing
Even without the Coalition’s amendments, the incredibly complex piece of legislation installing the CPRS -- it will be reintroduced to parliament next year -- will lock Australia into targets so low they are laughable. The official target is 5–25 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020, but the conditions attached to a 25 per cent reduction are so many that this higher target is unlikely to prevail. And Treasury modelling indicates there’ll be no actual reduction in greenhouse emissions until around 2033, because investment in offsets such as overseas carbon sinks will count towards the reduction.

The CPRS also not only offers, but locks in for the future, massive compensation to the big polluters. Importantly, the compensation figures included in the legislation assume that Australia cuts its carbon emissions by only 5 per cent by 2020. This means that in theory a higher rate of compensation to the polluters could kick in if the cuts are steeper than 5 per cent.

According to the Citizens Climate Campaign, Professor Garnaut, the Government’s own advisor on climate change policy, has criticised the CPRS, especially the compensation it offered the biggest polluters.

The deal struck with the Coalition on 24 November, before Turnbull’s defeat, would have watered the legislation down even further. Under the deal the government would have doubled its handouts to the coal industry, providing $1.5 billion over five years. Power generators would have received a further $4 billion in permits to pollute, bringing the total in permits to $7.3 billion. Further, $1.1 billion would have been spent on assisting manufacturing and mining businesses with higher electricity prices because of the CPRS. To top this off, $5.76 billion set aside to compensate consumers for the increased cost of living would have been cut.

Ordinary Australians were already going to be subsidising the big polluters, which would be able to go on with business as usual. However, these amendments would have made their subsidy even higher – $4 billion, rather than the original $2.5 billion, which was bad enough.

The dramatic turnaround in Coalition policy leaves many environmentally aware Australians feeling confused. On the one hand, they're relieved that we are not yet locked into a useless ETS; on the other hand they’re dismayed at both major parties’ refusal to really tackle climate change.

However, they shouldn't get too excited. The Minerals Council of Australia stated today that this was an opportunity to improve the CPRS legislation (read: throw more taxpayer money at the mining industry).

The proposed CPRS was complicated to start with and always had pathetically low targets. But when the global financial crisis struck, and even before it started negotiating with the Coalition, the government had heralded further industry-friendly changes, including moving the starting date from 2010 to 2011.

This cavalier approach to the planet, along with the Coalition’s changing position and the willingness of the media to air the views of climate change denialists in the interests of spurious balance, sent a message to the average Australian that climate change was not as dire a problem as previously thought. A recent poll by the Lowy Institute of International Policy found that Australians were less concerned about climate change than they had been two years earlier. According to the poll, on a list of 10 goals in 2009, climate change had slipped from its 2007 position, when it came equal first.

The Greens in Higgins
On 5 December a by-election will take place in my electorate, the House of Representatives seat of Higgins. The Liberals have a new candidate, Kelly O’Dwyer, to replace the one-time Liberal treasurer Peter Costello. The ALP isn’t fielding a candidate as Higgins is a safe-as-houses Liberal seat, but the Greens are. Their choice of candidate has been controversial though: Dr Clive Hamilton is a progressive economics academic and commentator, and one of Australia’s most committed climate change activists, but he has trouble connecting with the electorate and getting his message across.

Given the current Liberal Party furore it will be interesting to see whether Abbott’s leadership reduces the Liberal vote in Higgins. O’Dwyer claims to believe that humans play some role in climate change, but any policy must preserve our economy.

The Greens are the only party in the federal parliament with emissions targets that recognise the climate science – by 2020 they want a 40 per cut in carbon emissions compared to 1990 levels. Whether Higgins voters recognise the urgency of the situation, and send a message to both the ALP and the Coalition to get their act together, is yet to be seen.

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Selling homelessness: the housing affordability crisis in Australia

More than 105,000 people are homeless in Australia on any given night, but the true number is likely to be higher. Homelessness is not confined to those sleeping rough – it includes anyone in insecure, substandard accommodation. Homeless people may be ‘couch surfers’ who alternate between different friends’ houses; those living in temporary accommodation such as a refuge, emergency shelter or motel; or those living somewhere that is physically or emotionally unsafe because of a lack of alternatives.

Rather than focusing on the homeless themselves and the personal reasons for their predicament, I’m interested in the role of housing affordability and availability, both for those who rent and those who own, in contributing to homelessness. Until the government considers these issues its efforts to reduce homelessness will be in vain.

