Recording: A Right to Housing in Australia – report launch

Descriptive transcript

Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us at today's event, those of you here at UTS and all of those joining us online. My name is Amy Persson and I'm the Pro Vice-Chancellor of Social Justice and Inclusion here at UTS.

I want to start by acknowledging that for those of us in Australia, we are all on the traditional lands of First Nations peoples. This land was never ceded. I want to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, upon whose lands the UTS campus stands. I pay respect to Elders past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of this place. I also want to acknowledge that any discussion about the right to housing must recognise the specific needs and context of First Nations peoples in this country and reaffirm their sovereignty.

It is my pleasure to be co-hosting today's event with the Human Rights Law Centre and we're joined by an incredible group of speakers: Cassandra Goldie, Professor Jessie Hohmann, Tania Thompson, and Caitlin Reiger, who I'll introduce properly in just a moment.

If you have any questions during today's event, please submit them to us via Slido. There is a link and a QR code on the screen here and we'll share that with everyone who's online. Using Slido means we can see the questions coming in from both in-person and online audience members and you can upvote the ones you most want asked. We ask you to please keep the questions relevant for the topic at hand today.

For those of us here, there's a photographer in the room. If that is a concern and you don't want your photograph taken, please just let that person know or one of the event team know and that's totally okay.

I want to open today's discussion by reading directly from the report authored by Professor Hohmann, commissioned by the Human Rights Law Centre. She writes: "Housing provides and protects some of our most fundamental human needs. Adequate housing shields us from the elements and from external threats and pressures. It gives us a base from which we can take part in the life of the community, and from where we can build a livelihood, take part in education, and contribute to society. Housing also provides a space where the private aspects of our lives are fostered and supported. The way people are housed reflects a social and political agreement about what standards of living, levels of inequality and social exclusion we tolerate or condone. Thus, housing provides not just material shelter, but helps set physical boundaries of belonging and community."

At the heart of this, I think, is people. The right to housing is about all of us, no matter our circumstances, being able to fulfil our potential and to be fully human.

So that's the starting point for today's discussion and we've got some excellent and incredibly knowledgeable people gathered to discuss the impact it would make for our society if a right to housing was realised and the changes that might be made to our laws, policies and government services.

It is my pleasure to now introduce our speakers.

Our first speaker is Professor Jessie Hohmann, who joined the UTS Faculty of Law as Associate Professor in 2019. She is an internationally recognised expert on the right to housing. Her research also engages with the material culture, objects and materiality of international law and with Indigenous peoples and international law.

Next we have Cassandra Goldie. Cassandra is the CEO of the Australian Council of Social Service and an Adjunct Professor with UNSW Sydney. Prior to joining ACOSS, Cassandra held senior roles in both the not-for-profit and public sectors and in 2023 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished services to social justice through leadership and advocacy, promoting the rights of marginalised and disadvantaged people.

Next we have Tania Thompson. Tania is a community leader, social housing resident activist and seniors' rights advocate. Moving to Sydney from Aotearoa (New Zealand) as a teenager, Tania was instrumental in creating the Social Housing Women's Forum that promoted women's health services and legal advice, as well as instigating programs during COVID targeted at social isolation amongst seniors. Most recently, Tania has been involved in a partnership with Glebe Youth Service targeting food insecurity by providing food hampers and teaching cooking classes.

Our final speaker is Caitlin Reiger. Caitlin is the CEO of the Human Rights Law Centre and a human rights lawyer. She has spent the past 25 years working globally on transitional justice for mass human rights violations, international criminal law, and justice system reform. Since returning to Australia, Caitlin supported the First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria in the design and establishment of the Yoorrook Justice Commission. Please make our esteemed panellists welcome.

This is the best part of my job, to get to ask these very interesting people questions. I'm going to start with Jessie, the author of the report that we're launching today.

Jessie, can you summarise what your Right to Housing in Australia report finds and perhaps also give us a brief overview of what a right to housing is not?

Thanks so much. Thank you for the question and it is daunting to summarise such a 10,000 words, I think, in a few minutes, but let me give it a shot.

At the heart, a right to housing is a place to live somewhere in peace, dignity and security. Even more specifically, it's the right to have access to a place to live in peace, dignity and security.

To jump straight to what the right is not, there are a lot of misperceptions and myths around the right to housing. I think the most common myth is that it will end up being a right where you can go and knock on the Government's door and say, "Give me a house" and demand a house. It's actually not a right to demand a house from the state. It's much more nuanced and sophisticated. It aims to change the legal and policy landscape so that everyone can access that place to live in peace, dignity and security.

