Housing, Welfare And The Return To Family 02 Melinda Cooper by QPRadio

Part 2 - Housing - Melinda Cooper

Sydney has some of the most inflated property prices in the world. As rents are ratcheted up to guarantee yields for investors, squats are stamped out as a threats to asset values and public housing budgets are frozen, living space in Sydney and other capital cities is becoming increasingly claustrophobic. The inflation of housing prices has occurred alongside a long-term trend towards the restriction of welfare benefits, especially for the young. Changes to youth allowance introduced under Howard have increased the age of legal independence, making young people legally dependent on parental support until the age of 22, while Newstart barely covers the cost of rent. Together these trends have conspired to push people back toward familial forms of economic support and dependence. Already it appears that young people are leaving home much later than they did in the recent past and many are forced to return home or borrow from parents when they lose a job or income support, or in order to go to uni or tafe. Inheritance is also playing a much greater role in defining class difference as private home ownership is almost exclusively confined to those who get deposits from their parents. Changes to single parents’ payments, new approaches to the surveillance of people who receive income support, the ascendance of workfare, and the current reorganisation of the ‘human services’ market exert pressure to reproduce familial life. None of this has stopped people experimenting with share-housing, squats, care networks and other extra-familial ways of living. But people who are unable or unwilling to rely on family support often experience extreme forms of precariousness, punitive welfare regimes or homelessness.

In this panel we discuss the impact of these trends on the material possibilities of a queer, extra-familial life. We start from the premise that these developments are not accidental or inevitable but are the predictable effect of neoliberal economic policies adopted since the 1980s. Beginning with the Keating-Hawke government of the 1980s, both labour and coalition governments have pursued a policy of pushing back increases in wages and welfare while promoting the inflation of property and asset prices. In the meantime the new welfare consensus dictates that family should be the primary source of economic security. As John Howard once said, the family is “the greatest social welfare system the world has ever devised.” This is consistent with the old poor law tradition of family responsibility for welfare.

We explore the ways in which these developments have impacted on the imaginaries and possibilities of queer life and develop a critical perspective on the growing attachment to marriage and family in queer communities.

27th Feb 2016, Red Rattler, Sydney
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