VICTORIAN COUNCIL OF SOCIAL SERVICE ISSUE 1
CONTENTS
INSIGHT
CONTRIBUTORS
CITIES IN CRISIS?
Publisher Cath Smith Editor Marie McInerney Art Director Marta Gola Photographer Luke Chang Printer Blueprint
Dr Fiona Allon is the author of Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home ( University of New South Wales Press, 2008 ). She is a Senior Lecturer at The University of Sydney.
04. STATE OF OUR CITIES 05. TOP OF THE POPS Jane-Frances Kelly & Helen Morrow 06. MELBOURNE… YOU WANT THAT SUPERSIZED? 010. PANIC ATTACKS
Photo Credits: Unless otherwise captioned, all photos in this issue of Insight are by Luke Chang, a second year photography student at the Photography Studies College (PSC) at Southbank in Melbourne. We thank him for his enthusiasm, compassion and great visual sense.
Jane-Frances Kelly is Cities Program Director at the Grattan Institute, an independent public policy think tank. In recent years she has worked as a senior adviser to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Boston Consulting Group, and the Vice-Chancellor at Melbourne University. She played a central role in the 2020 Summit. John Lawrence is CEO of Kilmany Uniting Care in Gippsland. He is a member of the VCOSS Board and has been an advocate for rural issues for over twenty years.
018. CAST ADRIFT
Luke became involved with VCOSS through a special Second Year Project run by the PSC at Southbank. For a semester each year, students work with a wide range of community based organisations, providing them with photographs for public relations purposes, websites or publications such as brochures, annual reports and calendars. If you are interested in participating in 2011 please contact:
020. LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION Dr Marcus Spiller
Avril Moore, Photography Studies College, 65 City Rd, Southbank Vic 3006
024. BACKYARD BLUES
Thanks also go to Reuters Australia, particularly Mark Bendeich and Pauline Askin, for kind permission to use their photographs.
Helen Morrow is a Research Associate on the Grattan Institute’s Cities Program. She has worked on climate change, energy and environmental policies, predominantly in the public sector, where she advised the Victorian and Federal governments, including through the Garnaut Climate Change Review.
012. STIGMA HITS HOME Dr Deborah Warr 014. NOT LEAVING LALOR 015. HOME WRECKER RENOVATIONS Dr Fiona Allon
026. HER OWN WAY HOME Cassandra Bawden 028. THE STREETS IN MY TOWN John Lawrence
FEATURE
016. INTO THE LIQUID ETHER A personal journey of Melbourne by award-winning author Christos Tsiolkas.
REGULAR STORIES
Articles are subject to copyright. Apart from dealings under the Copyright Act 1968, permission must be obtained from both VCOSS and the author. INTRODUCING INSIGHT This is the first issue of Insight, published by the Victorian Council of Social Service ( VCOSS ). It aims to be Victoria’s leading social justice publication, exploring ways to end poverty and disadvantage. To contribute ideas and articles or to discuss advertising, sponsorship and subscriptions, contact VCOSS on 03 9654 5050 or vcoss@vcoss.org.au VICTORIAN COUNCIL OF SOCIAL SERVICE 128 Exhibition Street Melbourne 3000
029. QUICK CHAT Sarah Davies 030. CAMPAIGNS VCOSS lifts the lid on dodgy rentals: Sarah Toohey & Jess Fritze 032. SECTOR DEV The ‘haves and have nots’ in IT: Dean Lombard 034. WHAT I’M READING Angela Savage 035. NOT THE BACK PAGE Insights and out‑takes
03 9654 5050 VCOSS raises awareness of the existence, causes and effects of poverty and inequality, and contributes to initiatives seeking to create a more just society. www.vcoss.org.au SPECIAL THANKS VCOSS is grateful for the support of all our contributors, particularly those who responded to such very short deadlines for this first issue. Special thanks go to Claire Bauska, Cassandra Bawden, Luke Chang, Kate Colvin, Lisa Mansfield, Belinda Robson, Angela Savage, Christos Tsiolkas, John Wiseman and, particularly, Marta Gola for going so far beyond the call of duty.
George Morgan is a researcher at the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney and co-edited ( with Scott Poynting ) Outrageous! Moral Panics in Australia ( ACYS Press, Hobart ).
Angela Savage is Executive Officer, Association of Neighbourhood Houses and Learning Centres. She is also the author of Behind the Night Bazaar which won the 2004 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award in the unpublished manuscript category ( as Thai Died ). Her second novel, The Half-Child, will be published by Text in September 2010. Dr Marcus Spiller is a Director of SGS Economics & Planning Pty Ltd. His consulting experience spans land economics, regional development, housing policy, infrastructure funding and policy co-ordination systems. He is an Adjunct Professor in Urban Management at the University of Canberra, a member of the National Housing Supply Council and a former National President of the Planning Institute of Australia. Christos Tsiolkas wrote the novels Loaded, The Jesus Man and Dead Europe, which won the Age 2006 Book of the Year Fiction Award. His best-selling novel The Slap won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, South East Asia and Pacific Region, and was shortlisted for the 2009 Australian Literary Society’s Gold Medal and the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Dr Deborah Warr is a Senior Research Fellow at the McCaughey Centre in the School of Population Health at the University of Melbourne. She is a sociologist and her work explores the social determinants of health and spans theoretical, empirical and methodological issues.
ACCESSIBLE FORMAT If you would like to receive this publication in an accessible format
please telephone 9654 5050 or email vcoss@vcoss.org.au
03.
EDITORIAL
AUTHOR CATH SMITH
INSIGHT I
EDITORIAL In the 1990s, the need for academically solid social policy and critique was paramount. VCOSS published 50 editions of Just Policy as a unique collaboration between the community services sector and the social research community. In 2010, with a different academic rating system and the need for rigorous evidence-based comment as strong as ever, we are launching our new journal Insight. VCOSS is committed to developing a public space to explore the changes we need to create a more socially equitable community. This requires identification of the issues and structural trends driving disadvantage, and for the sector to disseminate knowledge and advice about programs, practice and policies that can enable a fairer society. The community and health sector employs more people and makes a larger contribution to gross domestic profit than the mining industry: it’s time for our sector’s contribution to be profiled, for successful outcomes to be identified and evaluated, and for decision makers to gain an insight into what community workers and leaders know. We believe Insight will offer sharp, informed perspectives on the contribution of the community sector and VCOSS members to reducing disadvantage, while publishing high quality commentary and social comment from thinkers, researchers and policy-makers. The theme of this first edition is ‘Cities in Crisis?’. Its planning took place during parliamentary debates into whether to expand the Melbourne urban growth boundary; as rental affordability across Melbourne dropped once again; as the difficulties in securing resources for developing social and community services in newer ( and existing ) suburbs were exacerbated; and as the obvious policy connections between climate science and transport disadvantage hit a wall with the dropping of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) at the federal level. In our stories here, we reflect on the trends and drivers that threaten liveability in Melbourne, and Victoria, for all those who lack a significant financial buffer.
Victoria has so far been protected from the worst of the economic downturn, but the future is less bright for some – young people not in study or employment and looking out to an uncertain economic environment, those who cannot find the extra $30 a week for rising rents and utility bills. VCOSS members are busy working in this context, grappling with the range of issues illuminated by this edition’s contributors. Our colleagues in the social housing sector know the opportunities for well‑considered socially inclusive development are enormous. So too is there enormous potential for addressing transport disadvantage through community transport services provided by community sector organisations and local government, the significant but largely invisible ‘third tier’ of transport services in Victoria. In the sector, we also intersect many other relevant policy areas – health, planning, disability, justice, climate change, education, families, human rights and more. Regional organisations see both advantages and disadvantages of being located outside the city. We would love to hear how your organisation is responding to our challenging times, and what policy and practice changes would make the most difference to your effectiveness. We also want to know how we can publish material that best suits your time and technological constraints. For instance, how many members spend a long time driving from A to B and would enjoy our material on a podcast or CD? We invite your response and your contributions to Insight. The next edition will accompany a pre-election forum on ‘Framing the Future’, to be held in late August. Ideas for the third edition are still being developed. Letters to the editor are invited to vcoss@vcoss.org.au, as are suggestions for future editions. My great appreciation to all our contributors, our editor Marie McInerney, designer Marta Gola, and the VCOSS staff team. Enjoy the read! Cath Smith Chief Executive Officer VCOSS June 2010
STATE OF AUSTRALIAN CITIES CITYSCAPES
HOUSING OPTIONS
RESOURCES
·· Melbourne’s estimated GDP of $ US135 billion ranks it the 33 rd in the list of the world’s 150 major cities, alongside Barcelona, Shanghai and Istanbul.
·· Higher proportion of low income households live in areas characterised by poor urban design, inadequate infrastructure and facilities, and lack of healthy, affordable food options.
·· Water restrictions saw total household consumption fall 7 per cent between 2000-01 and 2004-05, despite population growth.
·· Population distribution within Australia’s major cities (2006) – Sydney 2037 persons per square km, Melbourne 1566, Adelaide 1374, Geelong 1356.
·· Main reasons given by renters for moving house were to have bigger / better homes ( 15 per cent ), for employment ( 14 per cent ), or given notice by landlord ( 14 per cent ).
·· Households accounted for 11 per cent of total water consumption in 2004-05.
·· Around half ( 49 per cent ) of households in lowest household income quintile were renting; 56 per cent of Indigenous households, 59 per cent lone parent households.
·· Residential energy use accounted for about seven per cent of total energy consumption in 2007‑08, but grew at a high rate ( 2.2 per cent ) compared to other sectors ( due to population increase, higher ownership of appliances and IT equipment, and increases in average size of homes ).
HOUSING DESIGN ·· In 2007, 79 per cent of dwelling stock was single detached houses, nine per cent semi‑detached, 10 per cent flats, units, or apartments. ·· Australian homes now have the largest average floor size in the world ( Commonwealth Bank analysis, 2009 ). Average size of new houses in 2008‑09 a record 245.3 square metres, up from 160 square metres in 1985‑86. ·· Between 1997‑ 2006 average household size reduced from 2.7 persons to 2.5, while average number of bedrooms per dwelling rose from 2.9 to 3.1. ·· 77 per cent of couple‑only households aged over 65 years have two or more spare bedrooms. In 2003‑04, 73 per cent of new family dwellings had four or more bedrooms, compared with 52 per cent of existing owner occupied dwellings.
·· Average house prices in capital cities have risen to equivalent of more than seven years of average earnings, up from three years in the postwar period to 1980s. Rental prices have risen 17 per cent since 2000. ·· Shortfall exists of 202,000 dwellings for renter households within the lowest 20 per cent of income, with decline of some 90,000 social housing dwellings in period 1996‑2008.
TRANSPORT ·· Avoidable cost of traffic congestion for Australian capitals estimated at $9.4 billion, expected to rise to $20.4 billion by 2020. ·· Freight expected to grow by 70 per cent between 2003 and 2020. ·· Urban car use has grown almost 30‑fold since 1950. ·· Transport greenhouse gas emissions are projected to increase 22.6 per cent from 2007 to 2020. ·· Transport costs are the second largest cost to households, after housing.
State of Australian Cities 2010. Major Cities Unit, Infrastructure Australia; Canberra 2010
·· Annual decline of up to 50mm in rainfall per decade across eastern Australia since 1950.
·· Standby power is the greatest contributor to average annual growth in household energy use. ·· Around 97 per cent of energy used in Australia in 2007‑08 sourced from non‑renewable sources. ·· Total waste generation up by 31 per cent from 2002‑03 to 2006‑07, exceeding rate of population growth of 5.6 per cent. ·· Annual average temperatures in Australia projected to increase by 1.0ºC above 1990 levels by 2030 and up to 5.0ºC by 2070 under a high emissions scenario.
WEALTH ·· Real net worth per person up by 0.9 per cent from 1997-98 to 2007-08. ·· In 2007-08 Australia’s Gini Coefficient ( measure of inequalities within economies, where value of 1 represents highest level of inequality and value of 0 represents perfect equality ) was 0.331, up from 0.303 a decade before.
05.
CITIES IN CRISIS ?
