http://www.2ue.com.au/blogs/2ue-blog/albanese-defends-public-housing/20140401-35v3v.html
Lessons for Millers Point from Anthony Albanese's Mother
Like many residents of Millers Point, I was raised in a public housing property where I was born in 1963. My first community-based political campaign in the late 1970s, was fighting Sydney City Council, which had decided to sell our council house in Camperdown.
It was a battle that was fundamental to my identity and critical to the person I am today.
My mother had been born in this home in 1936 and was raising me there as a single parent. Her parents had been the first residents in the home after the Alexandra Dwellings estate was built in 1927.
For my family, this was more than just bricks and mortar. It was our home for three generations.
It sat in the centre of a proud working class community, made up of people as firmly anchored in the inner city as my own family.
The sense of community was enhanced by it being something of an island - surrounded by the Children’s Hospital, factories and light industry.
It was our home. We cared for it as though we had built it with our own hands, renovating and painting it at our expense to keep it up to scratch.
Yet the council was, as my worried mother said at the time, treating us with no respect. It was as though we did not matter.
My school friends from Millers Point at St Mary’s Cathedral School, supported our campaign because they understood the importance of security of home and community.
Months of tension and uncertainty followed, until the conservatives lost control of the council to Labor and the sell-off was shelved.
I lived at Camperdown for years afterward as I completed my education.
It remained my mother’s home until she passed away in 2001.
Today about 400 residents of Millers Point facing eviction at the hands of the NSW Liberals are suffering the same apprehension and uncertainty I remember so well.
For many, the first they heard of the government’s plan to sell their homes was a cold-hearted eviction notice slid under the door.
No respect.
The government appears to have made no attempt to weigh the financial gains of a sell-off against the social losses involved in the devastation of a community.
I was pleased to read in The Sydney Morning Herald on Monday that the National Trust is opposing the move because of the heritage value of the buildings at Millers Point.
But heritage is about much more than just buildings.
It’s about people.
Miller’s Point is a community – a living, breathing mixture of people that adds to the diversity of the broader Sydney community.
Successful cities are not disconnected enclaves of privilege and disadvantage. They are diverse. Their people come from a mixture of backgrounds.
The logic that only wealthy people should be able to live at Millers Point is a formula for a divided city based on haves and have-nots.
It also points to further public housing sell-offs in Sydney down the track.
That’s out of line with the values of most Australians who understand that a community is only as good as the way in which it treats its least-advantaged members.
Recently I read in The Sydney Morning Herald an elderly resident of Millers Point quoted as saying: “These people cannot come in and walk all over us and turf us out like we are rubbish’’.
It was as though I heard my own mother’s voice ringing down the years.
More than 800,000 Australians live in social housing, including a quarter of a million in NSW alone.
They matter.
Sydney, we can do better than this. Anthony Albanese is a former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/lessons-for-millers-point-from-anthony-albaneses-mother-20140331-zqozg.html#ixzz2xa7DzBYX
Shadow Ministerial Interview Transcripts
Transcript – ABC Radio 702 Mornings
Subject/s: Millers Point housing, Budget, Senate election, trade unions, light rail, climate change, asylum seekers
HOST: Federal Infrastructure spokesman Anthony Albanese is here this morning, good morning.
ALBANESE: Good to be with you Linda.
HOST: The Budget in a moment, among other things, but you’ve penned a missive for the Sydney Morning Herald this morning telling your story of growing up in public housing in Camperdown, and accusing the State Government of cold hearted eviction notices to the Millers Point residents. You’ve also said the government has failed to weigh up the social losses against the financial gains. Aren’t you romanticising things when in the case of Miller’s Point, it’s more a question of how do we accommodate a long list of people wanting public housing when there are tight budgets?
ALBANESE: Not at all. Successful cities are ones that celebrate their diversity. They’re ones that don’t have suburbs of haves and have nots. If you take the principle of Millers Point to its logical conclusion, you’ll also be selling public housing in Balmain, in Glebe, in Newtown, in a whole range of suburbs where it currently exists. But most importantly, this is a question about community, and whether we value not just the heritage of buildings, but also the heritage of social history that exists in real people, in real homes.
HOST: The community services minister, Pru Goward joined us yesterday. She said the residents have two years to relocate and that’s reasonable, she said they would move to social housing in the city’s inner ring, that was her description. She’s also talked about injuries to older tenants in those older terraces, [climbing stairs] up and down, and that in the past they’ve had to move people because of that. What’s more she’s said that there’s a misconception about the makeup of Millers Point.
PRU GOWARD, COMMUNITY SERVICES MINISTER: I mean 94% of people who live in Millers Point properties are on Centrelink benefits, so this romance about a low income working class suburb might have been true once when the MUA used those properties for their workers but it’s not true today. I mean we’ve got a huge number of people with mental illness. We’ve got elderly people. About half the people who live in Millers Point are of working age, but they’re not working.
HOST: That was Pru Goward talking to us yesterday. Your response?
ALBANESE: Well they are people who’ve lived in that community for a long time. There are people who have lived there for more than 80 years. They deserve better than getting what effectively an eviction notice under their front door.
HOST: It might have been able to be handled better, but the wider principle of the changing mix of housing and the wider economic demands is very real, isn’t it?
ALBANESE: What they’re talking about is selling all of the housing. Moving everyone out, compulsorily, at one time. I noticed yesterday on your program you had someone talking about the economic nonsense of putting all the houses on the market at once. Even from that perspective, it doesn’t make any sense. This is a debate about community that we have to have. I grew up in a housing estate in Camperdown that was City Council housing. In that community we were surrounded by the Children’s Hospital and factories, and there was a real sense of community there. People looked after each other. I spoke today about my mother being born and dying in the one house. She lived there 65 years. For her, and for my family, that lived there for three generations, we renovated it, we painted it, we looked after it as if it were a private home.
Disconnecting people from their communities is of concern. The logic of Pru Goward’s comments mean that the next stage will be to move people on from Pyrmont, from Ultimo, where there is still public housing. Our city needs diversity. After the work that Frank Sartor did to attract residential living in the city it certainly changed the composition. And that’s a good thing.
HOST: But there are a lot of residents living in the cities. There are a lot of students. There are a lot of older people. Pru Goward mentioned various other facilities. It’s not as if they’re being banished just because they’re working people.
ALBANESE: They’re being told to leave because they live in public housing. This is an attempt to remove all public housing from that city area, from Millers Point. That’s an important part of its culture. It began as Maritime Service Board housing before it was transferred to the Housing Department. These are people who have a real connection with the area. From time to time of course, people should be found alternative accommodation, but not if the move is just about economics rather than people.
HOST: The economics are pretty real, I mean the waiting list…
ALBANESE: So is selling the entire Glebe estate. It would be worth a motza. If you don’t challenge that logic, then that will be next. We’ll find ourselves in a situation where we say no matter how long you’ve lived in an area, no matter how strong your connections to the local community, we can say we’ll move you on, because it suits the economics of the time. When I was at school and living in Camperdown and hanging around Millers Point, it wasn’t as desirable as it is now. It wasn’t the sort of place people were clamoring to live in. Now just because it is, to treat people with no respect is unacceptable. That is the problem here. We need to have that debate, about community and what makes up a successful community.
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