Of course, the global financial crisis has probably increased homelessness and housing stress in Australia. The rise in unemployment and the government’s stubborn refusal to increase Australia’s clearly inadequate dole payments have probably left more people sleeping in their cars or living in cramped conditions with relatives, something that has become widespread in the US.

Housing affordability
But housing affordability was a problem before the GFC. The International Housing Affordability Survey found that housing affordability in Australian cities was among the worst in the world. The report rated seven of the eight major housing markets in Australia as severely unaffordable. While there was a slowing in the growth of house prices following the crash, Australia’s ‘housing bubble’ looks set to get worse despite the fact that unemployment is still rising. The Age reported on 3 October 2009 that 'the median price of a Melbourne home in September 2009 was $520,000, compared to $488,944 for the previous month', a jump of 6.4 per cent. Meanwhile a report released in October predicted that house prices in Australia would rise by 20 per cent in the next three years.

Meanwhile, the rental market is mean, lean and ruthless. In Melbourne, for example, only 9.1 per cent of dwellings rented out in the June quarter were affordable to lower income households, a huge reduction from four years earlier, when 29.4 per cent of homes were affordable for this group.

One reason for the blowout in housing costs – but not the major one – is unbridled immigration without the necessary planning. Last year Australia’s population grew by 1.9 per cent, one of the highest rates in the world and ‘unprecedented among developed nations’. It is forecast to surge from 22 million to 35 million in 40 years. There is simply not enough housing stock (let alone natural resources) to bear such an increase.*

Other reasons for housing unaffordability are the deregulation of the loan market, making loans easier to get by those who might not be able to afford them; low interest rates; the self-reinforcing effect of speculative booms; and government grants for first homeowners. But these reasons are themselves underpinned by the main cause of Australia’s lack of affordable housing – the government’s generous tax treatment of home owners and property investors.

Labor promises to reduce homelessness
When the Labor government came into office, Kevin Rudd made a personal commitment to tackle the problem of homelessness, labelling it a ‘national obscenity’. The Road Home, the government’s White Paper on homelessness, was released on 21 December 2008.

The White Paper outlines the government’s National Affordable Housing Strategy. The strategy includes an ambitious commitment to halve homelessness by 2020 and ‘offer supported accommodation to all rough sleepers who need it by 2020’. It promises $6.1 billion over the five years from 2008–09 for measures such as ‘social housing, assistance to people in the private rental market, support and accommodation for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, and assistance with home purchasing’.

The strategy involves agreements with the states and territories, which are required to provide some funding and are responsible for improvements in services that they run or administer. The White Paper includes interim targets and also accountability measures that the states and territories are required to report on annually.

However, even a quick look at the targets reveals an interesting contradiction. While Australia’s population is set to explode in the next 40 years, it seems that the government is only interested in reducing homelessness as a proportion of the total population. The White Paper states, as an interim target, that:

By 2013, the rate of homeless persons will need to be around 40 homeless persons per 10,000 population or better if we are to achieve our 2020 goal.

Other interim targets for 2013 include:

• The number of people engaged in employment and/or education/training after presenting at specialist homelessness services is increased by 50 per cent
• The number of people exiting care and custodial settings into homelessness is reduced by 25 per cent
• The number of families who maintain or secure safe and sustainable housing following domestic or family violence is increased by 20 per cent.

But some of the targets – and they are very specific – deal with absolute numbers, for example, ‘by 2013, a decrease of 7 per cent in the number of Australians who are homeless to less [sic] than 97,350 people’ and ‘the number of people released from [care and custodial settings] into homelessness is reduced by 25 per cent (3,552) by 2013’. It seems there is a fundamental confusion about the ambitions of the White Paper – does it aim simply to reduce homelessness proportionally, or to reduce the absolute number of homeless people?

Our worsening housing shortage
Australia already has a significant housing shortage. According to the Business Spectator of 26 August 2009, BIS Shrapnel estimated that ‘Australia’s dwelling stock deficiency … will peak at 160,000 properties by 2010’.

And it’s the disadvantaged who are missing out. The same article quotes the National Housing Supply Council, which released a report in March 2009. The report estimated that back in June 2008, 85,000 new homes were required to address ‘homelessness and low vacancy rates in the private rental market’.

