I grew up in a family which never owned its own home.

My father was a grocer, and we lived in rented accommodation behind a small shop in GlenferrieRoad, Hawthorn. Even though he worked two jobs, and my mother worked full-time in the small family business, we never had the security of home ownership.

The bookmakers took a fair proportion of our family’s earnings during the 1950s and 1960s.

For 40 years after I left home at the age of eighteen, I lived in some rather big houses, in connection with my work for the Catholic Church: in Bungay Street, Watsonia; in Studley Park Road, Kew; in Royal Parade, Parkville; and in Church Street, Richmond. I worked for no salary, no superannuation, and had no savings. After leaving the ministry, I knew housing insecurity on a personal level. Despite some well-paid employment since then, at the age of 75, I do not own my own accommodation and am reliant on the Aged Pension.

There have been several periods in my life where I have worked in the Social Housing sector. I want to draw upon all my experiences to reflect on the current challenges facing our country about access to stable housing.

Learning from housing policy over the years

After completing training as a Social Worker in the 1970s, my first placement experience was centered around the Hotham Public Housing Estate in North Melbourne. Those who lived in Public Housing in those years were mostly working families, low-income households certainly, but generally independent financially, supported by low-cost accommodation.

Today, the population of those public housing estates has changed substantially.  Unskilled employment is less available and the nature of the accommodation on those estates could now be seen more as welfare housing.

These public housing estates are no longer sustainable in their present form, and some aspects of the future planning by the Victorian Government have merit. Those estates need to be diversified to be sustainable. They should never be handed over to the private development sector, where minimal increases in the number of Social Housing units will sit alongside multi-million-dollar apartments.

The current plan is to demolish most of the high-rise towers and to allow an insignificant increase of just ten per cent of low-income households. It is a developer’s dream come true.

That plan would increase the present number of 10,000 dwellings to 30,000 dwellings on these valuable inner-city sites, resulting in just 11,000 social housing (public and community housing) units.  

Powerful construction firms stand ready to gain enormous financial benefits from the proposed redevelopment of the sites, with little gained by those with the least power and influence in this State.

At present, Victoria is behind every other State and Territory in Australia in the provision of Social Housing. It represents just 2.8 percent of homes compared to the National average of 4 per cent.

According to the latest report (4th March 2025) from Infrastructure Victoria, the State needs to build 4,000 new social housing homes a year for the next 15 years just to keep up with the demand: ‘Victoria needs an additional 60,000 social housing homes to meet the backlog of demand ….’

The report said that another $19 billion to $30 billion should be invested in social housing over the coming 15 years, although it suggested that $6 billion to $9.5 billion could be saved by using Crown Land or plots owned by local governments and Not for Profits.

The current proposals by the Victorian Government are reminiscent of what the Victorian Bolte Government did in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, senior Department of Housing officials stepped out of their offices to do a ‘street inspection’ of the slums surrounding the inner city of Melbourne, from the comfort of an FJ Holden. They failed to understand or appreciate the value of the long-established social networks of families and neighborhoods that had sustained many low-income families over generations. They failed to investigate. They failed to listen.

My own early family history was centered in Richmond from the time of the First World War. Not the Richmond that we are familiar with today, but the ‘Struggletown’ so well documented by social historian and fellow Fabian, Janet McCalman.

What those housing officials in the 1960s failed to recognize was the critical importance of social cohesion and supportive local community networks that sustained generations of low-income families from neighborhoods such as Fitzroy, Carlton, Collingwood, Flemington, Kensington, North Melbourne, South Yarra, Prahran, Brunswick and Clifton Hill.

Today, once again, senior government administrators fail to appreciate what will be lost by the dislocation of tens of thousands of low-income families currently resident in inner-suburban neighborhoods, soon to be demolished. These communities certainly need to be redeveloped to be sustainable. But evidence mounts that the towers can be stripped and renovated at substantial savings, compared to the model favored by the powerful housing and construction sector.

The State Government’s current preferred option is to demolish completely all the high-rise towers, and to rebuild them at a total cost of $2.3 billion over a period of 20 years. This would involve a complete dislocation of the present population of the existing estates. The proposal by John Holland Constructions, on behalf of the Victorian Government, estimates a cost of $680,000 for each renovated unit. An alternative proposal put forward by OFFICE Consulting on behalf of the Public Tenants’ Association would involve stripping each of the towers and extensively refitting them with modern design and fittings throughout.  Their estimated cost for each renovated unit is $400,000, with a much shorter time frame.

Private housing developers like John Holland, favor a clean slate on which to have complete freedom to redesign the multiple sites in highly sought after locations around the inner city of Melbourne.

People of substantial means will comprise close to 90 per cent of their future residents. Their apartments will be very expensive with million-dollar views.

Have we not learnt anything from what the Victorian Government destroyed during the slum reclamation programs in the two decades after the Second World War? Was demolition their only option available? Must this mistake be repeated again?

Where are the Labor Party Values being applied to this mindless destruction of inner-city housing once again? Will those most in need of Social Housing support inevitably be delegated to the outer suburban fringe of our rapidly expanding city boundaries?

The Critical Importance of Maintaining Social Cohesion:

Meanwhile, our State and Federal Governments are increasingly concerned about the damage to Social Cohesion across the nation. More and more reactionary resources are being directed to law enforcement and security intelligence to combat the impact of that breakdown of family bonds, neighborhood links and a sense of belonging to a rapidly changing Australian society.

More than ten years ago now, I was contracted to undertake a social consultation by the Victorian Department of Health. My report, tabled in March 2011, was entitled: Melbourne’s Future Growth: creating livable and affordable communities. (Norden Directions, Norden, P.)

