The fight for renters has just begun

BY MAX CHANDLER-MATHER
Member for Griffith

Numbers in our parliament alone will not be enough to change politics. I say this often, but real power and lasting change comes from our capacity to organise on the ground, mobilising hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.

Over the last nine months we have demonstrated that organising and campaigning outside of election cycles can force the government to do things that they previously said were impossible, and we’ve had a small taste of what it means to organise on the ground to build a platform to wield real power in parliament.

When this housing debate started, Labor tried to ram through a housing bill that didn’t guarantee a cent in funding for public or community housing, and relied entirely on a gamble on the stock market. Labor told us repeatedly that there wasn’t an extra cent available for public housing and the Prime Minister called rent caps “pixie dust”. 

But in just a short 9 months, the combined effort of hundreds of volunteers getting out doorknocking, installing yard signs, making calls and rallying alongside us, we’ve managed to significantly shift the scope of political debate when it comes to housing and renters. Together, we've secured $3 billion of direct investment in public and community housing, and guaranteed $500 million for housing every year thereafter. 

74% of the public now support a freeze or cap on rent increases, including 58% of Coalition supporters. For the first time in the history of this country, National Cabinet was forced to meet and discuss national tenancy standards. 

That has all happened because of the collective effort of hundreds of people. 

But let’s be real - we haven’t come close to forcing Labor to fix the scale of the housing crisis. That’s because we are fighting a Labor party entirely captured by the interests of property developers, banks and property investors, who in turn wield an enormous amount of power over the political system. 

Along with fossil fuel corporations, the finance and property industry dominates Australian politics. One way to think about this is that back in the 1990s just over 20% of all bank lending went to housing, and over 60% went to business. Since then banking lending to housing has skyrocketed to over 60% of all lending. That’s actually the highest rate in the world! 

In other words, Australian banks make most of their money from a massively financialised housing market. And what exactly are they investing in? Well the total value of housing in Australia is $10 trillion - or over 6 times Australia’s GDP. 

That’s what our movement is up against. 

So the big question is what will it take to win? To win not just a freeze and cap on rent increase, but a mass investment in public housing where the criteria is relaxed so everyone from university professors to cleaners can live in a good quality public home - where we scrap negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions - and where we build homes, cities and towns not for bank and developer profit, but in a way that ensures everyone has what they need to live a good life. 

Well over these last nine months we took our first small steps towards that future. We proved that when people get organised, collectively, we can win real, material gains. 

Indeed, if we were able to shift the scope of politics enough to force the government to spend billions of dollars directly from the budget on housing (rather than a series of complicated investment funds and bank accounts) and force every Premier and the Prime Minister to meet around the table to discuss national renters rights and rent caps in just 9 months, with only a couple of hundred volunteers, imagine what we can achieve with our numbers in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions. 

It’s with a mass movement that we could knock on hundreds of thousands of doors in a single week, turn out tens of thousands of people at rallies, and completely bypass a media establishment that often acts in the interests of big corporations. What does that power do? Well it allows us to ultimately communicate with millions of people in a clear and direct way, without relying on the corporate media. It would allow us to make clear to Labor or the Liberals that they stand to lose dozens of seats if they don’t shift substantially in negotiations. That scale of movement would also ensure that we remain connected to civil society in a way that gives us a much better sense of what the public actually wants and how willing they are for us to keep fighting. 

It was clear over the last nine months how much power, even just a few hundred people knocking on doors, gave us down in Canberra. Indeed knocking on only 18,000 doors helped win $3 billion for housing - imagine what knocking on hundreds of thousands of doors could achieve?

So our fight for renters and a better world has only just begun. Indeed our job now is take stock of what we were able to achieve together, and then continue to work to build our organising capacity, preparing not just for the next major parliamentary fight or elections - but for the bigger fight to shift power away from big corporations and the political class and towards the collective power of ordinary people. 

Our only limitation to winning a freeze on rent increases, to wiping student debt and abolishing HECS, to putting a stop on new coal and gas, is our ability and capacity to organise on the ground. 

See you on the doors!