By KATH GANNAWAY
“Get a good job; earn good money; get a house”.
Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey has copped heaps over his comments on housing affordability over the past week.
And he should have.
Debate over housing affordability has raged on every type of media, but it’s the underlying message that those simplistic comments convey to the majority of Australians, including young people and families across Yarra Ranges, that really cuts.
Housing affordability is an issue for everyone, but for people living in the rural interface communities of Yarra Ranges where homelessness and housing stress present a day-to-day battle, comments like those made by Mr Hockey last week are not only infuriating, they are demoralising.
What hope have we got when decision-makers in Canberra and Spring Street, don’t have even the remotest grip on what life is really like ‘out there’.
It’s not just about housing, it’s about almost every social issue that affects lower socioeconomic groups – domestic violence, education – even vaccination.
Cuts to critical programs are made with a broad-brush approach undermining the ability of individuals and the efforts of support organisations that deal with these issues at the coal face.
Take the base assertion – ‘get a good job’. In 2013 job opportunities for hundreds of Yarra Ranges people, young people, disadvantaged people, older people looking to reskill, were crushed when Swinburne University closed its doors in Lilydale.
The Federal Government’s withdrawal of funding from the Community Legal Service as part of the 2014 budget pulled the rug from under the very organisation that gives victims of domestic violence the legal means to take a stand.
Funding cuts to the Boys to Men program which addresses the same issue at the core – building respect in boys and young men, who often don’t have a significant male role model in their lives, for girls, women, and themselves.
Vaccination. Whatever the rights and wrongs of vaccination, the remedy proposed by the Federal Government of cutting welfare payments, while the well-off have the luxury of following their convictions without impact or penalty, equates to class warfare.
Where is the thinking when a government seriously proposes leaving the unemployed without an income for six months in communities where there is higher than average unemployment, poor school attendance and a high number of families on generational welfare.
Build a house?
The Yarra Ranges region is, quite rightly, identified as the lungs of Melbourne, but what that comes with is huge expanses of national parks and green wedge zoning, limiting opportunities for development.
Certainly housing affordability was the catalyst, but overwhelmingly the message that many would have taken from Mr Hockey’s comment last week is one of disillusionment that the decision-makers at the highest level of government are tragically out of touch.