The rental markets in Australia’s major cities have been constricted for years now. In Melbourne, for example, the trend metropolitan vacancy rate for the June quarter 2009 was only 1.3 per cent, compared with 3.6 per cent for the period from 2000 to 2005.

Given that the government plans to drastically increase Australia’s population in an already tight housing market, it seems inevitable that the total number of homeless will continue to increase. And ironically, one of the underlying reasons for homelessness – excessive immigration – will provide justification for the government’s failure to reduce the total numbers.

The Housing Industry Assocation acknowledges this problem. Citing the projected population increases, it warns: ‘already Australia has a substantial gap between the supply of dwellings and the underlying demand for dwellings. The gap is set to widen further with obvious consequences for house prices, rents and affordability.

‘Not only will there be a greatly increased demand for accommodation, Australia is faced with further strains on urban infrastructure, health and education to meet expected increases in population.’

If that’s the case it says something very important about us as a society. While refugees and family reunions – the most legitimate targets for immigration – account for some of the intake, roughly two-thirds of Australia’s permanent immigrants are skilled migrants. These people can afford to pay hefty application fees and have skills Australia needs, and so are not likely to be among the most disadvantaged when they arrive. But given the lack of housing stock, and the inadequate supplies of new social housing even with the government’s targets, market forces will mean that the wealth needed to access what housing there is, whether by renting or owning, will increase. As the population increases, more disadvantaged people who are currently at the bottom of the housing ladder will fall off it entirely.

Just as job seekers sometimes give up on the labour market, would-be renters become discouraged if they are repeatedly unsuccessful in finding somewhere to live, leading to overcrowding as they outstay their welcome with relatives. Alternatively, they may pay huge proportions of their income on rent in overcrowded share houses with what was once living space becoming makeshift bedrooms. Meanwhile the slum is making a comeback.

As a society,we seem to be accepting that excessive skilled immigration will bring greater housing disadvantage to a number of Australian citizens. These citizens may include newly arrived refugees, the mentally ill, the old, the unemployed, the physically disabled, the addicted, and the sick. This is the unspoken trade-off the government is willing to make.

Yet the government will be able to claim success if a lower proportion of people in a grossly inflated population are homeless!

Regardless, the housing strategy is already running into problems. The Age reported on 28 August that, due to a ‘$1.5 billion cost blow-out’ on the schools infrastructure program, the government would be cutting $750 million from its $6 billion plan to build 20,000 new public housing units. While most of that cut was due to lower than anticipated costs, the number of new homes built was to be cut to 19,200.

Tax benefits for the rich at the expense of the poor
But the main reason for the housing affordability crisis in Australia is government tax policies that favour owners and property investors, resulting in the loss of literally billions in tax revenues – billions that could be used to build affordable housing. The main culprits are the capital gains tax exemption and the land tax exemption for owner-occupied housing; negative gearing for investment properties; and the discount on capital gains for investor properties.**

These tax benefits result in an obscene government subsidy to wealthy home owners at the expense of the poor. The Senate Select Committee on Housing Affordability, reporting in June 2008, estimated that these concessions came to a whopping $50 billion per year. If you add the exemption of owner-occupied housing from the asset test for the age pension, that’s another $10 billion. Compare that with the paltry figures the government has promised to combat homelessness; now imagine what would happen to the texture of Australian society, its cohesiveness and degree of income equality, if only half that huge amount were spent on social housing!

As commentators quoted by the Senate committee point out, such figures may reward existing home owners but they do nothing for the institution of home ownership itself.

Small investors welcome the housing bubble because they are making more money, and owner-occupiers also welcome the rise in their property prices. But those with children must watch them struggle to find a decent rental property, struggle to get into the housing market, and then struggle to maintain huge mortgage payments.

The problem of negative gearing
Negative gearing occurs when an investor borrows money to buy a property, but the interest payable on the loan is higher than the income gained from the property. The investor is able to claim the loss against taxable income. (Investors also get a discount on the capital gains they derive from the property.)

Negative gearing has been slammed by many in the welfare sector because it gives favourable tax treatment to those who already have a first home and are investing in a second one, as compared with those who are buying their first home.

The Senate Select Committee on Housing Affordability admitted that negative gearing was encouraging investors at the expense of home ownership, reporting that ‘investors now account for about a third of new home loans’.