AUTHORS JANE-FRANCES KELLY & HELEN MORROW
Melbourne often ‘Tops the Pops’ in the Most Liveable Cities of the World charts – but what don’t those league tables look at? Jane‑Frances Kelly and Helen Morrow put them to the test. “Third most liveable in the world!” announced the headline, when Melbourne’s impressive ranking in the 2009 Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Survey was revealed. Other rankings also place Melbourne highly: Monocle has made it 9th most ‘liveable’ for two years, based on its recreational offerings ( illustrating the muddiness of the term ‘liveable’ ), and Mercer’s Quality of Living survey consistently puts Melbourne in the world’s top 10 per cent of cities. Such a consistently high performance makes for good political speech-fodder, and carries the risk that we become complacent in our attractiveness. But before we rest on our assets, we should ask for what purpose these rankings were put together. Take Mercer’s ranking, for example. It’s designed for use by the human resources divisions of multinational corporations to calculate what salary package and ‘hardship allowances’ executives should be offered for postings around the world. Its methodology therefore can be expected to take the perspective of the globally mobile, highly educated elite ( also a fair description of the average Economist reader ). These ‘league tables’ suggest Melbourne is safe, attractive, entertaining and a provider of abundant goods and services – for those that are mobile, skilled and, generally, wealthy. But they don’t say what it is like to live in Melbourne if you are struggling with the costs of living, painful commutes, feel socially isolated or don’t have decent access to basic services. In addition, these tables don’t report on the range of a city’s performance on any given indicator. For example, while Melbourne might score well on average income, the growing gulf between rich and poor isn’t reflected. Nor that Australia’s low-income households spend almost two-thirds of their income on basic necessities, while wealthy units spend only around 40 per cent 1. 1 Garnaut, R. 2008, Garnaut Climate Change Review Final Framework Report: 388, Cambridge University Press
INSIGHT I
“A LIVEABLE CITY NEED NOT MEET ALL PEOPLE’S NEEDS ALL OF THE TIME, BUT SHOULD DO SO FOR MOST, MOST OF THE TIME.” Low-income households are often clustered in the urban fringe, where they are highly dependent on cars and therefore, as the VAMPIRE index identifies, highly vulnerable to rising fuel prices and at risk of isolation and social exclusion 2. It’s unlikely these people find Melbourne ‘liveable’, but the indices’ failure to measure the spread and distribution of performance masks such inequalities. The league tables also struggle to properly measure, or value, intangible aspects of life that can’t be quantified but are essential for people to survive and thrive. Certainly, economic opportunities and efficient markets help make a city liveable. But when asked what they want from their city, people frequently cite social interaction, a feeling of connectedness, public space, new ideas, excitement, colour and movement. Cities must meet the psychological as well as material needs of its residents, but league tables generally do a bad job of taking this into account. A liveable city need not meet all people’s needs all of the time, but should do so for most, most of the time. Melbourne’s population includes the homeless, the illiterate and uneducated, the unemployed, and the mentally and physically ill. Scoring Melbourne’s liveability should encompass the well-being of all these groups – not just the norm, or indeed of those at the other end of the socio-economic spectrum. In thinking about our cities we must look more deeply than these narrowly based rankings, which ignore the city’s experience for so many. ● 2 Dodson, J. & Sipe, N. 2007, ‘Oil vulnerability in the Australian city: assessing socioeconomic risks from higher urban fuel prices’, Urban Studies 44(1): 37–62
06.
CITIES IN CRISIS ?
INSIGHT I
07.
CITIES IN CRISIS ?
INSIGHT I
01. ON THE FRINGES Rapid population growth is driving new patterns of inequality, vulnerability and disadvantage. ·· Melbourne’s population is growing faster than any other Australian city, with another 1.8 million people expected by 2030.
MELBOURNE 2010, POPULATION 4 MILLION. MELBOURNE 2050, POPULATION 7 MILLION OR MORE... MAKING A DIFFERENCE.
It’s not just the city that’s growing, but its inequalities. This snapshot is informed by recent McCaughey Centre research by John Wiseman and Belinda Robson for the Melbourne Community Foundation. It highlights seven challenges to creating a big city that’s just, sustainable and liveable for all.
What needs to be done to deal with growing trends of disadvantage in Melbourne ? Insight asked key academics and community service leaders for their top priorities.
·· Sixty per cent of current growth is occurring at least 20 kilometres from the CBD, with many ‘outer fringe’ households highly vulnerable to rises in housing interest rates, energy, water and petrol prices, and ( particularly for young people and families ) lack of access to transport or recreational / social activities. ·· Fastest growing areas from 2001 to 2006 were Melton ( 8.9 per cent ), the City of Melbourne ( 8.6 per cent ), Wyndham ( 5.9 per cent ), Cardinia ( 4.5 per cent ) and Casey ( 4.1 per cent ). ·· Total number of Melbourne’s households are expected to grow by 41 per cent by 2031, but number of residents per household to fall by 2.6 to 2.3 per cent by 2054, putting more pressure on housing and energy demands.
HOMELESSNESS Tony Keenan CEO – Hanover ·· Make the ongoing stability of children in school the driver of housing and support services for families experiencing homelessness. ·· Develop intensive integrated accommodation, support and early childhood services for families at risk of child protection involvement. ·· Act to reduce the number of women and children having to leave the family home due to family violence. ·· Do what it takes to boost the supply of affordable housing: more public / social housing, encourage private / philanthropic investment, and open real debate on the ‘sacred cows’ – negative gearing and how to best leverage Commonwealth Rental Assistance to increase affordable supply. ·· More quality youth foyers to provide support into education/training and jobs as the first option for young people exiting care, juvenile justice and those who are homeless. ·· More Common Ground / ‘Home First’ options so people with complex needs can, at last, have the chance of a home for life.
08.
CITIES IN CRISIS ?
02. DEEP POCKETS OF POVERTY Unemployment and financial insecurity are hurting vulnerable people, households and communities. ·· While the fallout from the global financial crisis ( GFC ) for Victoria appears less severe than feared, unemployment is again on the rise in some Melbourne suburbs, with rates of more than 10 per cent in areas like Sunshine, Corio, Broadmeadows and Dandenong. ·· Absence of transport, jobs and services in new outer suburbs means residents are forced to travel longer distances, often by car. ·· Poverty increased in Victoria from 7.7 to 10.7 per cent in the decade to 2003‑04. ·· People from culturally and linguistically diverse ( CALD ) backgrounds face particular barriers, including language, lack of recognition of qualifications, unfamiliarity with the local job market, and employer attitudes. ·· Estimated 23,299 Victorians were homeless on Census night in 2006. That year, housing and homelessness services in Australia turned away 13.2 per cent of people who needed help. Homelessness is likely to increase. Thirty per cent of homeless people are estimated to have a mental health issue, 43 per cent to have problems with substance abuse.
INSIGHT I
03. YOUNG & OLD UNDER PRESSURE Households with complex needs are facing increasing challenges. ·· Proportion of Melbourne’s population aged over 75 is on the rise, concentrated most in Whitehorse, Boroondara, Monash, Moreland, Glen Eira, Kingston, Darebin and Banyule, with more people choosing to live at home. ·· Number of Victorians with severe or profound disability are up from 335,000 in 2006 to 362,000 in 2010. ·· Carers face a particular risk of long‑term economic, social and health problems as a result of their caring responsibilities. Two to four times the number of female carers report health as ‘fair’ or ‘poor’ compared to women of same age without a primary care role. ·· Number of people with diagnosed mental illness is expected to rise by 100,000 in the decade to 2019. ·· Mental health presentations to emergency departments rose from 29,734 in 2001-02 to 46,474 in 2006-07. Rates of acute inpatient involuntary admissions have increased, with a 13 per cent increase in Crisis Assessment Teams contacts since 2001-02. ·· Children and young people are also vulnerable to a range of complex health conditions. Mental health and substance use disorders account for over 60 per cent of illness among 15-24 year olds but only one in four with mental health problems get adequate and appropriate help.
04. NEIGHBOURS OR STRANGERS? Melbourne’s cultural diversity is both a strength and challenge. ·· Cultural diversity is on the rise, with a 10.5 per cent increase in people speaking a language other than English at home during the period 2001-2006. ·· In 2007‑08, the Victorian population rose by almost 100,000 – just over half were migrants. ·· Linguistic and cultural barriers, sometimes linked to race‑based discrimination, will continue to limit access to employment, housing, services and social networks. ·· Rapid growth is also evident in the number of older people from different cultural backgrounds, with this group estimated to make up 23 per cent of older Australians by 2011. ·· Indigenous people are the most disadvantaged population group in Melbourne on nearly every indicator of socio‑economic and health inequality. Indigenous life expectancy is significantly lower than the rest of the population, Indigenous homeless rates are six times greater, while unemployment rates are three times higher. Less than a quarter of Indigenous people have finished Year 12.
PUBLIC TRANSPORT
HEALTH AND WELL ‑BEING
DISADVANTAGE
Jodie Willmer CEO – Travellers Aid
Robbi Chaplin CEO – Inner South Community Health Service
Cath Smith CEO – VCOSS
·· Find new ways to integrate public and community transport to create more inclusive, affordable and seamless travel options across regional and urban Victoria.
·· Deliver real national health reform with an integrated focus on individual and community health: physical, social, emotional and environmental.
·· Better, cheaper access to public transport for disadvantaged users, so tickets and fines don’t add to a cycle of ongoing poverty.
·· Create a whole of government focus on reducing the level of health inequities that exist across and between communities.
·· Require a percentage of affordable rental homes in every major development across the city, especially areas that are close to transport and services.
·· Develop coordinated approach at all levels of government to provide more accessible transport to communities outside the CBD radius.
·· Focus better on ‘closing the gap’ in Indigenous health outcomes in partnership with Indigenous communities.
·· Put community services in the areas where people live – well beyond the traditional inner city concentrations of disadvantage.
·· Develop a sustainable funding approach ( non-Medicare based ) to manage chronic conditions in a way that addresses all determinants and focuses on the most disadvantaged.
·· Implement access and mobility planning: no new schools, hospitals or government buildings without public transport options to get there.
·· Expand travel concessions to International Students ( who are currently full fee paying for higher education, and full fare for travel ).
·· Get State governments to sign up to the federal goal of halving homelessness by 2020. ·· Strengthen focus and investment on prevention and early intervention. ·· Invest in IT, facilities and other infrastructure to support integrated community based service delivery.
·· Retain the urban growth boundary and focus more affordable housing on smaller blocks and in-fill sites.
·· Focus on regional development, ensuring transport, housing, jobs and services are well located across regional centres and country towns. ·· Invest in transport; not just rail, but improved bus services ( including turning regional school buses into public buses and expanding transport connections in growth corridors ). ·· Ensure all major developments and infrastructure are planned ( or not ) in line with their greenhouse emissions and ecological footprints.
09.
CITIES IN CRISIS ?
INSIGHT I
05. HOUSING DEMAND THROUGH THE ROOF Affordable housing is out of reach for more and more people. ·· Predictions that the GFC might push down housing prices have proven wrong; soaring prices so far this year foreshadow a further crisis for low income house buyers. ·· Victorian rental prices are up by over 40 per cent from 2005-2009 with only 20 per cent of all new lettings affordable to lower income households. Across Melbourne in the March 2008 quarter, only 8.9 per cent of dwellings were affordable to these households, down from 16.8 per cent the year before. ·· In 2005‑06, around 23 per cent of households were spending more than 30 per cent of their income on housing, up from 16 per cent the previous decade.
06. OFF THE RAILS Lack of access to affordable communications and transport. ·· Unequal access to affordable public transport continues to be a major driver of disadvantage and inequality, particularly in outer urban areas. ·· Recent VCOSS emergency relief report found that people in Melbourne’s outer suburbs nominated petrol as the expense most commonly contributing to their financial hardship. ·· While household internet access continues to improve, there are still major gaps, particularly in low income households and outer urban communities.
07. THE HEAT IS ON Impacts of climate change on vulnerable and disadvantaged communities. ·· Climate change was declared in a recent report in The Lancet as ‘the greatest population health challenge of the 21st Century’. ·· Unabated and unaddressed, climate change will further exacerbate existing social inequities. Older people and people with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to heat waves and extreme weather events. ·· Low income households will be seriously exposed to the impacts of rising food, energy, water, food and transport prices, and will struggle to be able to retrofit properties in order to maximise energy and water efficiencies.
SOCIAL COHESION
DISADVANTAGE
DISABILTY
Julie Edwards CEO – Jesuit Social Services
John Wiseman & Belinda Robson McCaughey Centre
Frank Hall-Bentick Disability Resources Centre
·· Strengthen post-natal services to help parents raise children in safe, stable and caring environments.