In order to understand how we would do that or what we would do to make that happen, we can think about the right to housing as being made of seven elements. If you can identify each of the seven elements and check off that each one is present to an adequate level, then the right to housing is ensured.

These include elements such as accessibility for vulnerable or disadvantaged groups, affordability of housing such that your housing costs won't compromise other basic needs, security of tenure so that you are secure in your home and can't be moved on or moved out at any point, that your house will be meeting basic standards of habitability, that it will be in an adequate location, not cut off from schools or work opportunities, and that it will be culturally adequate.

Australia already has obligations for the right to housing. In the 1970s, Australia ratified an international treaty that includes the right to housing and therefore it took on obligations for that right and it uses those obligations to ground its powers for housing. The Federal Government uses this treaty, saying we have powers under this treaty to make housing policy and to act in the housing sphere, but on the other hand, it hasn't brought those rights into Australian domestic law so that we can claim them before a court or hold the Government to account for them. So, it empowers itself through this international law but hasn’t made it possible for Australians to actually hold it to account or use that right for accessing housing.

So, the most important aspect, I think, of a right to housing is, as we've already talked about, putting the human being at the centre. You won't be surprised, you're here in the audience today, you won't be surprised by the depth and the breadth of the housing crisis in Australia. We know housing is increasingly insecure for many, that homelessness numbers are growing and that inequality is growing.

For too long we have tried to navigate Australian housing policy without turning our minds to the right to housing as an appropriate response and actually I think that we cannot keep going as we are. Instead, the right to housing provides a really, really powerful new way to think about housing and to think about each person's right to a place to live in peace, dignity and security—a kind of overlay that we could lay over all of Australian policy and ask whether it is moving towards the right to housing or away from it.

So, in the report I've covered five key ways that the right would make a difference to Australia in the housing sphere and to people's lives in Australia. The first is that it does provide that really clear set of check marks—each of those seven elements—and if you can just check that your policy is increasing affordability, increasing accessibility for vulnerable or marginalised groups, making housing more habitable, making sure that it is culturally adequate, then you are going to be able to check whether your policy is a good policy in human rights terms.

The second way that the right to housing can make an important difference is in recognising that those who are experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity are not passive welfare recipients or charity cases, but rights holders entitled to dignity and to an equal access to housing. They have agency and as a matter of right are entitled to adequate housing. I think that shifts the frame in a really important way and in a way that's been missing from the Australian debate for a long time.

Third, it's so important to see the right as a foundation for other human rights. So without access to adequate housing, our educational outcomes are much worse, our health outcomes are much worse, our family and private life is diminished. All of those other rights that we think are so important—if you don't have secure and adequate housing, then you can't exercise those rights. So, it's a foundation for the realisation of numerous other human rights.

Fourth, and it might come as a surprise, because one of the criticisms of rights like the right to housing is that they are very expensive and governments just can't afford to comply with them. Research is now showing that it can be really cost effective to ensure the right to housing. Some research coming out of Wales in the UK has shown that over the same time period it would cost only half as much to ensure adequate housing in terms of the right to housing than it would cost to pay for the health impacts, the frontline services, the cost of the criminal justice system, the poor educational outcomes and the loss of productivity that go with living in inadequate or insecure housing. So, it really breaks that myth that the right to housing is too expensive and we can't afford it.

Finally, and I think importantly, in a democracy if you're going to have a right, you should be able to hold the Government to account for it. We have this right in international law, but the Government has not made it possible in any way to hold them to account for it. And ultimately, if you have a right, you should have a remedy for it and an opportunity to hold the Government to account.

Can I just ask a follow-up around our international obligations and the Federal Government not having enacted those in domestic law? They've done that for other things, haven't they? Can you talk just briefly about the other ways they've done that? I guess I'm getting to this is not some crazy ask. We do this in Australia.

Absolutely. The prime example is really the International Covenant on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which has been brought into Australian law as the Racial Discrimination Act. So you can approach an Australian court and say, "I have been subjected to discrimination on the basis of my race," and you can have that resolved in Australia. That was done in the 1970s as well. So, it's absolutely not something that has never been tried before. It's a tried and tested technique.

There's precedent, which is one of the main terms I've actually kept from my law degree, for those of you studying the law.

Cassandra, ACOSS is a very strong advocate for a housing system where low income Australians have access to safe and secure and affordable housing. Can you talk to us a bit about the main policy asks from ACOSS in that space?

