Community support coalesces around Waterloo public housing tenants at fiery speak-out
Image: Students met with Action for Public Housing members and Waterloo tenant Karyn Brown last week at Sydney University to strategise. Photo: Action for Public Housing/Facebook.
By ROBBIE MASON
A fiery speak-out and rally critiquing the Minns government’s plan to demolish 749 public homes in Waterloo took over the streets of Redfern on Friday night.
On Monday 21 August, the Labor government committed to demolition, pledging to transform the Waterloo Estate, which is currently 100 percent public housing, into high-rise apartment blocks with a mix of private rentals, affordable housing and social housing. The decision contradicts NSW Labor’s pre-election commitment to save Waterloo and protect tenants’ homes from demolition.
Organised by Action for Public Housing, the snap action brought together a diverse group of invested parties. There were speakers from Waterloo public housing, unions, political parties, student groups, a welfare advocacy organisation, a mutual aid group and a community action resident group.
Tenants from public housing sites across the inner city also spoke. Expressing solidarity with Waterloo’s public housing residents, these speakers highlighted the systemic factors interlinking the individual fights to protect the inner city’s remaining public housing estates.
Wiradjuri and Gomeroi artist Laura Munro said that government policies have attempted to remove Aboriginal communities from the inner city.
“That’s why my mum Jenny Munro set up the Aboriginal Tent Embassy down at The Block,” she yelled into the microphone.
Karyn Brown, a tenant at the South Waterloo public housing precinct slated for demolition and redevelopment, said, “the government said last week we live in squalor… I don’t think the answer to a leaking roof in one apartment is to knock down the whole friggin’ block.”
“Also they said we are a social experiment that failed,” she continued. “I spent half my life as a lab rat in that case and I don’t wish to be discarded with the petri dish.”
Greens MP Jenny Leong took issue with the framing of the Waterloo Estate public housing blocks as a failed project that would never be attempted again.
“Well, what you wouldn’t do again, is privatise the maintenance contract so they’re run by for-profit entities that allow the stock to be run down,” she said.
Leong suggested that the best way to increase diversity within public housing blocks involves the construction of more public housing for low-income workers, such as teachers and nurses who want to live close to their workplaces and pay a percentage of their income as rent, rather than the prioritisation of community and affordable housing.
Paul Keating, Sydney secretary of the Maritime Union of Australia, emphasised the historic connection of working class communities to the inner city and the importance of defending their right to access and live within the city’s central neighbourhoods.
“This idea of ‘social housing’ is a dead-set fucking con,” Keating told the flock of supporters.
The impassioned speeches represented an outpouring of frustration and anger at the Labor government’s housing policy.
Following the speak-out, the mob of supporters marched through the streets of Redfern. Regular chants rang out: “save public housing, yes we can!”
In a video posted to social media yesterday, Rachel Evans from Action for Public Housing pledged to ramp up the campaign, calling for support for daily direct action activities.