·· Invest in well-planned, long-term physical and social infrastructure, particularly in urban growth areas.
·· Provide free three-year-old kinder, childcare and school for children of health care card holders and incentives for best and brightest teachers to teach in most disadvantaged communities.
·· Focus job creation on areas / groups most vulnerable to long-term unemployment.
·· Give a ‘housing guarantee’ for homeless people or those at risk, and fund affordable housing by scrapping negative gearing tax breaks. ·· Deliver safe, reliable, timely, round-the-clock public transport across Melbourne, free for health care card holders and their dependents. ·· Create jobs for young people in disadvantaged communities. ·· Keep vulnerable young people engaged in school or training. ·· Focus prisons on rehabilitation and support prison leavers with access to housing, education and jobs.
·· Expand well-integrated community support, and strengthen job opportunities and financial support for people with complex challenges and needs. ·· Build cultural understandings, improve opportunities for new arrivals, and rapidly address poorer health and well-being outcomes in Indigenous communities. ·· Address demand and supply drivers of rising house prices, invest more in public and social housing and improve affordability and security of rental housing. ·· Ensure reliable, affordable public transport networks. ·· Act on climate change at local, national and international levels to rapidly and equitably move to a low carbon society.
·· Enshrine human rights at both federal and State levels for people with disabilities. ·· Ensure a stable, non-means tested, government income base for all people with disabilities. ·· Open up the public service, support retraining, and address barriers to promotion. ·· Make all public and private housing and accommodation, public, commercial and community transport, and all buildings fully accessible in three years. ·· Provide full access for people with disabilities to attend their local school and university, with therapy services funded and delivered separately so they don’t impact on learning. ·· Ensure support services are funded and delivered on a human rights, not charity model.
WHAT ARE MORAL PANICS? A moral panic occurs when an event(s) connects with some latent public anxiety and triggers disproportionate expressions of alarm in the media and amongst public figures / ‘moral entrepreneurs’. A defining feature of a moral panic is that the reaction to the precipitating event(s) – both the public indignation and the official political / legal response – greatly exceeds the magnitude of the genuine threat posed by such event(s). The main risk of a moral panic is the demonisation and silencing of minorities and the increase in the coercive powers of the police and the legal system to punish and regulate those deemed responsible for the alleged moral dysfunction. 1
7 MOMENTS OF MORAL PANICS 1. Certain forms of behaviour become defined as problematic – a looming sense of threat, as yet not clearly defined. 2. Media crystallises the threat through exaggeration and stereotyping.
Melbourne’s growing knife “culture” 2009‑10 Victorian Government grants police stop-andsearch powers in designated areas, removes requirement to publicise weapons searches in advance, introduces $1000 on‑the‑spot fines for anyone found carrying a weapon. Asylum seeker “waves” 2010
3. In come the ‘moral entrepreneurs’, the rightthinking guardians of respectability ( politicians, clergymen, ‘community’ representatives ) pronouncing upon the problem. 4. Experts are called upon to offer strategies and remedies. 5. Official strategic responses are formed to address the problem, which entail the involvement of various arms of the state – police, judiciary and welare agencies in particular. 6. The condition around which the moral panic has focused subsides. 7. The legacy of the moral panic – how, if at all, it reshaped the arrangement of social forces in society, how it is related to subsequent moral panics. 2
1 George Morgan, Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney 2 Stan Cohen, cited in Morgan, George and Poynting, Scott, eds. Outrageous!: Moral Panics In Australia. ACYS Publishing, Tasmania: 2007
ATTACKS ON CIVIL LIBERTIES
Queensland’s Sunday Mail declared “They’re here!” in a front page article showing a photo of a woman, two children and a shopping trolley: “suspected immigration detainees… returning from a shopping excursion.” The political row over increased numbers of boats carrying asylum seekers leads Rudd Government to suspend the processing of all new immigration claims from Sri Lankan and Afghan asylum seekers. Young Aboriginal ‘Gang of 49’ 2007‑10 SA police reveal they are monitoring a group of 49 primarily Aboriginal offenders held responsible for hundreds of crimes. They become known, in media and among politicians as the ‘Gang of 49’. Politicians talk up sentencing changes, with gang described as “pure evil” and “beyond rehabilitation”. Research finds kinship links but no identifiable leadership or ‘gang’. Artist Bill Henson and ‘child abuse’ 2008 NSW police seize 20 photographs of adolescent girls from Bill Henson’s Sydney exhibition with the intention ( not followed through ) of launching criminal proceedings under the Child Protection Act. Liberty Victoria president Michael Pearce says overwrought concerns about the sexualisation of children – which often stem from guilt at inaction on real abuse in the past – has led to “handcuffing of normal people”, with school football coaches needing police clearance. ●
011.
CITIES IN CRISIS ?
AUTHOR MARIE MCINERNEY
INSIGHT I
PANIC PANIC A ATTACKS TTACKS ‘Moral panics’ – they’ve been with us for years, centuries even, beating up fears about everything from hoons to heroin, Aborigines and Afghans. Plan on seeing a few more in the lead-up to State and federal elections, and don’t be surprised if they take on a particularly ‘ethnic’ bent. “Melbourne city too dangerous at night.” “Police say Sudanese a gang threat.” “Muslim threat to Aussie way of life.” “Drug War!” “‘Vile’ paedophile free to roam.” “Five more boats in a week!” We know them when we see them. The headlines that take off and end up with tougher laws, whether it’s equating bikies with terrorists, opening new desert detention centres, or allowing police to randomly search anyone who’s young and poor. They were made famous by UK researcher Stan Cohen in the 1970s in an analysis of the clash between Mods and Rockers 1 and explored in the 2007 book Outrageous: Moral Panics in Australia. Co-editor George Morgan, from the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney, says that moral panics are alive and well and may be taking on a racial bent in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
PHOTO REUTERS Mick Tsikas
One recent example has been the response by the New South Wales government to organised crime involving the bikie community, which was represented as being largely Middle Eastern in origin. “The bikies were seen as Lebanese – therefore they were seen as potentially, if not actually, terrorists,” Dr Morgan says. “This was the language used by politicians and police and what was basically a domestic policing issue came to be subject to powers you would associate with anti-terror, international security powers.” There’s been a similar “massive over-reaction”, says Liberty Victoria president Michael Pearce, to problems of alcohol-fuelled violence in Melbourne. These have escalated into a law and order issue but stem, more significantly, from a failure in planning and licensing laws which allow concentrations of licensed premises operating around the clock. 1 Morgan, George and Poynting, Scott, eds. Outrageous!: Moral Panics In Australia. ACYS Publishing, Tasmania: 2007. p.2 2 Outrageous! p.158-170 3 Ibid. p108
“THEY WERE DESIGNED TO DEAL WITH SOMEONE SETTING OFF The Cronulla beach riots in Sydney in 2007 were another clear example of a moral panic which, A BOMB AT according to Scott Poynting , was characterised KINGS CROSS by the granting of “permission to hate” at a cultural level by media and political actors. That “saw STATION immigrant youth criminalised as ‘Lebanese gangs’ who terrorise ‘our’ streets, and Muslims IN LONDON accused of misogynistic deviance and represented as ‘grubs’ who sexually assault ‘our women’.” AND NOW Closer to home, says RMIT lecturer in politics WE’RE USING and sociology James Rowe, was the ‘drug war’ proclaimed around Footscray in 1995-96. He THEM TO STOP argues the drug problem at the time was one that might have occurred in any location with ‘HOOLIGANS’ similar characteristics but there was no attempt to uncover what made Footscray and its young WHO MIGHT Vietnamese population susceptible to involvement. BE CARRYING “Instead, the focus remained on a predatory drug trade characterised by violent Vietnamese KNIVES.” criminal gangs and their teenage minions” . In response, we’ve seen the introduction of search and seizure laws adapted also from anti-terror laws in the United Kingdom. “They were designed to deal with the possibility of someone setting off a bomb at Kings Cross station in London and now we’re using the same laws to stop ‘hooligans’ who might be carrying knives,” Mr Pearce says.
2
3
Of course, he says, there have been many more moral panics since, from the reporting of alleged crimes by ‘Sudanese gangs’, repeated issues around sex workers ( including the dubbing of prostitution tolerance zones as “government run brothels”) and, interestingly, the recent debate over whether or not Indian students were being targeted in racial violence in Melbourne, which seems to be a ‘moral panic with a twist’. “Much of the fervour here was around the criticism of us and our governments by the Indian media,” he says. “It allowed the community here to feel aggrieved itself at being told how we should care for people living in our community.” ●
013.
CITIES IN CRISIS ?
AUTHOR DR DEBORAH WARR
INSIGHT I
How do we make sure that disadvantaged communities get the attention and support they need, without being labelled as ‘Bronxes’? Dr Deborah Warr reports on how ‘making poverty perform’ can compound problems for the areas we deem to be ‘bad’. Living in a place with a poor reputation emerged as a key concern for residents in a recent study of disadvantaged neighbourhoods across Victoria. Asked ‘What is the most difficult thing about living here?’, the responses included: ‘The perception that outsiders have of the area, that is, low-income, no-hopers’. Another commented, ‘The pig-headed opinion that some people have about the area–that the scum live here.’ Many likened their suburbs to infamously stigmatised neighbourhoods: ‘It is known as ‘the Bronx’ 1. We all know that where you live determines access to a range of amenities that contribute to quality of life: proximity to public transport options, schools, recreational facilities, shopping and other features of neighbourhood environments. Disadvantaged suburbs invariably have fewer services and facilities, and the implications are numerous, although the effects on overall quality of life (the ability to get by) and life chances (the ability to get ahead) are yet to be fully understood. But one important aspect that currently gets overlooked is the way poor places tend to get negative and unflattering reputations that then also apply to their residents. Residents, like those in the study above, themselves conceptualise these negative reputations as problems of neighbourhood stigma. Erving Goffman developed the concept of stigma2 to describe the ways in which characteristics or attributes are devalued and serve to identify those who possess them as being somehow inferior. Problems of place-based stigma are sometimes described as post-code discrimination, and it presents significant problems for people living in some of Victoria’s most disadvantaged suburbs. It also presents major challenges for policy makers and the community sector in the way they seek to address that disadvantage. Stigmas around poor neighbourhoods can really diminish chances for residents to move out of disadvantage. They describe difficulties in getting jobs and establishing social connections because of where they live. Pejorative and unflattering stereotypes also have corrosive effects on people’s self-esteem and self-confidence. A young mother who had recently moved into a suburb with a bad reputation explained how she was now so much more conscious of stereotyping. “Especially when people say ‘where do you live?’ and I’m like, ‘well, do I really have to say?’”3 In advanced economy cities, tendencies to stigmatise poor places and poor people are heightened because the poor and not-poor are likely to live further apart from each other. This trend, known by sociologists and social geographers as ‘socio-spatial polarisation’, means dwindling opportunities for everyday contact, interaction and engagement across socio-economic circumstances. As residents are painfully aware, neighbourhood stigma is not only transmitted in everyday prejudices and careless jokes about ‘bogans’ and ‘bogan suburbs’, but fuelled through the ways in which suburbs are reported in the media and even in research findings. While journalists and researchers are motivated to bring issues to public attention, their efforts are just as likely to reinforce negative stereotypes. Publicity and research might serve to put social issues on the agenda but they also transmit messages that some places are dangerous, disordered, and to be avoided. 1 Margaret Kelaher, Deborah Warr, Peter Feldman, & Theonie Tacticos (2010) Living in ‘Birdsville’: exploring the impact of neighbourhood stigma on health. Health & Place, 16, 381-388. 2 Stigma. Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Harmondsworth: Penguin
The misfortune and frustration for residents of poor neighbourhoods is that stigmatising images invariably misrepresent and distort the realities of their everyday life. Certainly disadvantaged areas show lower employment, school retention rates, health outcomes and other indicators. However, the truth is that people and places are more alike than different. Most of us share similar aspirations for our families and our life. The real differences for people in socioeconomically disadvantaged suburbs are about making ends meet with lower incomes, and getting by in local environments that lack the facilities and amenities that are taken for granted in other suburbs. Emphasising strength and resilience, however, doesn’t make for a persuasive case when seeking resources for programs and research. Residents, community workers, service providers and researchers are obliged to emphasis the disadvantages, disorders and defects of poor neighbourhoods in efforts to attract resources and funding for research. Mark Peel refers to this as ‘performing poverty’ 4. While it makes sense to funders who try to allocate finite resources according to need, they also risk compounding the very problems they seek to address.
