Do you love renting? Does it make you feel patriotic?
How good is renting?
Historically, renters have always been a site of extraction. As the euphemism goes, they’re a source of “passive income” for landlords.
But in the 21st century, in the age of data harvesting, renters in Australia are also being mined for their personal data. And it’s being extracted from them before they’ve even found a place to live.
Do you want to apply for a rental property?
You’ll have to fill in an online application form so a private RentTech company can run a background check on you.
Please provide a copy of your passport, driver’s licence, Medicare card, utility bills, pay slips, bank statements, your boss’ phone number, your rental and employment history, and more.
It’s far more information than is required to assess your ability to pay rent.
But if you refuse to provide some of that info, your application will go to the bottom of the pile. Good luck securing a place. And sorry, even if you do supply all of that data, you’re not guaranteed to secure a place either.
What will the company do with your data?
It will use it for advertising and marketing, and to track your interactions with real estate agents and landlords, among other things.
But don’t stress, the company says it will keep your data safe from hackers. Don’t worry about identity theft.
We’ve seen what happened to customer data held by Latitude, Optus, Medibank, Qantas, Ticketmaster, Telstra, the Australian National University, and a growing list of organisations, but that won’t happen to you here.
Anyway, what choice do you have? Do you want a roof over your head or not? Give us your data.
Housing for Australians with low incomes
It’s another indignity of renting these days.
A few decades ago, when policymakers turned their backs on the post-war “Australian dream” of widespread home ownership, and put our country on the path towards landlordism, the state of technology was very different.
But as housing has become increasingly unaffordable for low-income and young households, forcing many to live in private rental markets for longer than they’d like, the predatory behaviour of RentTech companies is exacerbating the anger many renters feel about Australia’s contemporary housing situation.
Do our politicians think it’s helping with social cohesion?
Back in 1945, when the Chifley Labor government negotiated the first Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement (CSHA) to address the housing crisis of the 1940s, it sparked a nasty debate about “little capitalists” and home ownership.
That debate is worth recalling quickly, because many of its arguments have come full circle.
The CSHA had been cobbled together, in the mid-1940s, to address an urgent need to provide housing for people quickly (particularly returned servicemen) who had such low incomes that they couldn’t afford to purchase their own homes.
Some state governments were suspicious of the Commonwealth’s desire to involve itself in housing supply, but the government still managed to secure their support to introduce a national scheme for subsidised rental housing.
The policy was less ambitious than housing reformers wanted, but it was better than nothing.
During the second reading debate on the legislation, a Labor MP from Tasmania, John Frank Gaha, told his parliamentary colleagues that he supported the CSHA “in its entirety”.
However, he said, he regretted the fact that constitutional limitations prevented the Commonwealth and states from taking a “wider view” of the role that housing played in the structure of the economy itself.
He said it made a huge difference to people’s lives when they owned their own homes, especially in retirement.
He said it would be great if the government could devise a scheme to keep rents at a low level nationally, so some of the money that low-income families would otherwise spend on rent could be used to help them pay off a family home.
“In this way, we would make the average worker a capitalist; and that is our only solution to communism in this country,” Dr Gaha said.
“If the scheme now before us has any weakness at all it is its failure to enable the occupant to become the owner of his home.
“I sincerely hope that the time is not far distant when we shall launch in this country a bold and practical scheme of housing based upon private ownership for the purpose of enabling people to acquire their own homes. We must stabilise our social and economic life, with a higher basic wage,” he said.
One wonders what Labor thought of Dr Gaha’s proposal.
The government was so close to getting its legislation through parliament, after arduous negotiations with the states, and up steps Dr Gaha with his left-field idea.
John Dedman, Labor’s minister for post-war reconstruction, responded to his colleague’s idea this way:
That is too big a problem for me to discuss in detail tonight, but there is one argument which I would put forward: the Commonwealth Government is concerned to provide adequate and good housing for the workers; it is not concerned with making the workers into little capitalists,” he said.
Larry Anthony, a senior member of the Country Party, then pounced on that comment, asking: “In other words, it is not concerned with making them homeowners?”
To which Mr Dedman replied with a politically fatal remark.
“If there is any criticism which may be directed against the policies of past governments supported by the present Opposition, it is this: too much of their legislative programme was deliberately designed to place the workers in a position in which they would have a vested interest in the continuance of capitalism.
“That is a policy which will not have my support, at any rate,” he said.
The battlelines of post-war housing policy
What was Mr Dedman thinking?
He was born in Scotland in 1896, and moved to Australia in his mid-20s after serving in the British army, at Gallipoli.
He had a deeply-held Presbyterian Christianity, of the kind that felt the profit-motive driving capitalist industry was “alien to the principles of Christianity,” while Communism was “like atheism”.
His colleagues admired his administrative abilities, but he could get into political trouble with his rhetorical flourishes.
In the book Accommodating Australians: Commonwealth Government Involvement in Housing (2012), the late professor Patrick Troy said Mr Dedman’s comments were an “extraordinary political misjudgement” that utterly changed the dimensions of Australia’s post-war housing debate.
Until that point, he said, neither side of politics in Australia had established a monopoly on unequivocal support for home ownership.
“Some non-Labor politicians had supported the interests of landlord investment in rental housing and had shown a tendency to sneer at the home-owning pretensions of lower income workers. Others strongly favoured home ownership as a source of social stability,” he wrote.
“A number of Labor politicians had asserted the interests of tenants exploited by the private rental market, and advocated greater home ownership as a remedy. Others were strong supporters of low rental public housing.
“These were not clearly drawn ideological positions, but the CSHA debate was to produce a marked hardening of partisan battlelines on the issue of home ownership,” he said.
And when you read the parliamentary debate that ensued, you can practically feel the Liberal-Country Party developing its post-war housing policy in real-time.
“The Minister for Post-War Reconstruction said that legislation to enable workers to own their own home would create a lot of little capitalists and would retard the onward march of socialism,” Mr Anthony told parliament.
“That was a most extraordinary statement. Does it mean that the policy of the present Government is to discourage homeownership?”
Under the leadership of Robert Menzies, the Liberal-Country opposition would thereafter be strongly for individualism, free enterprise, and home ownership, in contrast to the Labor government’s socialism, controls, and apparent denial of home ownership.
Widespread home ownership would be key to building up Australia’s middle class. It would improve social cohesion and ensure that younger generations would have material lives that were as good, if not better, than their parents.
If you owned your own home, you’d have something to defend. It would turn you from a potential revolutionary into a citizen.
Labor lost the election in 1949 and remained in the political wilderness until 1972. Mr Dedman was one of the high-profile MPs to lose his seat.
Multiple properties for some, renting for others
So what happened?
In the last few decades, under the leadership of both Liberal and Labor governments, that old belief that Australia would prosper if younger generations and low-income households could afford to purchase their own homes was apparently discarded.
A generation of Australians was encouraged to buy more houses than it needed.
The value of their extra properties would increase over time, and generate rental income, providing them with a higher standard of living in retirement. They’d get tax incentives to help them do that.
They were encouraged to become little capitalists, with a vested interest in the system, but in ways that made it harder for younger generations to become home owners themselves (and to therefore have something to defend).
Thankfully, modern renters have private RentTech companies to help them find a place to live. Just give them your data first.