Thanks, and just acknowledging I'm on First Nations land and pay respects to Elders past and present, to acknowledge any First Nations colleagues who are joining us today and to particularly acknowledge the extraordinary leadership of the First Nations groups involved on this really critical issue of the right to adequate housing. ACOSS collaborates and supports and tries to amplify the voice of many people who are working very hard on trying to deliver decent, secure housing for everybody in Australia, and colleagues who are in the room here today from Community Housing Industry Association, National Shelter, Homelessness Australia and many grassroots organisations all over Australia every day are trying to breathe life into the vision that Jessie so beautifully lays out again in asserting that housing is indeed a human right.

ACOSS, we do spend a lot of time with people who are very directly affected by this issue, and there is absolutely no question that when your modest housing is threatened, what it means to your sense of self and dignity. What it means to be put into public housing when you've got absolutely nothing behind you and get told that you've got to put the window coverings and pay for them yourself, and so you end up with sheets covering your windows when you finally get into something that might be vaguely affordable for you. It means a lot for people who watch every day the way in which our housing system for far too many people has become a way to make more money, to allow property investors to be at the front of the queue because of the very generous tax arrangements that we have that mean that housing as an asset class is not a bad investment, particularly if you can keep the price going upwards.

So certainly our view is that the housing crisis is now on everybody's lips, has been a long burn in Australia for a number of decades and everybody who can remember, they go back to remember when, if you had a reasonable income, a modest income, you might have a chance of getting into a secure form of housing and for far too many people now, you don't. The policy solutions, there are a number of them and there is a lot of consensus about what needs to be done. We've allowed an underinvestment in low income housing, public housing, social housing, community housing. This current Government has now created some important vehicles—it's called the HAFF. It's a way for us to start to finally put investment into the growth in social and affordable housing so we can get to what we believe is needed, which is that overall, one in ten properties are actually affordable for people on low incomes because right now, if you're on JobSeeker, there is literally nowhere in the private rental market which is affordable for you. JobSeeker is just $56 per day. So a big boost, we need at least, we estimate about 55,000 per year needs to be expanded in terms of supply.

Supply is one part of it. The second is the adequacy of incomes. We do continue to highlight the importance of social security, which has been falling behind in its adequacy. So affordability is two parts: it is the price and how much money you've got. So a proper, adequate increase to JobSeeker and Commonwealth Rent Assistance, particularly for people on low incomes, is also really key.

We talk about cultural adequacy and I think that's a really, really important missing part of the dominant discussion about housing. I want to again really acknowledge and urge all of you to look at the really excellent work that's being done by the First Nations Housing Industry Alliance that is working very hard to bring through to government what is needed around a community-controlled housing sector in Australia that does actually build genuinely culturally appropriate housing. That's really key.

Tax. We need to continue to call out the way in which negative gearing and the capital gains discount, the design of stamp duty and land tax is helping to fuel upward pressure on prices, which comes to the question about affordability for the country. Most of what I've just described would require billions in investment and so it should. Just remember last year we spent as a country about $20 billion per year in providing income tax cuts, a lot of which went to very wealthy people in Australia. And if we even modestly reduce the egregiously generous tax concessions associated, which is benefiting property investors, speculative property investors, we would help to generate the billions that we need to continually invest in the growth of social and affordable housing stock.

I might just finally flag security of tenure. It's one of the—actually, I was just talking to somebody, I first started work in the community legal centres and legal aid and that's what I was working on was trying to stop no cause evictions in this country. It is an absolute disgrace that it continues to happen in a number of jurisdictions because, from a human rights point of view, whilst there's a progressive obligation to deliver supply of adequate housing, there is an immediate obligation to protect people from forced evictions and to make sure that people are not being evicted into homelessness. We could deliver that through proper legislation and there are many models of how that is done overseas. There's been some progress, but nowhere near enough, and minimum standards so that actually it's not too hot for you to live in—that'd be good too, in terms of liveability. All of which are active policies we're working on right now.

Yeah, and I think that point, particularly about no forced evictions, I mean, it just exists in so many other countries very successfully and has a huge impact on people's sense of safety and security. It's one of those, I think, almost vexed public policy questions where when you've been involved in housing policy and debates over a number of years, you just think, come on, let's just do this, it really makes so much sense. And there is movement, there's movement in New South Wales, isn't there?

There is, but it still is seen as something to manage in terms of the interests with the very powerful vested interests that are associated with the churn of housing stock. One of the things that doesn't get, I don't think, enough attention is, to your point Jessie, about the other human rights that are attached to secure housing, in terms of being able to keep your children in a school. The number of parents that have to move their children year after year because they keep getting evicted, because the latest owner wants to buy and sell to make a bit of money, and no factoring in of the consequences on those children having to be taken out of school again and moved somewhere else where they might be able to find a place to live. So it is very serious, and eviction is not just an administrative act, it's a really serious human rights act, and it engages the right to adequate housing, and there's nowhere near enough scrutiny of what happens when somebody's evicted, and no obligation on the state government to turn up and say, what is going to happen to this family before this eviction is allowed to go ahead? Because often, actually, now it's in the hands of homelessness services who are really unable to find anywhere affordable for those families to live, and so they are in cars, we know it, they're in parks, and they're all over the country in regional Australia in that sort of situation at the moment.