“PUBLICITY AND RESEARCH MIGHT SERVE TO PUT SOCIAL ISSUES ON THE AGENDA BUT THEY ALSO TRANSMIT MESSAGES THAT SOME PLACES ARE DANGEROUS, DISORDERED, AND TO BE AVOIDED.” Places come to be perceived as beyond any potential for positive transformation, and moving out becomes the only option to get ahead. Households with the means to move out become highly motivated to do so while others are deterred from moving in. This only serves to intensify disadvantage and deprive poor neighbourhoods of potential resources that socioeconomic diversity brings. Many socioeconomically disadvantaged suburbs may also be ethnically diverse. Experiences of racism become entwined with experiences of neighbourhood stigma with potent effects. People from migrant and refugee backgrounds living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods may incur double-barrelled risks of racism and stigma. So what can be done? A first step is to be more aware of the risks that are posed through the ways in which suburbs and people are portrayed in the media, popular culture, and research. Interventions in neighbourhoods could also involve initiatives that support communities to reclaim or promote positive place identities. More difficult to address are the ways in which the sting of place-based stigma is linked to growing socio-spatial fragmentation across Australian suburbs. In this context, the answer to a question such as ‘Where do you live?’ increasingly reveals a lot about the opportunities you will have to live with dignity and respect. Dr Deborah Warr is a Senior Research Fellow at the McCaughey Centre in the School of Population Health at the University of Melbourne ● 3 Deborah Warr, (2005) Social networks in a ‘discredited’ neighbourhood . Journal of Sociology, 41, 287-308. 4 Mark Peel (2003) The Lowest Rung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
NOT LEAVING LALOR It’s one of the most disadvantaged areas in Victoria but you wouldn’t know it from talking to the locals. Steve Allport is untroubled that Lalor, 20 kilometres north of the CBD, might not ever hit the lists of Melbourne’s ‘hot suburbs’. “I don’t think a lot of people actually know where Lalor is,” he says. “I don’t mind. I’m happy to live here. I’m happy to fly the flag for Lalor. I live comfortably.”
McCaughey Centre Research Fellow Deborah Warr sees as essential to breaking down the stigma and stereotypes that entrench disadvantage, and stop communities becoming more diverse ( see Stigma p.13 ). For Steve, it’s the neighbour who brings in his bins for him and gives him a lift to the shops. For Gail Romari, also 54, who moved here as a young married woman from Coburg, it’s nearby family and local facilities. And, despite clear need, most are hard-pressed to come up with a wish list of better services for the area. Maybe, they offer, better trains, buses that run on Sundays, a few more volunteer programs. None – not those who have been here 30 years, not the lone teenager having a ciggie break outside Coles, not the new arrivals from Punjab – say they’d leave the area, even if they won the lottery. If anything, they felt better off than those living in nearby areas that had, say, worse crime rates.
In fact, the 54 year old former truck driver’s had a pretty rough time of late after a triple bypass operation forced him to stop work. Plenty of his neighbours also do it tough in this region that was established in the 1950s for young families making up Melbourne’s then ‘outer urban fringes’. Still a blue collar area and part of the City of Whittlesea, it ranks in the lowest decile on the SEIFA indices of Relative “It doesn’t look the best…,” said Matt Curzi, 19. But if he could Socio-economic Disadvantage and Education and Occupation. live anywhere? “I’d probably build a house in Lalor.” Unemployment is higher here ( 8.7 per cent in the 2006 Census, To garden project manager, Jeremy Hearne, from Plenty Valley compared to 5.3 per cent overall in Melbourne ), two thirds of residents Community Health, such responses speak to feelings of pride have not completed Year 12, 51 per cent were born overseas, and ownership, also to an underlying resilience; as well, perhaps, 69 per cent speak a language other than English, and rental prices to lower expectations. “One of the things that occurs when are, as the Council puts it, “higher than you would expect” 1. you’re used to living with disadvantage is you learn to cope with But there’s no sign of any rush to leave. In fact, more than it,” he says. That said, there are clear problems, particularly with half of Whittlesea residents who moved house in the past isolation – of young families, the elderly, people with mental health decade moved to another location in the municipality. And, issues, and new refugee arrivals – that spell the need for greater as the City also notes, when it comes to housing, the most community engagement and integration of services, he says. important factors influencing suburb choice include price But, for some, existing connections are the suburb’s best attraction. and proximity to friends, family, schools and shops 2. “You can have 100 theatres or shopping centres,” says IT professional A quick unscientific survey of Lalor – at a volunteer community Sukhchain Singh, rushing through the mall with a box of vegetables garden project and in the local mall – confirms the finding, with family for a regular ‘welcome all-comers’ lunch at the local Sikh temple. and community connections the most important reasons given “But having good connections to people is more important.” ● for continuing to live here. It’s those sorts of considerations that 1 City of Whittlesea, Councillors’ Reference Guide, November 2005 2 City of Whittlesea, Statistical Bulletin, November 2008
015.
CITIES IN CRISIS ?
“THE AUSTRALIAN DREAM NOW LOOKS LIKE IT IS ON STEROIDS.”
AUTHOR DR FIONA ALLON
Australians have long been enthusiastic about bricks and mortar. It’s the national creed, the Great Australian Dream. But our preoccupation reaches way beyond the widely held aspiration of home ownership. It extends to everything to do with home and housing – house prices and property values, interest rates and mortgages, investment properties and, of course, home renovations. You could say we’re obsessed. The prosperity of the last decade gave us more money than we knew what to do with 1. Lucky that, for our mortgages were huge, as impressive as the big houses they were used to purchase. Often they were big enough to break the bank. Which in some cases they did, if we think about what has happened in the US housing market crisis. The worldwide rise in house prices over the past decade has been called the biggest bubble in history 2. When the housing boom really took off, Australia’s long-standing obsession with home ownership was unleashed like never before. Many were prepared to do anything to get a toehold on the property ladder, whether it meant taking on truckloads of debt and dodgy low doc (document), or even ‘no doc’, loans.
PHOTO REUTERS Mick Tsikas
It’s no surprise that supply couldn’t keep up with demand. Along the way the meaning of home ownership also fundamentally changed – a house was no longer primarily a means of shelter; rather it was a vehicle for wealth accumulation, a ticket to riches and prosperity. And as our houses became more important, the renovations became almost constant, a never-ending process of improvement and upgrading. By the time we’d finished buying and selling, trading up and renovating, house prices across the country had more than doubled 3.
INSIGHT I
are now bigger than anywhere else in the world 4. With its home theatres, extra bathrooms and multiple bedrooms, the average house is now 10 per cent bigger than a decade ago. The ever expanding floor space of Australian houses also means an ever expanding footprint. But environmental consequences are not the only concern. Increasingly larger houses also result in the privatising of space. With more and more importance attached to the size of private, interior spaces, there is less attention given and less value attached to shared public space and public connections to others. Larger houses also encourage urban sprawl and that, in turn, strains public transport services and infrastructure. While the share of GDP devoted to housing is currently above the average of the past five decades, this has, paradoxically, not translated into an increase in the number of dwellings – it’s just resulted in more renovations and the building of bigger and better-appointed houses. Most people assume that renovating is a harmless activity, merely ‘feathering the nest’. But constantly renovated housing leads to more and more expensive housing. That in turn excludes low income owners and first home buyers from buying cheap unrenovated housing, relegating them, or those who can afford it, to the outer fringes where many of the houses are expensive McMansions. Young people and low income earners find themselves stuck between a brick and hard place. Australian homes are also now amongst the most unaffordable in the world, overvalued by around 50 per cent according to The Economist. So what of that housing dream for the next generation? What did your ensuite do? Dr Fiona Allon is the author of Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home (University of New South Wales Press, 2008). She is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney. ●
But something else also got bigger – the size of our homes. The Australian Dream now looks like it is on steroids. Australian Bureau of Statistics 2009 data confirmed that new homes in Australia 1 See John Edwards, Quiet Boom, Lowy Institute Paper 14, Lowy Institute for International Policy, 2006; Fiona Allon, Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home, University of NSW Press, Sydney, 2008. 2 Robert J. Shiller, The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about it, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008.
3 Reserve Bank of Australia, ‘Submission to the Productivity Commission Inquiry on First Home Ownership’, Occasional Paper No. 16, 2003. 4 Simon Santow, ‘Australians live in world’s biggest houses’, ABC News: AM, 30 November 2009.
INTO THE LIQUID ETHER BY CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS
A woman much older than myself taught me how to be courageous in the night.
and light with good. Shift workers, prostitutes, taxi drivers, revellers were part of the night, worlds the day preferred to forget or ignore. Darkness, she insisted, could be home. This was a hard lesson to learn. For most of my childhood, the dark, the night, was a dangerous and forbidding place. When my brother and I fought, my mother would switch off the light and slap me. Then, abruptly, the light would return. That was the Virgin, she scolded, punishing you. After dark I was forbidden to shake off the tablecloth in the back yard, in case I was to feed the demons lurking in the vegetable patch. This instruction so terrified me that if I had to use the outhouse after dark I would be seized by terror. Returning safely I had the good sense to giggle at my thrall to superstition. As I entered my adolescence, this fear of the dark became less benign. I was prone to imaginings, full of perilous and illicit desires. Sin lurked everywhere in the dark. I was convinced insomnia was a punishment from God.
Born to immigrant parents, she had lived all her life in Melbourne’s inner north. She remembered stepping over the stink of the vomit and urine running down the tiles of the pubs after the six o’clock swill, remembered when cafes only served the Greek, Italian and Slav men who gambled within them. Having grown up in the city, before it colonised the surrounding farmland and bushland, she never learnt to drive a car. She went everywhere on her bicycle. I recall walking her home one night, telling me about art and poetry, politics and feminism, the changes to her city. Come on, she urged me, veering away from the quiet street and heading towards the darkness of an alley.
But in sleeplessness, I became an expert of night, its air was thicker, a liquid ether in which you could drown if you were not careful. The eternity of the night was punctured by the screeching of neighbourhood cats, the knock of shingles on the roof, and always the furious, vigorous activity, then blissful surrender, of masturbation. Before guilt crept back and again suffocated me in its embrace.
These are mine, she continued, the alleys belong to me as much as to anyone. Darkness, she explained, was nothing to fear, but was the victim of a slur which equated whiteness
Fortunately, that was not all that there was to night. I would read, book after book. It is possible because so much of the reading was done in those hours when the rest of the world
017.
CITIES IN CRISIS? FEATURE
AUTHOR CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS
DARKNESS, SHE INSISTED, COULD BE HOME.
