ACT Shelter CEO Corinne Dobson. Photo: Liv Cameron.
Fifty years ago, Canberra’s housing scene looked very different – but in many ways, it didn’t.
When ACT Shelter was founded as an independent housing policy lobby group in 1975, public housing was the city’s backbone.
Two decades earlier, in the late 1950s, up to 84 per cent of all Canberra’s homes were government-built – destined for teachers, nurses, but mainly Commonwealth public servants and their young families – and it wasn’t until the 1970s that privately-built residential dwellings finally began to outpace them.
“Government was the primary developer, builder and owner of housing in the ACT through a lot of the 20th century,” ACT Shelter CEO Corinne Dobson says.
“But because we were always a growing city, there was still a significant shortage of housing.”
In the 1970s, the city’s hostels were also closing, and a new means test suddenly shut out people who had once been eligible for public housing. Dobson says it was into this that ACT Shelter was born.
The Australian Council of Social Service went on a national road trip to set up “shelters” in all the states, inspired by a similar organisation in the UK.
Students, unionists, tenants, public servants and community groups met at ANU for the first meeting in February 1975, and by August, Canberra had hosted a National Shelter conference.
“It was a period when there was a lot of activism, there was a lot of awareness, more about inequality and poverty,” Dobson says.
“Our focus is on getting better housing outcomes for people who are on low or modest incomes. That’s our primary focus.”
But Canberrans will know 1975 for another reason.
By December that year, Gough Whitlam’s Labor Government had been dismissed, and the new prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, started pruning the public service, in turn, reducing government spending on new public housing.
An aerial shot of the nation’s capital in the 1970s. Photo: Archives ACT.
Unemployment, particularly among young people, rose sharply, and demand for housing outstripped supply. As inequality grew, so too did housing activism.
According to Dobson, not much has changed.
“Today, the percentage of public housing in Canberra is only about 5.5 per cent, so that’s obviously a huge contraction since the late 1950s,” she says.
Throughout the 80s and 90s, ACT Shelter – mostly volunteer-run and operating on shoestring budgets – pushed to keep affordability, homelessness prevention and tenant rights on the agenda.
For instance, in 1983, several groups, including ACT Shelter, pushed for the former Havelock House hostel to be reopened as community housing – by way of a “round-the-clock picket through the Canberra winter”.
In 1996, the group finally received its first dedicated staff and funding, and the rest was history. Or not.
“There are still a lot of challenges in the housing system in terms of affordability and supply, but not it’s now just people on the lowest incomes – it stretches much further up the income spectrum than it has in the past,” Dobson says.
The ACT Government plans to build another 30,000 homes by 2030, but that’s like throwing a starving man a cracker. And the Federal Government allowing first-home buyers to scrape in with a 5 per cent deposit has only boosted prices by at least the same.
“If you’re a first-home buyer – and I’ve been in that situation recently – you’re looking at this additional funding and thinking, ‘Well, thank goodness I’ve got this’. But what that actually does is push up the overall price of housing.
“The only way I was able to afford to buy last year was because my mum and dad were able to step in. Not everyone has that option, and that in itself ends up pushing prices up.”
She’s wary of rushing through changes like reducing the lease variation charge without independent modelling – and input from organisations like ACT Shelter.
“It serves a very important function in terms of generating the revenue that we need for things like social housing,” she says.
Dobson says building regulations are worth looking into to see if they’re driving up construction costs. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
But she says it is important to look at what regulations might be “imposing a barrier” to affordable housing, by driving up the costs of building materials and construction. There are also processes within government that “need to be improved”.
“But we need to be careful there too, because some of these regulations and processes serve an important purpose.”
But across all the areas – planning, construction costs, tax settings, and tenancy law, Dobson says it all comes down to a lack of coordination.
“Is the government trying to ensure house prices don’t keep going up and up? Or are they trying to support people? Things are not being done in a coordinated, coherent way, and with a clear sense of the evidence. They are not prioritising it in the way that it really warrants.”
From January, the ACT will become the first jurisdiction in Australia to recognise a right to adequate housing in law. Dobson says it’s “no silver bullet” either, but it will create new obligations.
“It will mean that the government has to actually demonstrate that they are working towards progressively realising that right,” she says, adding it gives community groups a new tool to hold the government to account.
“I feel like we’re at the crunch point,” Dobson concludes. “And if we continue on this trajectory … it’s just going to get worse.”
ACT Shelter certainly has its work cut out for the next 50 years then.