Thanks, Cassandra. Tania, over to you. Talk to us about the role local communities can play in this debate and in advocating their needs, and I think all of us would be interested in your experience of that community advocacy.

I suppose I should start so that people understand where I came from. So, my housing insecurities probably started around 10 years ago, where my life changed medically, I came from domestic violence, so there were many things on board that I had. I became homeless. I was couch surfing. Being an older woman that used to be very confident and used to move very positively through community, I had a job, I had money, I didn't worry about anything, but when that actually happened and when I became homeless, I didn't know where to turn. I didn't know who to talk to and when I did start talking to people, I didn't feel like I was being heard in a lot of ways. So, I did this for about five years, couch surfing, being homeless. I have children, but I didn't put that pressure on my children. It was not for them. It was my journey. So I put my name down for every type of housing that you could possibly think of, and hoping that someone would hear me and would pay attention to my needs, because you only want to tell so much, because sharing that experience, you feel that that could show weakness in many different ways, and I didn't want to do that. So my medical issues started to increase and change very rapidly, and I started to get a bit noisy, because I started to get a bit frustrated with what was happening, and it was just this fire that started inside me. So I started really pumping out applications, knocking on doors, and for me, I was lucky enough that community housing picked me up—Bridge Housing. When I got that call, there was excitement, there was fear, because I didn't know where I was going, because you hear about housing, you see housing, and it's not very attractive to look at as a woman and coming from domestic violence, because we look for safety, we look where we can be safe, and the security of that. So that's sort of—I won't go into too much about that—but that's where my journey began. So, I was housed in community housing just over six and a half years ago. I stayed in my unit for about six months, and I did not talk to anyone. I didn't want to talk to anyone, even though everyone said hello to me, and I wanted to say hello, but I just couldn't. Anyway, after meeting some of my neighbours, who were elderly, who I love—I love elderly people—and they actually broke down a lot of my barriers. Just having conversations with them about all different things, they just opened up so much to me about their needs and wants, and what they could have, and what they had experienced. So, I suppose that started my journey in wanting to speak up for them, because I knew I could. I knew I could actually do that for them and be their voice. So advocating then started, literally, little things, little steps, with the elderly to break down those barriers with community housing, with Bridge Housing, to change different things to help the residents.

So basically, living and advocating in the Elger Street Housing Group of close to 173 tenants, thereabouts, give or take, 60% being women and average age around 66. We have many diversities in this community, so many, which are made up of a mix of First Nations residents, people living with disabilities, people coming from domestic violence and many levels of mental health, and also a very large group of nationalities. So, there's a huge, a big rainbow of people, a mixing pot really of interesting individuals. Some of these individuals had been escaping the violence, but also homelessness, possibly where they'd been sleeping rough for many, many years, which I understood. I actually understood that. They come from transitional housing where drugs and so forth, substances, were involved, so they were looking for an out to a better life, and then people started looking towards me for a voice, or to help them find their voice, to speak up and step up. The impact that it probably had on them, that I heard, was that they were getting their experience of rejection of everything. Every word that they said, they felt that they were not being heard, they were being rejected and they were shutting down. By offering them and encouraging them to participate in anything that I was trying to bring forward to them, like, you know, the Golden Oldies Project, to allow them to speak up and be part of something that others were the same, and we valued what they had to say and what they were feeling.

No, I think that's awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about whether there's support for you to play that role in your community? Because it sounds to me like that community is extremely lucky to have you. And I think we all—and we're a university on your doorstep, right, and I know we work closely with you—but I think we need to make sure people like you have support to influence and feed into these debates and discussions.