INSIGHT I
the venetian blinds to criss-cross our bodies. My first hit of speed was in a suburban kitchen and I remember walking out onto Tram Road where, in the distance, the bleak towers of Doncaster Shoppingtown were transformed into the glittering spires of an emerald city. I was not in Kansas anymore. That I placed myself in danger is undeniably true. I went home with strangers who sometimes proved brutish or cruel, I risked encounters with disease. But the risks were inseparable from the experience and gave meaning and weight to my adventures. Their significance was in the decisions I learnt to make and the protections I put in place. I discovered that adolescence is not simply the end of childhood but also the beginning of adulthood. I fumbled, I fell, I made mistakes. I learnt to stand on my own feet. We are now so aware of danger we only wish to be safe and secure. We distrust strangers, whether they be our neighbours or the ones who come in boats. Liberation, transcendence, abandonment. How suspect these words seem in an Australia shaped by the economic husbandry of a John Howard or a Kevin Rudd. Billboards scream out to us to not drink, not smoke, not speed, to dob in our friends, our colleagues, the person driving next to us. We begin to see nothing amiss in these injunctions from the State. They have saved lives, they have changed behaviour but in doing so they have separated our communities. Health and freedom of movement belong to the proper and prosperous. The stranger, the addict, the poor are to be kept out of sight, exiled to another kind of darkness, one not visible from the vantage point of our safe and secure worlds.
is asleep, that my tastes veered towards the grim, the violent and the obsessive, the complex and adult. In night, I also discovered the world of the late and late-late movie. I was being taught the exhilaration of art–that the impossible can be made possible. One more thing I discovered at night, in the dark: intoxication. I began to take nips from my parent’s whiskey bottles, adding water to top them up. I searched the bathroom and experimented with the drugs prescribed to them. It was not that the pleasures of the night were completely new to me. For my parents the end of the long tedious working week spent in numbing, bone wearing labour was celebrated in a long weekend of food, music, partying and dance. The carnival would continue into the early morning and my cousins and I preferred to fall asleep under the kitchen table, or near the dais where the band performed. The clarinet and the bouzouki would play feverishly, the men and women locking hands in a circular, whirling dance. The world of the night and darkness was a liberation and a transcendence – from work, from responsibility, from routine. It is in adolescence, however, that I encountered the joy of dark for myself. It was in the domain of the night that the subterranean world of the senses was opened up: the tribal rhythms and communion of dance, the surrender to the rush of intoxicants, the pleasures of sex. Not, I might add, that any of these experiences are limited to the world after dark has fallen. My first sex was in a stolid brick-veneer with the harsh light of summer slipping through
Our fears around danger, risk, our hysteria for safety, might in some part be explained by our fear of this world. My lover, on hearing another grim news item on how Australians were now most at risk of dying from heart disease, turned around to me and asked, What the Hell are we meant to die of? We know that elsewhere in the world war, famine, disease, earthquakes, floods kill millions. We know that there are those who die of loneliness or broken hearts. But we, we wish to live forever. So we banish danger and risk, recklessness and wildness from our lives. Danger does exist, it can be around the next corner. In darkness I discovered the possibilities of the body; in age I discover its limitations. I realise how lucky I have been that the spectres of madness, disease and death have passed over me. But no amount of instruction, no campaign, no curfew will stop young people having sex, taking drugs, spending the night dancing, f***ing, chatting, joking, drinking. They won’t because with their very first high they will come to understand, as I did, that the world of the night is as beautiful as it is frightening, full of promise as it is danger. I walk the alleys home all the time now. Even after all these years, I am still prey to the fear of what lurks around the corner. I try and remember my friend’s advice: the alleys and streets belong to us. Occasionally, when I turn from the alley and walk into my street, it is long past dawn. One of my neighbours is heading off to do the shopping or to go to the gym. Hey, mate, they call out, a good night, was it? Edited version of an original story published in The Age, June 14, 2008. Reprinted with kind permission of Christos Tsiolkas, author of the award-winning, best-selling novel The Slap.
CAST ADRIFT Our urban fringes are growing, in population and disadvantage, but community services aren’t keeping pace with population growth ‘out there’. Why not? It’s the vacuum cleaner in the bathtub at Anglicare Family Services in Craigieburn that tells the story. There’s simply nowhere else to store it in the former three bedroom private rental property that’s the only space Anglicare Victoria has been able to find to lease in four years in an area that’s growing by the minute and crying out for support. Until a booking system was introduced a year or so ago, people looking for emergency relief began to pack out the small lounge room that now serves as reception and waiting area, forming a queue some days to the end of the driveway. More than 400 people were assisted by the program in the six months to December 2009, with demand growing. Even with bookings, it’s generally chaotic on emergency relief days, with four Family Services caseworkers, volunteers and up to 20 clients and children competing for space and a quiet word in an area meant for a small family. “It’s very hectic, very difficult for clients, and makes an already stressful job more stressful,” says Family Services Practitioner Antoinette Veljanoski. It’s a story that the community sector knows well. But usually it’s about lack of staffing or funding. In Craigieburn, as in so many other of the ‘urban fringes’ areas, it’s about infrastructure – where the population has doubled since 2001, but with no planned provision for community
services. It’s not even, says Anglicare Victoria Area Manager Lee-Anne Biggs, a question of whether community services can afford to lease suitable premises, there just aren’t any. In late 2008 an alliance of 13 community service organisations (CSOs) and the Hume City Council was set up to seek funding to develop ‘service villages’ in Broadmeadows and Craigieburn. Funded by the Department of Human Services (DHS), Ernst and Young came up with a proposed model to house CSOs, a TAFE building, and residential apartments, plus retail outlets and professional offices to help subsidise the rent. However, Lee-Anne says, work slipped in the wake of the Victorian bushfires and the global financial crisis. Talks continued recently with the State Government but also brought few outcomes: “We were informed that DHS don’t fund infrastructure and the Department of Health will only fund infrastructure for health but not for community services and that much will depend on the planning that Northern Health engage in.” “If community health centres need to be developed or built, that seems to be accepted as government responsibility,” she says. “If community services are needed, it’s seen as the organisation’s responsibility to source the premises.”
019.
CITIES IN CRISIS ?
AUTHOR MARIE MCINERNEY
INSIGHT I
COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF INVESTMENT IN GROWTH AREAS SUMMARY OF KEY FINDINGS
·· Growth areas on the fringes of Australian cities are significantly disadvantaged in regard to access to jobs and services. ·· This situation will worsen without significant public funding in structure and infrastructure. ·· The benefit of investment ( half closing the gap between fringe growth areas and average metropolitan areas ) in jobs, transport and community services nationally outweighs the cost. ·· The benefits continue well after the investment has been made.
PRESENT VALUE OF REQUIRED INVESTMENT
NATIONAL
VICTORIA
$50 billion
$14.12 billion
$78 billion
$23.4 billion
1.56
1.66
$18 billion
$5.8 billion
230,000
73,542
( $ MILLION ) 2009-2031 PRESENT VALUE OF BENEFIT
( $ MILLION ) 2009-2031 BENEFIT-COST RATIO 2009-2031 GDP IMPACT ( $ MILLION ) PER ANNUM TO 2054 JOBS CREATED PER ANNUM TO 2054
Prepared by SGS Economics and Planning for the National Growth Areas Alliance (2009)
‘SILO’ MENTALITY Of course none of this is news. Lack of community services is one of the biggest issues flagged in report after report on the problems of growth in Melbourne. So why is there still no sign of a systemic approach to filling the gaps that community service groups say are leaving vulnerable individuals and families at risk?
PHOTO REUTERS Mick Tsikas
“It’s to do with a lack of integrated service planning within government – the ‘silos’ continue to plan population growth without enough reference to transport, health or education planning,” says VCOSS CEO Cath Smith. Anecdotal reports also point to the regional structure of State Government agencies – that is, so long as a certain number of services are available in the massive ‘northwest’ region of the city, there isn’t a clear case for more services in one particular area. The exception, Cath says, is the Growth Area Authority, the independent statutory body charged with developing communities in growth areas that are “socially, environmentally and economically sustainable”. But she notes that integrating infrastructure planning with that of social services is still a vexed question. Ruth Spielman from the National Growth Areas Alliance (NGAA) – which represents 25 of Australia’s fastest growing municipalities, including Casey, Cardinia, Wyndham, Hume, Whittlesea and the Shire of Melton – says physical infrastructure, roads and rail, for example, “is hard enough to achieve.
But it seems easier for governments to think about those than services, partly because the services involve recurrent funding not one-off capital.” The NGAA recently commissioned a cost benefit analysis of investment in growth areas ( see box ), which shows every $1 spent in Victorian fringe areas would generate $1.66 value in return. At a strategic level, there are positive signs in Canberra – the
“It’s not even a question of whether community services can afford to lease suitable premises, there just aren’t any.” creation of the Major Cities Unit, a new population strategy with its own Minister. “The conversation has begun, but it’s early days yet,” Ruth says. Meanwhile at the local level, so-called Interface Councils are trying to identify human service gaps and what they can do, but many are only now moving to the point where they can afford to employ social planners. It may also have taken community services organisations longer to get out into regions like Craigieburn because models for good practices and innovative services are often very citycentric, in areas of traditional disadvantage.
In the growth areas, there aren’t the same giveaway signs. Individuals and families may be under major financial stress, isolated, and underserved, but the housing is new and the streets wide, not run-down slums pointing to trouble. “You can drive through and not actually see the need,” says Karren Walker from St Vincent de Paul. St Vinnies is funding family and housing services in the outer areas of Hume and Moreland, but they’re ‘outreach’ services from their Glenroy base because the latter is served by a bus hub and train line. “Had there been a way for clients to get there, we would have set up in Roxburgh Park, but there’s not the public transport.” Loose service alliances are forming, but tend to be driven by connections between individual workers and teams. While relationships between agencies have improved, competitive tendering still leaves some distrust. Projects thus tend to be smaller and localised, which makes it difficult to collect data to press the case for further funding. One solution is of course to build geographical provisions into funding submissions to help or ‘force’ services out to the fringe areas. But that then goes back to the issue of where they can be located. “There’s no room for growth in terms of how you position yourself for future funding and submissions,” Lee-Anne says. “If you haven’t got a building where you can deliver from, it can make it difficult to apply to deliver additional services.” ●
020.
CITIES IN CRISIS ?
AUTHOR DR MARCUS SPILLER
INSIGHT I
WE’RE PLANNING TO PUT MORE THAN 700,000 PEOPLE IN AREAS OF MELBOURNE THAT ARE “WELL AND TRULY REMOTE FROM THE LOCATIONS OF HIGH PRODUCTIVITY AND HUMAN CAPITAL ACCUMULATION”, WRITES DR MARCUS SPILLER, WHO SAYS GOVERNMENTS ARE GOING TO HAVE TO MAKE SOME RADICAL CHANGES TO CITY PLANNING OR FACE BIG SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS.
021.
CITIES IN CRISIS ?
AUTHOR DR MARCUS SPILLER
“PEOPLE OFTEN WONDER WHY SOME BEACHSIDE LOCATIONS IN MELBOURNE HAVEN’T ‘TAKEN OFF’. FOR EXAMPLE, FRANKSTON. THE ANSWER IS SIMPLE: POOR ACCESS TO JOBS!” Melbourne might not need a Boris Johnson or a Michael Bloomberg, like the cities of London and New York have, but it desperately needs a Greater Melbourne Authority to take planning decisions away from local and State governments so we can really tackle the big issues that are making our city more and more unworkable and unfair.
ACCESS TO JOBS
That might seem a big enough ask but that’s not all. As well as wanting the State Government to relinquish some of its control over planning across Melbourne, we also need it to introduce bold new policies such as road pricing – like London’s famous congestion charge – and extend ‘value capture’ policies, so that more of the uplift in property values caused by public investment and planning regulation can be returned to the community for reinvestment in vital infrastructure.
SGS show a very clear link between median house prices in an area and the total number of jobs accessible from that location within 30 minutes drive in the morning peak. In Melbourne’s east, house prices rose by $0.43 for each additional job brought within the range. In the west, they rise $0.80 for each job within range. This is not just willingness to pay for access to employment. One person’s job is another’s service. So access to jobs is actually a good indicator of access to all of life’s opportunities – educational, recreational, health and well-being, and retailing as well as employment. People often wonder why some beachside locations in Melbourne haven’t ‘taken off’, for example, Frankston. The answer is simple, poor access to jobs!
It’s almost impossible to imagine State Governments opting easily for such measures. But that’s where leadership from Canberra is essential. As it did with National Competition Policy, the Federal Government needs to share the dividend from more competitive and sustainable cities with the States, to induce them to take on the necessary hard reforms. Statistical analyses by SGS Economics & Planning Pty Ltd ( SGS ) estimate that making the State Government’s Melbourne@5 million vision a reality, which could only come through the steps outlined above, would boost Victoria’s gross domestic product ( GDP ) by at least three per cent. Importantly, two thirds of the additional tax revenues would flow to the Commonwealth – quite an incentive to act. What’s driving the need to take these steps is a radical change in access to jobs in Melbourne ( and no doubt in Sydney ), which is producing dramatic inequalities between the people in our communities and being exacerbated by current planning models and processes.
Ordinary Melbourne households don’t need New Growth Theorists to tell them they’ll do better to live in ‘strategic’ or well connected suburbs, because they know instinctively that living in areas like Richmond and South Yarra will lift their learning capacity and ultimately their income earning potential and life prospects generally.
There is further evidence of the nexus between connectivity, human capital development and productivity. For example, 2006 Census data shows that unskilled workers residing in inner urban Stonnington start off in much the same pay band as their counterparts in middle suburban Moorabbin but will end their careers earning more than twice as much. Thus, the more opportunities households can reach within a reasonable travel time, the more they learn and acquire skills and the more productive they become. Little wonder then, that the map of relative accessibility across Melbourne is more or less a proxy for land values. Figure 1 rates neighbourhoods in Melbourne according to jobs accessible within 30 minutes in the morning peak. The influence of the radial principal road network is clear, as is the extensive postwar program of freeway building across the east.
