Affordable Sydney? Don’t Hold Your Breath

By Roger Hanney

Newly elected NSW Green MP David Shoebridge is pursuing Premier Kristina Keneally and the Redfern Waterloo Authority over millions of invisible dollars set aside for affordable housing that has yet to appear.

Keneally is Minister for the Redfern-Waterloo Authority (RWA). The Authority was established under legislation in 2004 with its primary objectives being to ‘encourage the development of Redfern-Waterloo into an active, vibrant and sustainable community’ and ‘to promote, support and respect the Aboriginal community in Redfern-Waterloo’.

Far from achieving this outcome, the RWA has focussed on the redevelopment of the Australian Technology Park in Alexandria, the refurbishment of the Channel 7 headquarters therein, and a push to sell the Eveleigh rail yards – a major site for community programs – to private developers.

“4 years into the first 5 year delivery period,” said Shoebridge, “and they haven’t even finalised the Affordable Housing Program. They’ve been prioritising key commercial developments ahead of affordable housing. What it suggests is utter disinterest.”

Research by Shoebridge and his colleagues has found only silence in terms of moneys received, spent, or held by the RWA. Their accounts are “off budget”, and not subject to the transparency of government finances. However, by next year the Authority should have spent close to $18 million, out of a total $35 million, making at least half of a total of 75 low-cost residences available in the area.

“I don’t have any basis to think it’s corruption,” he continued, “but at some point inaction becomes culpable. And you’d have to say that if you’re 4 years into a 5-year work schedule, and you haven’t even developed the program, well then the management is culpable.”

If any head’s going to roll, “the Premier can’t hide behind the Authority. She’s the Minister responsible, it’s squarely in her electorate, she ought to be delivering on this.”

In the last weeks of September he has submitted detailed questions for her response, but such questions are routinely sidestepped or unanswered by government ministers.

With both the Coalition and the Labor Government hostile to lower income residents, Shoebridge sees the City of Sydney as the only authority with a social program, as evidenced by their city-wide target of 7.5 per cent affordable housing. According to Shoebridge, the State Minister for Housing, Frank Terenzini, was not even aware of his own government’s unambitious 2.3 per cent target for affordable housing within the Barangaroo development.

“That was news to him – I had to tell him that in Budget Estimates.”

In essence, and in the apparently deliberate absence of any plan, Shoebridge says that “lower and middle income families aren’t welcome in Sydney. Under this Government it’s become an enclave of the wealthy”. At best “a pattern of indifference is the nicest gloss you can put on it”.

In a future without housing that can be afforded on the wage of an ambulance driver, police officer or teacher, says Shoebridge, “this wealthy enclave is going to be gutted of public services”.