100%. And I think having the support, my support comes from—firstly, I will always, my first step is always going to the housing provider: What do you have to offer? These are the issues that we are having down here, can you offer something, can you play a role in actually helping our residents? Most of the time they will try to do that, but then, you know, it may not fit into what is happening. They have a great community team, and they have a great housing support team that try to work very closely with all the residents that they have, but sometimes, you know, with the complexities of some of our residents, that can be really hard. So, it's like breaking it down, bringing—for me, if housing can't step up for that, and it's not stepping up, but if they don't have what we need, I will always reach out to other organisations just to make them feel more comfortable, which I did with the Women's Forum. Women were shouting, "We need more, we need more information, I don't know where to go." I brought Seniors Rights in that sat down and had a conversation with them and I had a full room. At first, 30 people maybe. My room was standing only left and I looked in the room and it was the elderly, there were organisations, so people wanted to hear what was going on with our people. So, it's encouraging all organisations to play their part, to pay attention, because it's not just shelter that they're looking for. Shelter is important, but it's all the other things that come with that once we're inside that shelter to assist, because we can't just put people in a place and forget them, because they just come with so much, and they just want peace, safety and someone to listen.

Thank you. Caitlin, I want to bring you into the discussion. The Human Rights Law Centre has been coordinating a campaign for an Australian Human Rights Act. Can you talk to us about the difference a Human Rights Act could make in this context?

Yes, absolutely. Thank you. And thanks, Tania, for bringing to life for everybody as well what this means at a very personal level and the destabilising impact that that uncertainty has. Really, this is what this conversation is about. Jessie, you highlight that really clearly in the report, that this is about everybody having the basic, equal ability to live in safety, in dignity, and in a place that enables them to live their full life, with their health, with their kids' education, their ability to go to work. So, it's very foundational things that we're talking about, and these are really minimum standards. So, when we talk about why do we need a Human Rights Act, because these are the foundational elements that make us a better and fairer society. Australia is one of the only places, certainly one of the only liberal democracies in the world, without this level of basic legal protection. It's the missing piece in our legal framework, and the challenge with thinking about housing is that, as we've heard, you can't separate your right to housing from your ability to live with your health and your access to your kids' education and all of these things all are deeply interconnected. You don't get to pick and choose which human rights people get to enjoy. They are interconnected, and they are mutually reinforcing. So, a Human Rights Act would provide that overarching framework.

We heard earlier that Australia's international obligations in some areas of human rights have had some implementation, but it means we have this very messy patchwork of anti-discrimination law for certain characteristics, but not others. But that doesn't help with helping a decision maker think about the full array of human rights that are likely to be at play in making a policy decision or an administrative decision. It's really thinking about, well, what impact, who is going to be affected, and what impact will it have on that person's everyday life? So, a Human Rights Act is the framework and the set of rules. It helps everyone from the public to decision makers, and certainly when new laws are coming into effect and being designed, it makes the obligation clear that you've got to think about these things. These are not just optional policy choices, they're actually existing legal obligations under international law, and they're foundational requirements to make our society fairer.

We know that Human Rights Acts are already making a difference in relation to housing rights more broadly. In three jurisdictions in Australia—in the ACT, Queensland and Victoria—there is some form of human rights legislation in place. None of them explicitly contain the right to housing, but even so, because housing is so connected to these other things, people have been able to use that legislation to hold decision makers, hold governments to account, and get really practical solutions that make a difference to being able to live with more dignity, with more safety.

There's examples in Queensland where Tenants Queensland was able to support a woman who'd been surviving family violence, who was faced with an eviction order from her social housing, and the eviction was partly because of damage and actions taken by her former partner. So using the Human Rights Act was a way of getting the relevant authority to take that into account, ultimately solve the case by transferring the lease to her—really practical things that show the interconnectedness and how powerless people can feel when those considerations are not taken into effect. We also know in Victoria, there was another case where a man who had been in a mental health facility against his will—the care team had decided that for his long-term support, it would be better if he went into a particular housing facility, but because he owned his own house, he wasn't eligible. So then there was an application for guardianship orders to take the decision away from him so that his house could be sold so that he could be put into this housing. Ultimately, the Victorian Charter of Human Rights was able to be used then. It wasn't a right to housing per se, it was a right to protection from arbitrary interference with your privacy and effectively your home, and that was a way in which they were able to prevent his house being sold, ultimately him going back to his home where he lived for a further decade as he got older, and as an older person with mental health issues, he would have been even more vulnerable if he'd ended up in the housing arrangements that were provided. So these are not just legal conceptual discussions, they make really practical differences for people's lives, but at the moment, that depends on where you live, and if you're not in one of the jurisdictions that's got that legal protection, too bad, which is not how I think most Australians want our society to operate, that it shouldn't be dependent on where you live that you get that level of legal protection.

So a Human Rights Act is something that would actually bring everybody under the same level of protection, and it's something that has now been formally recommended by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights last year, which is a joint committee of both Houses of Parliament that has clearly recommended that there needs to be a Federal Human Rights Act that includes all of these rights together and that puts that obligation onto decision makers to think about this at the earliest stages, so that we're preventing violations, at the same time we're giving peop