INSIGHT I
022.
CITIES IN CRISIS ?
AUTHOR DR MARCUS SPILLER
INSIGHT I
“CENSUS DATA SHOWS THAT UNSKILLED WORKERS LIVING IN STONNINGTON START OFF IN MUCH THE SAME PAY BAND IN MOORABBIN BUT END UP EARNING MORE THAN TWICE AS MUCH.” SOCIAL EXCLUSION
WHAT WAY AHEAD?
Accessibility and connectivity don’t just build human capital, they also build business productivity. SGS estimates that if you double effective density – that is, weighted average travel time from one point to all others in the metropolitan geography– you get a seven per cent boost in productivity on average, and more in those sectors where time is more valuable, for example finance.
In the past, the answer to these issues was simple – build more freeways. This undoubtedly boosted post-war productivity but we are now at the limits of car access. The city is seriously congested and it’s prohibitively expensive to insert more road capacity.
Bearing in mind where effective density is strongest ( it broadly reflects the access to jobs ) and where businesses can optimise their access to skilled workers, the strategic locations in Melbourne become very evident. But the vulnerability of the metropolis to social exclusion and prospective depletion of human capital potential is also shown in high relief. If centripedal forces are allowed to play out without policy intervention, we will have continuing focus of investment in the central city and a corridor stretching down the Monash Freeway as far as Mulgrave. However, we are planning to put more than 700,000 people, who are growing up in or moving to the city over the next 20 years, in areas that are well and truly remote from the locations of high productivity and human capital accumulation ( areas circled in Figure 1 ). This is a new phenomenon. In the early post war period, with a smaller city, suburban communities did not face the same accessibility divide. Moreover, we did not have the pattern of concentration of quality jobs in the central city. These days all of the growth areas have much longer travel times to work than the metro average. In Cardinia, for example, 62 per cent of workers travel 30 minutes or more ( compared to an average of 38 per cent across Melbourne ). For them, the treasure trove of opportunity in central Melbourne may as well be located in another city altogether ( Figure 2 ). This not only threatens to limit their own personal development, but can hurt the economy as much as it does the goal of social inclusion.
We need an urban structure which maximises connectivity but cuts down on cars. This points to the need for a polycentric urban structure, as shown in Figure 3. The State Government’s Melbourne@5 million plan does a good job of crystallising this vision. The real question, though, is do we have the where-with-all to deliver the plan? As things stand, local government is being asked to represent regional interests in its local decision making. Despite all the rhetoric, this is unrealistic and unworkable. But having State Government routinely march in to over-ride or make decisions only politicises the planning process and makes it vulnerable to short term electoral cycles. Like most successful cities around the world, such as London, Vancouver and New York, Melbourne needs a metropolitan government with a democratic mandate to look after sites and infrastructure programs of genuine city-wide significance. These include Dandenong, Broadmeadows, Footscray and other Central Activity Districts ( CAD ) nominated in Melbourne@5 million; public transport management and investment; major roads investment; metropolitan parks; and the principal employment hubs in the metropolis ( CBD, airport etc ). To do this would take some hard political decisions – not least a State Government prepared to give these powers away while bringing in other unpopular measures like road pricing and value capture policies. Which is where Canberra comes in. Dr Marcus Spiller is Director, SGS Economics & Planning Pty Ltd. Terry Rawnsley and Julian Szafraniec in SGS’s Melbourne Office generated the numbers and maps cited in this article. ●
VCOSS’s quarterly journal, Insight, is distributed to more than 460 community service organisations in Victoria as part of their membership benefits. Call the VCOSS office on 03 9654 5050 for membership information or email lisa.williams@vcoss.org.au Insight is also available to other individuals, organisations and institutions by subscription. Rates (including GST) for 4 editions:
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024.
CITIES IN CRISIS ?
AUTHOR MARIE MCINERNEY
BACKYARD BLUES It may be unfair, but they’re known as NIMBY’s ( Not In My Backyard ) and they look set to be joined by NOTES ( Not Over There Either ). Whatever they’re tagged, the community housing sector is looking at new ways to engage with people who object to social housing, to ensure their fears don’t drive the costs of affordable housing through the roof. It’s become a standard reaction in some communities: the more gentrification increases, the more opposition there is to social housing. What’s more worrying is the risk that eventually this erodes general community support for community housing. Certainly we’ve seen instances of vocal opposition over the past year, in the wake of the Federal Government’s Nation Building Economic Stimulus Plan that is providing the funding for the construction of 5,000 new social housing units in Victoria. The money comes with a deadline, so with nearly 1900 contested planning applications worth $41.3 billion before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal ( VCAT ) at the time, the State Government acted to fast-track developments under the stimulus funding. “We still might be in the planning process of a number of projects we’re building if the Government hadn’t acted,” says John McInerney, managing director at Common Equity Housing. “But it created a lot of angst and whipped up more opposition than we expected,” he says, adding that
INSIGHT I
some opposition has been “harvested” by councils in protest at being cut out of the planning process. It didn’t help, he said, that the State Government managed much of the public comment around particular controversies. “The Department ( of Human Services ) was telling us not to talk to the media, to refer calls to them. I think it was the wrong strategy. It looked like they were the developers and, because of stereotypes around public housing, they don’t have a good ‘brand’.” Before the stimulus program was begun, the City of Port Phillip commissioned the Community Engagement in Community Housing study from consultant Mandy Press ( see breakout ) – believed to be the first of its kind and scope in Australia. Research partners included the Housing and Local Government Network ( HALGN ), Municipal Association of Victoria ( MAV ), Community Housing Federation of Victoria ( CHFV ) and Victorian Local Governance Association (VLGA). It was, says Gary Spivak – housing development officer at the City of Port Phillip – looking for “common lessons and practical strategies to reduce adversarialism in the process and make consultation more successful”. From examining overseas evidence and greater Melbourne case studies, the study found that most objections to community housing were around the ‘type’ of tenants, the density and design of a project, and mistrust about the process. There were important differences in perceptions of what consultation meant – to the objectors it meant ‘the right to veto’ projects they didn’t like, rather than to be open to consultation and negotiation. The report also detected a life cycle of opposition, which began stridently but, in fact, mostly died away over time. In one case, the 42 unit John Cribbes House in East St Kilda, 61 per cent of local residents / neighbours had concerns at planning application stage; seven months after completion, 88 per cent had no concerns or no comments. The report urges a fair, transparent and inclusive process to address concerns, but it also notes that prospective community housing tenants are rarely included in consultations. Wider community interests, such as the need for diverse communities, also have to be weighed. “This is important,” it says, “because the kind of vocal opposition experienced during most of the case studies…
COMMUNITY HOUSING IS ALIVE AND WELL AND COMING TO A PLACE NEAR YOU – OR IS IT?
From Community Engagement in Community Housing by Mandy Press for the City of Port Phillip, July 2009. The study looked at international examples and nine case studies across Melbourne. seriously threatens the legitimacy of local government, deters councillors from acting in the broader community interest and can undermine a broader social justice agenda about maintaining diversity and promoting social inclusion.” Gary Spivak believes it would be valuable for further research now to gather empirical Australian evidence on whether well designed and well managed community housing has any impact on property values ( there’s no evidence of that to date ) and to build a body of ‘post occupancy’ evidence on how people feel about project proposals compared with their views after projects are completed. It’s also recognised as important to give tenants more of a public ‘face’ and voice. “We need to be telling people: ‘these are your aunts and uncles, this will be about your sons and daughters,” says Jacqui Watt, the new chief executive officer of the CHFV. “We need to ask questions like what happens when people like aged care workers can’t afford to live in the communities that need them.” Local government areas that aren’t yet committed to community housing are other important areas of focus, says Jan Berriman, former chief operating officer with Housing Choices Australia, now working as a consultant. “In the outer suburbs, if you don’t have a supportive Council, you wouldn’t even bother to go out there ( with a proposal ) – to the detriment of their own communities,” she says. It also doesn’t take much to blow out budgets. Jan Berriman points to past instances where delays caused by the objection process can increase costs to the public purse of between 10 and 25 per cent. To counter that, she says, community housing agencies need to push the point to councils that local economies will be weakened if they don’t have affordable housing. “They won’t have workers, they won’t have families, there’ll be no kids going to the schools.” “I think people believe anyone on a low income must therefore be a drug addict. That’s not to say that people with drug issues aren’t good neighbours but we need to get out there and tell the public and local councils that Housing Associations in particular are good neighbours, that we ensure that tenants are managed well and that they sustain their tenancies, and assist and contribute to local economies,” she said. ●
Who objected. Opponents were primarily property owning ratepayers, well educated and capable of representing their case. Generally next door neighbours or lived in immediate vicinity. Why they objected. Concerns expressed were about a rise in crime, impact on public safety, and increase in drug trafficking. Neighbours were unable to acknowledge that those to be housed more often than not were already living in the area or at least had close ties. Also objections about impact on parking, loss of amenity (noise), and vehicle traffic, plus fears about reduction in property values. Affluence and upward mobility a significant factor. Life cycle of opposition. Typically four stages of opposition: initial reaction, where numbers objecting are large; getting organised and in for the long haul, where the numbers diminish, and the final post occupancy phase, where acceptance ( or indifference ) tends to be widespread. Key to the cycle was learning that objections about use of the facility and types of tenants would not be seen as reasonable or valid grounds for refusing an application. How best to consult. The rational, bureaucratic and regulatory features of the community engagement process usually can’t deal well with emotional concerns about ‘the neighbourhood’ and property values. Formal meetings with preset agendas frequently alienate objectors, and large public meetings can become adversarial. Good to have informal, open information sessions. Key approaches recommended. Make it clear that type of tenants and ‘use’ are not considered valid planning matters that are up for consultation; avoid NIMBY tags, be prepared to listen and, without jeopardising the integrity and feasibility of the project, take on board practical objector concerns in project design.
HER OWN WAY HOME.
027.
CITIES IN CRISIS ?
AUTHOR MARIE MCINERNEY
INSIGHT I
Cassandra Bawden had just completed her diploma in community development, been active in student politics, was working four days a week in disability, bringing up two kids and managing money well. She was all set for the career she’s now launched in community services. She never thought she was about to become homeless. “Things were going well,” she recalls. “I think I fell into this idea, like many of us do, that people who are homeless are a particular sort of person and that wasn’t the person I was.” But what shocked her almost as much was how long it took to get back into a home of her own – at the barriers in law, policy, service delivery, and, of course, the overwhelming shortage of housing and support services. It’s a journey that’s taken her from a women’s shelter in Melbourne’s outer suburbs to a media conference in the courtyard of Parliament House in Canberra, staring into the lenses of television cameras to make a personal appeal to the Prime Minister. “When I become homeless I assumed that I could go into a service and they’d be able to help me,” she says. “I thought all I’d have to deal with was getting us emotionally through it all. I just assumed Australia had enough support in place for anyone who needed it.” Articulate and intelligent, she ended up being part of the Australians for Ending Homelessness campaign in November 2008, launched by Council to Homeless Persons ( CHP ) and other state and national homelessness peaks, to advocate to the Rudd Government, ahead of the release of the much-awaited White Paper on Homelessness. The White Paper, since released, has set targets to halve homelessness and offer support to all rough sleepers who want it by 2020. Cassandra’s involvement in the campaign, and later in the Call This A Home? rooming house campaign in Victoria, came through the CHP Peer Education Support Program ( PESP ), which provides people who have experienced homelessness with training, skills and experience to participate in and inform homelessness policy and practice. The consumer volunteers at PESP advocate for systemic change, and provide consultation, training and media commentary on issues pertaining to homelessness. Being involved with PESP has meant the world to Cassandra – and, she thinks, changed it for her. “I think it got me out of homelessness in some ways. ( Till then ) I really felt worthless. I didn’t tell my best friend ( about being homeless ) until about two years after it happened. I dropped contact from everyone I knew, totally isolated myself.”
Cassandra, 36, became homeless six years ago when she fled her home, with her two children then aged 7 and almost 1, to escape family violence. Despite good family support and her personal resources, they didn’t move back into a home of their own for two years. “It took me a lot longer than I thought it would; it was harder than I would have expected,” she says. The system seemed to conspire against her from the beginning. She had fled with her children thinking the women’s shelter would provide a brief safe haven until her former partner was dealt with by the law. But she was informed she would lose custody of her children if she returned to the rented home they had once shared with him, because they may be at risk there.
