FORUM:
It is good to hear that Regional Development Australia Central Coast (RDACC) is a “key driver of affordable housing initiatives across the region” (CCN 370).
If it weren’t for this assurance, one might have the impression that the affordable-housing situation is worse than ever and that nobody has the slightest idea of what to do about it.
However, the opposite is clearly the case.
Only this year, RDACC “brought together over 100 business and community leaders … to discuss the impact of housing affordability gaps”, and the outcomes of this meeting will help to “accelerate development and plan for the various housing needs of the Central Coast”.
Already, we have a paper on affordable housing, representing “the culmination of forum ideas and set(ting) out the elements needed to see more affordable housing”.
At this rate of progress, we can expect to see great inroads made into the problem sometime in the next century.
Anybody would think that the problem of affordable housing had only just been discovered, rather than having been the subject of more than enough study for decades past, at every level from the international to the local.
However, instead of our acting on the widespread knowledge we already possess, it is easier to go on reinventing the wheel and frittering around the edges of the issue in ways that can be passed off as action but actually have no impact on the situation.
You can’t tackle the issue of affordable housing by piling up more repetitive reports, having more gabfests about it and making more policy statements about it.
You have either to do something practical or to admit that it’s too hard and give up.
That said, it is difficult not to be sympathetic towards such a well-meaning group as Pacific Link Housing which is actually doing real-world things, instead of just blathering on.
Unfortunately, what they are doing will have no impact and just provides a smokescreen behind which politicians can hide and pretend a concern that doesn’t commit them to putting forward a functional programme that addresses what needs to be done.
Regrettably, the election promise of the current federal government is completely wrong-headed and, even if carried out, will make no difference.
It is the same old policy that has been followed around the world for nigh-on 100 years and hasn’t worked anywhere and isn’t going to work here.
It also isn’t encouraging that the state government is already reviewing the Housing SEPP that it only adopted last year.
There hasn’t been time for the SEPP to have had any results that would justify a review, so it can only be that the SEPP was defective when it was adopted and now has to be hastily amended to remove some of its glaring inadequacies.
Whether this will result in any improvement remains to be seen.
The outcomes of other government “consultations” on planning measures certainly don’t inspire confidence that this one will be any different.
The betting is that it will be just window-dressing and that those-who-know-better-than-any-of-the-rest-of-us will eventually adopt exactly what was intended in the first place: it is amazing that we continue to have such confidence in the authority of those in charge when they have nothing to show but a record of continuous and unrelieved failure in all the measures they have introduced so far.
I doubt that those needing affordable housing are going to gain much from all the frenetic but ill-directed action that we are seeing now.
Email, Dec 4
Bruce Hyland, Woy Woy