But trying to get rid of this tax has proved electorally unpopular, and it is a truism that it increases investment in private rental properties and therefore the amount of rental stock available. This comforting idea is illusory. Most of the investment fuelled by taxpayer-funded negative gearing goes into existing housing stock – it’s not being used to buy new houses.

The tax benefits available to property investors – negative gearing and capital gains discount – are supposedly needed to make the investment worthwhile because the properties are so expensive to buy in the first place. But because these benefits have increased demand for investment properties, negative gearing is itself partly responsible for that expense.

In September 2009, the Brotherhood of St Laurence released a report it had developed jointly with the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. The report confirmed that the government’s tax policies made housing more expensive for disadvantaged Australians. And it found that for households in the top 20% of incomes, the average annual benefit of the exemption from capital gains tax on owner-occupied housing was worth $8,000 – almost seven times the average of $1,200 in subsidies for housing expenses that the government pays households in the lowest 20 per cent of incomes. It offers the following example:

Wealthy negatively geared property investors in the top 20% of incomes are getting around $4,500 from tax benefits in relation to investment properties. However, people from the poorest households who receive the top rate of Commonwealth Rental Assistance gain an average subsidy of just $2420.

Another reason that the capital gains and land tax exemptions are wasteful is that they also encourage people to invest extensively in their homes as a form of saving; for example, building a larger home than they actually need.

Reforming the housing market
In order to increase housing affordability and accessibility for the most disadvantaged, and to favour first home buyers over property investors, the Brotherhood has called for the following changes:

Remove the capital gains tax exemption on homes worth more than $1.1 million.

Combine the introduction of taxation of imputed rent and capital gains with mortgage interest deductibility [to benefit first home buyers].

State governments should consider removing the exemption from land tax for very expensive owner-occupied dwellings while at the same time removing or reducing stamp duty on lower-priced homes.

Any resulting revenue gain should fund measures to make housing more affordable for those in need, including providing more public and non-profit housing and more generous support for those on rent assistance.

Give pensioners in large houses tax breaks so they could let out part of their houses without being penalised.

Other options
The government needs to:

immediately double its commitment to new social housing and reinstate the urgency with which it originally seemed to be tackling the housing crisis, expediting the implementation of its National Affordable Housing Strategy and putting pressure on the states to prioritise this area

conduct an inquiry into immigration policy that takes account of Australia’s housing availability, its already overstretched infrastructure, the limits of its natural resources such as water, and the implications for the disadvantaged of excessive immigration

use negative gearing solely to encourage the building of new housing stock for rental purposes

increase its commitment to providing adequate skills and training in needed areas, which would also reduce unemployment.

Improving the rental market
Change tenancy laws to encourage European-style long-term tenancies as an alternative to owning.

Immediately outlaw rent auctions.

Make it mandatory for landlords to make their own decisions about who lets the property, rather than property managers who are often young and prejudiced.

Coordinate tenancy laws across the states so that blatantly unfair practices, such as the requirement in Queensland that all renters go on six-monthly leases, be abolished.

Places caps on rent increases, abolishing increases based purely on market forces.

A fairer go in the housing market
Putting the 'fair go' back into the housing market would not benefit the disadvantaged alone. Everyone, even the richest, gains from the social cohesion, lower crime rate and stronger community spirit that a more equal society offers. Bring it on!



* I fully acknowledge that this is a touchy issue, given Australia’s shameful history of openly discriminating against non-Caucasians during the years of the White Australia Policy (the discrimation was so blatant even the Brits were embarrassed by it). Those opposed to immigration in Australia have traditionally been on the right and motivated by a fear of the other. We are, as many are proud to say, a nation of migrants apart from Indigenous people, so who are we to turn others away?

For the record I’m not against immigration as a concept and think that Australia should favour refugees from all races (including asylum seekers who arrive by sea) over skilled migrants. However, I do think we need to look seriously at reducing future increases to the skilled migrant intake and start to plan how we are going to house, feed and provide water for our growing population.

** Please note that I am not bagging people who invest in this way and are simply responding to government tax policy. My own parents have a small investment property and their ordinary-sized house, in a sought-after suburb and on a large block, is now worth over $1.5 million. I am lucky enough to benefit from the fact that my landlord is not still paying off the property I rent, but is an outright owner, so was not affected by the high interest rates before the GFC.

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