“IT TOOK ME A LOT LONGER TO GET OUT OF HOMELESSNESS THAN I THOUGHT IT WOULD; IT WAS HARDER THAN I THOUGHT.” “Things have changed in family violence law since then, but I really felt almost as if I’d done something wrong because I was being punished for it,” she says. In the tumult that followed, she didn’t alert her former landlord of her circumstances, partly because she had been advised not to disclose her current location, and because she was dealing with injuries and the trauma of dislocation for herself and her children after leaving home with only the clothes they were wearing. This later led to a significant rental arrears debt and a long-term blacklisting from private rental. Getting wrong advice on eligibility later meant she also missed out on Segment One allocation on the public housing waiting list. The result was many months spent swinging between living with her mother and in crisis accommodation motels, relying on expensive, unhealthy takeaway food because there was no kitchen to cook in and often up to three public transport connections from her daughter’s school. Another gap was a six month delay in counselling
services for her daughter. “They said ‘we haven’t got resources for that, here’s a colouring-in book about DV ( domestic violence ), this should help her’.” Cassandra knows she and the kids were lucky to have the option to live at times with her mother, though it was not ideal. But she doesn’t see this as viable option for most women in her situation. “It’s not always possible to get family support. Not everyone has a good relationship with relatives and a lot of families are struggling to maintain themselves financially, let alone take in another family. My mother works, as well as caring for my adult sister who has a disability, so Mum’s got a lot to deal with anyway. It was really hard to add to that by moving in there with my children. It’s a big ask and I think you’ll end up, as a government, spending more on help for the original family, because stress levels go through the roof and impact on everyone’s health.” All up, it’s an experience that makes her passionate about consumer participation in community services and moving towards a more inclusive model of service delivery. “It can sometimes be very much tokenistic, the way consumer participation is practised. But a lot of the time that’s because services don’t have the resources, whether it’s time, money or staff. It’s also the fear of the unknown – ‘how on earth do we do it in a meaningful and respectful way’. It has to be well-planned, ideally a team of people who support each other, and a cultural shift within the organisation to understanding rights-based service delivery and the importance of consumer input.” Yes, she says, organisations that have worked with homelessness for years know well the issues involved, but consumer input gives an added dimension: “knowing what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the service as opposed to providing one.” “Every person’s experience is different, but to go through that initial shock and then the trauma and the effect homelessness has on you personally, on your community connections, your employment, your health, your family. In the sector we know about that theoretically, but it’s very different to knowing what it feels like. I think that’s the unique perspective.” ●
028.
CITIES IN CRISIS ?
AUTHOR JOHN LAWRENCE
INSIGHT I
In one street in my town in rural Victoria there are six houses vacant, ready for public housing. That should be great because we estimate the number of homeless to be 111 ( 28 per 10,000 ) 1, and this doesn’t include those families and individuals living in marginal housing in caravan parks who take the homeless rate here to 37 per 10,000 2. But no‑one wants to move into these houses because of their reputation, in fact we’re told some would rather not apply for public housing than be housed in ‘that’ street. Not just for the fear of neighbourhood violence, real or imagined, but because the address means stigma, and they worry they’ll be discriminated against when it comes to jobs or private rental if the name of streets like this one are at the top of their applications. The issue of social housing isn’t just for cities, it’s a problem across the State. In Gippsland, we find the sea change momentum is pushing up rents ( from $100 to $200 plus per week for a basic two‑bedroom unit ) and waiting lists for public housing have increased. Comparing our agency Supported Accommodation Assistance Program ( SAAP ) data over 12 months, we are seeing almost double the number of people who are homeless or at risk.
“Many of our regional towns and cities are booming. Thank goodness. But it’s not whinging to point out it can come at a cost.”
What makes us different to Melbourne and the larger regional cities is that we have no boarding houses, no youth refuges, no women’s shelters and no crisis houses to keep people living among their family and social supports. We have young people, families and individuals forced to ‘couch surf’, sleep rough in the open, in tents in local caravan parks – well as long as it’s not our service making the caravan park booking because it would likely be refused. Emergency accommodation is available, but it’s at least 70 kilometres to the youth refuges in Morwell or Bairnsdale. Add lack of a car and very limited public transport, and the outcome for individuals and families can be lonely, overwhelming and, at times, desperate. Families complying by public housing rules often have to take the first offer and move to neighbouring towns or further afield – that may only be 30 kilometres but, with limited public transport and / or school buses available, children often have to change schools and lose friends. It makes it tough too when we have to advise them to move, to lose the case management relationship that might be keeping them mentally and physically stable. Many of our regional towns and cities are booming. Thank goodness. But it’s not whinging to point out it can come at a cost. At the very least, it creates challenges for future service planning. Ignore the rights or wrongs of government water policy – the new desalination workforce for the Wonthaggi area has tripled local rents. Same in Sale with the RAAF base and oil rigs. Our workers are at their wits’ end, with so many crisis cases that they cannot positively engage with individuals and families with complex needs. At the end of the day, it’s not just about housing, or school buses, or mental health services. It’s about all being in this together – planners and government and community services and business. Seeing the costs of boom times and realising we can’t afford them. Working out that all our streets have to be liveable. John Lawrence is CEO of Kilmany Uniting Care in Gippsland. ● 1 Chamberlain & MacKenzie, 2009 2 Ibid
029.
INSIGHT I
SARAH DAVIES CEO Melbourne Community Foundation PM for the day – your first three decisions? ·· Fully fund The Road Home – the White Paper on homelessness. ·· Restore tax breaks for business to support innovation and R&D. ·· Introduce an emissions trading scheme targeting a minimum 20 per cent cut by 2020. Top priorities for Melbourne as a city? ·· Fix public transport. ·· Eliminate youth homelessness. ·· Nurture and celebrate our multicultural community.
What was your dream job as a child?
Best training?
To travel the country ( in a Romany gypsy caravan ) building homes for children who didn’t have them ( did not occur to me that I’d actually need to earn some money! ).
A consulting skills course I did in the US with the Hay Group in the late 1980s – taught me how to listen, facilitate and the importance of really understanding your client or customer.
What got you into the community services sector?
Top three sector challenges?
My early life experiences made me realise that where you are born and who you are born to have such an influence on your life opportunities – which never seemed fair to me. My father taught me that we all have the responsibility and opportunity to help create the kind of community we want to live in. Best ( life or work ) decision? Marrying my husband and having a family together. Biggest ( life or work ) mistake? Dropping science in school when I was 15 because I did not like the teacher, without realising how much I was limiting my future study / career options Hardest ( life or work ) lesson to learn? Deciding what to persist with and fight for, and what to let slip to the keeper (even if only temporarily!!) See, I still struggle with that one… Motto?
·· What we need to do – finding workable, sustainable solutions to increasingly complex and inter-related social and community issues and needs. ·· How we are going to resource it – talent, people, money, time. ·· Continuing to demonstrate and evidence the critical role and contribution made by the sector in order to increase broad community understanding and support. Inspiration? All the amazing people who commit themselves and their resources, professionally or voluntarily, to making our communities more just, equitable and simply a better place to be for everyone. And it’s not just about the big things – it’s also about the everyday. What makes a great weekend? Sunshine, family, friends, dancing, laughter, at least one decent liein and a good movie or book. Three pieces of music for a desert island?
As per Gandhi : “... be the change you want to see...”
·· Hey Jude, The Beatles ( full length version ) – great for a sing-along, and no-one to scare off with my voice.
Best advice?
·· Nutbush City Limits, Tina Turner – for dancing.
From my father, to help with work / life balance and keeping a sense of perspective: always keep an innercore within you protected from what is going on outside and around you.
·· Bach’s Air on the G String ( for guitar )–for calm and comfort.
Worst job? When I worked as a lifeguard, having to remove certain brown, floating objects that should not have been in the pool!
Books by your bed? ·· Last three issues of The Economist. ·· Latest issue of Who Magazine. ·· Linda Fairstein – Hell Gate. ·· Muhammad Yunus – Banker to the Poor. ·· Muhammad Yunus – Creating a World Without Poverty. ·· ( The rest are on the floor as they don’t fit on my bedside table ). Something people at work don’t know about you? I once found a dead body in the boot of a car at Heathrow Airport. ●
IN A TIGHT MARKET, THE HOUSEHOLDS WITH LITTLE OR NO CHOICE – A BAD RENTAL RECORD, YOUNG KIDS, OR A NON-ENGLISH SPEAKING BACKGROUND – WILL END UP IN THE DODGY HOME.
031.
CAMPAIGNS
AUTHORS SARAH TOOHEY & JESS FRITZE
INSIGHT I
DECENTNOT Rents in Victoria have never been so high. It’s boom-time for landlords, so why are one in ten rental households not fit to live in? “Smells like death” was the feedback on the survey form for the rental property judged the ‘worst of the worst’ in VCOSS’s investigation of rental properties across Melbourne and Geelong in March this year. The property in Coburg, a tiny studio at the back of another house, had no proper cooking facilities, rotting floorboards, windows that didn’t open, and doors that couldn’t be locked securely. It was available at $180 a week and – cliché aside – you wouldn’t want your dog to live there. But it was perfectly legal for the landlord to offer it for rent. Make no mistake, VCOSS’s ‘Secret Shopper’ teams saw plenty of good quality rental properties in its survey of more than 116 houses, flats or units across 54 suburbs. The majority either met basic housing standards, or would do so with the installation of one or two basic and inexpensive items such as a low flow showerhead or an electrical safety switch. But more than 10 per cent lacked two or more of the very basics, like heating, or were in serious disrepair. This is of real concern as it demonstrates the failure of the private rental market to ensure that people are able to access adequate housing that is safe, secure and affordable to live in. These findings support VCOSS’s Decent not Dodgy campaign to reform the Residential Tenancies Act to introduce minimum standards for rental properties in Victoria. The campaign has so far attracted nearly 2,000 fans or followers to its Facebook page and has prompted much interest from other States 1. Victoria’s rental market, like the rest of Australia, is made up generally of mum and dad investors who, mostly, own one or two properties and have lots of electoral clout. The majority provide properties which are up to standard, but some don’t. No-one of course, not the government or the real estate lobby, condones the so-called slumlords. In positive news, in response to the launch of the
1 Only 23 per cent of Facebook fan pages have more than 1000 members according to http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/28/ facebook-fan-pages-77-percent/
Decent not Dodgy campaign on April 8 this year, a spokesperson commented to The Age that the State Government was “committed to reviewing laws for rental accommodation standards” 2. But it remains a common belief that the market is the ultimate ‘sorting hat’, and that consumers will ‘shop around’ and refuse properties that aren’t up to standard. In reality, low income renters have extremely limited choice in the current tight rental market, with vacancy rates of 1.4 per cent and multiple applicants for even poor quality properties. The Decent not Dodgy survey, for example, found two similar properties on offer for rental in the same street of the same suburb. One was marked as being in “atrocious” condition, the other good quality. The atrocious property was being offered for rent at $5 a week more than the good one. Obviously those renters who have a choice will turn the bad one down and take the good one. But in a tight market, the households with little or no choice, for example those who have a bad rental record, or a couple of young kids, or perhaps from a non-English speaking background, will end up in the dodgy one. Certainly one real estate agent in Fawkner made this clear to one of our Secret Shoppers, who asked if there’d been much interest in a three bedroom house. “Only from people like them,” he said pointing to a group of young Indian men who were walking out the gate. “But my client’s made it clear he won’t be letting it to any of them.” Rental standards do apply in various other countries. The UK Decent Homes Standard was introduced in 2000 to ensure all social housing was “warm, weatherproof and ( has ) reasonably modern facilities”. It later covered private rental stock for vulnerable households, with financial assistance for landlords to meet standards. In the U.S, the Superior Court of California has found that all rental leases come with an “implied warranty of habitability”, covering conditions such as weatherproofing, plumbing, and electrical and structural safety. Where landlords ignore requests for specified repairs, the tenant
2 [3] ‘Slum shock as VCOSS lifts the rental lid’, Dewi Cooke, The Age. April 4, 2010
DODGY NOT DECENT Results collected by teams of volunteers from VCOSS and the Tenants Union of Victoria inspecting rental properties open for inspection between March 13 – 27, 2010. Of the properties surveyed: ·· 14 per cent had two or more of the following: no heating, visible lack of weatherproofing, extensive mould, unsafe ( no electrical safety switch or deadlocks ); ·· 39 per cent had no or only some deadlocks on external doors; ·· 33 per cent had no safety switch; ·· 11 per cent had a visible lack of weatherproofing; ·· 20 per cent had visible and extensive mould ( bathroom only ) ; and ·· 19 per cent were not connected to gas.
can have them done and deduct the cost from the rent or, if the conditions are a serious threat to health and safety, withhold rent. In South Australia the Housing Improvement Act 1940 was introduced to improve housing conditions and “regulate the rentals of substandard dwelling houses”. This act sets out areas under which regulations can be made and the accompanying regulations further define what is a suitable minimum standard for housing. In Victoria, landlords are required under the Residential Tenancies Act 1997 to provide a clean dwelling at the start of the tenancy and to maintain the premises in good repair. Good repair is not further defined but, by the standard of properties VCOSS and its members have seen, it sets a pretty low bar. To follow the Decent Not Dodgy campaign, visit www.facebook.com/decentnotdodgy Sarah Toohey and Jess Fritze are policy analysts at the Victorian Council of Social Service (VCOSS). ●
HOW IT SAVVY IS THE COMMUNITY SECTOR & HOW CAN FURTHER INVESTMENT IMPROVE WORK AND LIFE FOR STAFF AND CLIENTS? THE DOING IT BETTER PROJECT WAS THE FIRST MAJOR ANALYSIS OF THE SECTOR’S INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY NEEDS FOR MANY YEARS & IT PRODUCED SOME GREAT RESULTS AND IMPORTANT FINDINGS. DEAN LOMBARD EXPLAINS.