I noted:

‘Melbourne’s population is growing at the rate of 2 per cent a year, significantly higher than the rest of Australia. This growth linked with a shortage of housing, particularly affordable housing, is placing an enormous strain on the lives of ordinary Australians…

‘The task of creating livable and affordable communities is one fraught by tensions between developers, state government planning bodies, local councils and residents themselves…

‘The critical issue, especially regarding the Department of Health’s concern with mental health promotion, is housing affordability and the manner in which it sets about increasing Melbourne’s housing stock in the coming decades.’

In that consultation, I noted the critical importance of maintaining and sustaining ‘social cohesion’, which results from strong social and community connections combined with stable and supportive environments.

During the 1990s I managed three major social disadvantage studies undertaken by the late Professor Tony Vinson, from the University of New South Wales. We measured social disadvantage by postcode for every community in Victoria and New South Wales. Our conclusion was  that there was a growing social divide occurring throughout Australia and it was critical to address this if we were to avoid major disruptions to the lives of ordinary Australians in the coming decades.

The recently released Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (HILDA, 2024) notes that inequality across the nation had grown to its highest level in twenty years. It noted that:

‘In common with the findings for financial stress (and indeed for poverty), single-parent families have the highest rates of housing stress. They experienced particularly large increases in housing stress prevalence between 2009 and 2017. … Non-elderly single people also tend to have relatively high rates of housing stress.’ (HILDA, 2024, p. 52).

Homelessness Australia in March 2025 reported that 58 per cent of low-income households currently pay more than 30 per cent of their income on rent, a key indicator of housing stress.  

Their report Fixing Australia’s Homelessness Emergency suggests that:

‘Early action to avert homelessness is infinitely better than waiting until someone is experiencing a homelessness crisis. A systemic approach to targeted prevention for groups at heightened risk and early assistance for those facing imminent risk would make a significant dent in homelessness numbers’ (2025, p.6).

Solutions?

The Federal Government has a shared responsibility with the States and Territories in a Partnership Agreement on Housing. This is a good initiative. However, I have discovered that in practice cooperation and liaison even between different State government departments is often hard to achieve.

The experiences I have had make me wonder about the nature of the consultation taking place about the redevelopment of the numerous public housing estates around the inner suburbs of Melbourne at the present time.

That question keeps ringing in my mind:

How is it that Victoria has been spending proportionately less than every other State and Territory in Australia on social housing over the last decade while the number of families seeking housing assistance grows year by year?  

Housing stress is a critical concern to many Australians at the present time. And not just for low-income families. The consequences are multiple forms of social disruption, both for those household members, but also for our wider society. This social disruption contributes to social problems like domestic violence, gambling addiction, drug and alcohol abuse, child abuse and neglect, and youth crime.

The recently retired Victorian Supreme Court Judge, Kevin Bell, has incredible experience in these areas. In an excellent discussion paper entitled: Housing: The Great Australian Right (2024) he points out:  ‘Across generations, people are anxious about accessing housing, including the young and those on low to middle incomes who face insecure or poor housing for life. Housing anxiety is why the ‘Great Australian Dream’ is now frequently called the ‘Great Australian Nightmare’.

His conclusion is that governments have the capacity and the power to resolve this national plight: ‘The first step is for Australia to rethink its approach to housing policy and recognize access to housing – having a home – as a fundamental human right’.

Finding Solutions from Professional Experience:

For a number of years I worked as a community organiser in public housing estates in inner Melbourne. During the 1990's, I supervised staff who worked on the public housing estates in Richmond, Collingwood and Fitzroy. In Fitzroy the Brotherhood of Saint Laurence conducted a most interesting survey of the social environment of the local Atherton Public Housing Estate.

While schoolchildren were expected to be up early and off to attend primary or secondary school by 9 am, their parents were often not yet on the move, with extremely high unemployment being a significant factor impacting those families. This issue persists to this day, and it calls for greater diversity in the mix of tenants living in the one neighborhood.

I had seen a more extreme form of this social breakdown in the sand dunes at the back of Cable Beach in Broome, Western Australia when I visited in 2008, I discovered that while the children were up and about and eager to receive food donations being provided by local volunteers, not one adult was awake at the time we arrived around mid-morning.

The solution to these scenarios is not simple. To address entrenched disadvantage of the nature that I had observed at Cable Beach, Prime Minister Tony Abbott employed dozens of Truant Officers in the Northern Territory. Their role was to appear in the indigenous camps and housing settlements early every school day morning and drive the school age children off to school.

The problem was the kids had not slept properly the night before and often had not eaten well over the previous twenty-four hours. Single dimensional solutions of this nature will never work effectively.

Conclusion

To address the growing divide in Australian society requires a multi-dimensional approach, sustained over more than the time of a State or Federal Government electoral cycle of three or four years.

With regard to government’s responsibility to support the need for affordable and sustainable social housing at the present time, there is a similar challenge.

The solutions of recent decades will never be effective. The failure to learn from our recent history and the experience of those who have worked in the field for many years will result in a repetition of mistakes of the past.

In the changed world in which we now live in Australia, there is an obvious need for government to undertake a more interventionist approach to the provision of stable and secure housing for those currently excluded from the competitive housing market.

To fail to recognize the changed social and economic environment will result in ineffective short-term solutions that will have dire consequences for the social cohesion of our Australian society for decades to come.  It also will result in human behavior that will have very serious financial and social consequences for ordinary Australian families, regardless of their income security.

This is not just about the provision of adequate housing, but the fragmentation of a cohesive society in the coming decades.

Peter Norden AO,

April 2025​​​​​​

Peter Norden is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University in Melbourne. In 2018, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Deakin University ‘for eminent and sustained service to the Australian non-government sector in the field of community services.’