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VCOSS@LARGE
KEY RECOMMENDATIONS 1. The creation of a Centre of Information and Communications Technology ( ICT ) Excellence in Community Services that will : ·· Develop an IT strategic plan for the sector. ·· Deliver expert advice to community sector organisations ( CSOs ) on ‘big picture’ IT issues as well as knowledge management, change management, information systems and so on. ·· Deliver subsidised IT services to CSOs that need it. ·· Facilitate access to education and training. ·· Advocate for the sector on IT issues. 2. Adequate allowance for IT maintenance and development costs in funding agreements. 3. Development of tools to measure the impact of IT investment on service delivery. 4. Support for further partnerships between the CSO sector and government, universities, and the private sector. What was it about? Doing IT Better was a three year project to build information and communications technology ( ICT ) capacity in the Victorian community services sector. The aim was to figure out what was holding community service organisations ( CSOs ) back from using IT effectively, and how best to improve. It was initiated by Dr Larry Stillman from Monash University, with VCOSS as the natural community sector partner. Together we built on the original vision, leaving Monash primarily responsible for the research ( case study ) work, and giving VCOSS responsibility to share information and resources and advocate on systemic issues. What were the big issues? A major concern was the amount of time, money and productivity wasted by CSOs in making the wrong decisions – or none at all – on IT investment. In some organisations, workers regularly squandered hours wrestling with archaic filing systems. Others were spending a relative fortune trying to upgrade obsolete equipment, or – conversely – buying expensive over-powered hardware that they didn’t need. Inefficient investment or administrative practices like these are especially worrying in a sector where resources are tight and precious. Another pressing concern was the lack of data and information security. Many CSOs have inadequate backup regimes creating a real risk to their most important assets – client files, policy documents, and so on. Many have poorly protected IT systems, with basic or no passwords, unsecured wireless networks, and so on.
AUTHOR DEAN LOMBARD
What did the program deliver? There have been some exciting outcomes already. The State Government has been working to make it easier for CSOs to report against multiple quality standards: this was a direct response to our findings on data interoperabiltiy. The Government is also set to do a significant ICT capacity-building project using a framework that draws heavily from our work. Our case studies have delivered great benefits to the organisations involved, with new, more capable and efficient systems in place and, for a number, new funding for software and infrastructure. They have also benefited the sector more broadly by demonstrating how a modest but well-targeted application of expertise can yield many times its value. The seminar series was enormously successful. Nearly 500 people from 200 CSOs participated, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Many felt able to start important projects or processes ( such as IT planning or developing a requirements’specification for a major software purchase ) as a direct result. We had so many requests for sessions to be repeated or issued as video podcasts that we are planning a new program. Underlying all this has been the development of what in academic-speak is called a ‘community of practice’. A group of IT-savvy and innovation-focused people already in the sector emerged during the project. This is the kind of group that provides and supports “thought-leaders” for the sector, and is one of the most important things needed to drive the changes required. It’s interesting to note that almost all the seminar presenters – experts in their fields – were people already working in the sector. What are the easiest things to fix? The great news is that a lot of what needs to happen is pretty straightforward. The biggest problem is simply lack of expertise and awareness: low levels of IT expertise, lack of understanding about how IT tools can help efficiency, and insufficient knowledge of information management and data security. Where’s the logjam? It’s mostly resources. Most CSOs run on the smell of an oily rag. They often don’t have enough operational staff to properly support service delivery, and they tend to underspend on IT. What they do spend is often disproportionately used on hardware and software rather than people and planning. I walked into one small agency to find boxes and boxes of new technology. No-one really knew what it was, let alone how to set it up and get value from it. Staff workloads are another obstacle. It will be hard to address the expertise and awareness issue if people don’t have time for professional development. Third is organisational culture and resistance to change. The community sector can be pretty techno-phobic. Some boards puts a low
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priority on IT spending because they see it as a luxury. Some managers resist changing old ways of doing things because “it works just fine”, even if it’s not. For example, when reporting must be electronic, reliance on paper-based information systems is a massive procedural inefficiency. Lack of investment in identifying and addressing the problems is not helping either. We were able to do all this thanks to an anonymous benefactor, with some rescources from the State Government. That was great, but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the actual spend on funding CSOs to deliver services. More resources to help the sector cross the digital divide are desperately needed. What can CSOs do themselves? Become informed! Find out what other CSOs are doing, as well as how communication and information is changing in wider society. Look critically at the way you do things, and think about it in terms of what you are trying to achieve rather than what tasks need to be done. It is really important for CSOs to take IT seriously, as seriously as their systems for finance, payroll, filing and auditing. We saw too many examples where spending on IT was such a low priority that it was only done when there was ‘spare’ money. Often what followed was an IT meltdown, and then investment became both urgent and frightfully expensive. CSOs could also be more strident about their needs. The sector is chronically underfunded, but CSOs have this incredible ability to make silk purses out of sows’ ears – fantastic for the vulnerable people they support, but not so good for their own sustainability or staff. The sector needs to stand up as a group and insist that funding agreements make proper allowance for maintaining and growing IT infrastructure and associated services. What needs to happen strategically? Fortunately there’s a growing group of IT-savvy CSO workers who are leading change and development in the sector; and the Victorian Government is taking the issue seriously – funding a good project to improve quality compliance last year and allocating $2 million in this year’s State Budget to community sector capacity-building, with a particular focus on IT. We believe these are due, in part at least, to the outcomes of Doing IT Better, and ongoing work from organisations like the Infoxchange, PILCH, and Field – all proving the value of working collaboratively and cross-sector. Our project recommendations, based on the research and practical work of the project, form a pretty comprehensive strategy for the near term. Dean Lombard is IT Projects Coordinator at VCOSS ●
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ANGELA SAVAGE EXECUTIVE OFFICER Association of Neighbourhood Houses & Learning Centres
“A fox ‘one of the only wild creatures in the world that can successfully make a life for itself in cities.’”
At work I’m reading handouts from a Conscious Governance ‘Masterclass in Strategic Leadership and Innovation’ I recently attended. The workshop explored how to create a culture of leadership and strategic awareness, and the handouts provide practical tools I can use to support the governance board at ANHLC, including visioning exercises, recruitment plans, assets maps and guides for strategic decision-making. I liked the workshop’s definition of governance as ‘nothing more than the choices we make to create the future for the communities we serve.’ I read The Big Issue every fortnight for a dose of popular culture, current affairs and laughs. Buying The Big Issue has the added bonus of helping people experiencing homelessness and other disadvantage to help themselves, plus it’s the perfect size for reading on crowded trams and trains. At home I’m reading The Tango Collection, edited by Melbourne publisher, writer and comic artist Bernard Caleo. Bernard launched his romance comic anthology Tango in 1997, releasing Tango 9: Love and War in 2009. The Tango Collection brings together highlights from the first eight editions, on themes including Love and Sedition, Love and Sex and Love and Food. With contributions from comic artists both experienced and aspiring, The Tango Collection is a celebration of diversity, together with the joy, pain and pleasure of love in all its forms. I’m reading Nobody Owns the Moon by award-winning Australian writer and illustrator Tohby Riddle to my four-yearold. It describes the life of Clive Prendergast, a fox – ‘one of the only wild creatures in the world that can successfully make a life for itself in cities’ – and his friendship with Humphrey the donkey. Humphrey is doing it tough and often has no fixed address. But fate delivers tickets to a theatrical opening to the two friends, and Humphrey’s life is transformed for a day. Riddle says the story is dear to him for its ‘idea of inner wealth, a kind of resilience of spirit’. If only we could deliver all our ideas with such subtlety – and exquisite illustrations. ●
www.consciousgovernance.com www.CoreStrategies4Nonprofits.com www.tohby.com/HomelinkNOTMNotes.html www.cardigancomics.com www.bigissue.org.au
NOT THE BACK PAGE.
QUOTES OF THE QUARTER
“Of course, community services organisations are not asylums… ” From the VCOSS / Monash Doing IT Better project report, May 2010.
“We can’t have a plan, because then we could be held accountable.” Senior Victorian bureaucrat responding to question as to why there was not an implementation plan against the new strategy.
“I’m stressed because I’ve got a massage in an hour.” Colleague to another at an inner suburban NGO.
30 years of Yes Minister
SIR HUMPHREY If you want to
be really sure that the minister doesn’t accept it you must say the decision is courageous. BERNARD And that’s worse than controversial? SIR HUMPHREY Controversial
only means this will lose you votes, courageous means this will lose you the election. From Terry Lane’s “Happy Birthday, Minister”, Inside Story, 2010.
PASSING THROUGH We know that…cities have to be places where people work to be economically viable, where people learn, where people recreate, and very importantly where people can live. And it is critical that we understand that every great city, great metropolitan area, needs a mix of housing types. We find immense dysfunctions when the balance of jobs and housing is out of kilter. Immense dysfunctions when we forget that a job needs a place to live. In the United States we have instances where the middle band of housing, workforce housing for middle class people is simply not available. American Cities : A 21st Century Urban Agenda – Henry Cisneros. Grattan Institute forum. Transcript available at www.grattan.edu.au ONE THAT GOT AWAY Former Bogota Mayor Antanas Mockus, who just lost the first round Colombian presidential vote, declared Nights for Women to make the capital’s streets safer. About 700,000 women went out, flocking to free, open-air concerts and flooding bars that offered women-only drink specials. Men who couldn’t bear to stay indoors during the six-hour restriction were asked to carry ‘safe conduct’ passes. When women saw a man staying at home, carrying a baby, or taking care of children, they stopped and applauded. In another initiative, Mockus also used more than 400 mimes to improve both traffic and citizens’ behavior. A pedestrian running across the road would be tracked by a mime who mocked his every move. Reckless drivers got the same treatment. “Knowledge empowers people,” Mockus told the Harvard Journal. “If people know the rules, and are sensitized by art, humor, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change.”
LIVING SPACE British author and activist Ted Dewan sees the encroachment of cars into our lives and streets as bordering on apartheid. He’s hit back over the years, with what he calls “a family-style form of civil disobedience”. Known as his Roadwitch campaign, he’s slowed down the traffic in local streets with everything from a community clothesline, fake zebra crossing with ‘corpses’ slowing traffic, a three metre Megabunny and, his most famous, the Living Room. Photo Ted Dewan JUST THINKING “We need to punish the ones we’re afraid of and treat the ones we’re just mad at.” Hon Peggy Fulton Hora, Judge of the Superior Court (Ret.) California, and Adelaide Thinker in Residence. Public Lecture. April 2010. It Pays to Deliver Smart Justice. Hawke Institute. Available at www.unisa.edu.au/hawkecentre/events/2010