This morning, we looked at a very expensive-looking house. It had multiple bedrooms, a waiting room outside, and a separate main entrance. It was really well-kept, but obviously empty, and it has been since at least 2018. Beautiful garden, beautiful backyard, nice little shed, but completely empty. It’s still connected to the utilities — we played with the taps and turned on the switches. That’s what the housing crisis looks like to me. We have homeless people and we have vacant houses like this. And I just think that’s really wrong.

Even for people who are housed, the standard of our housing in Australia sucks. It’s so bad. It’s falling apart around us and on us. We’ve seen properties that are infested with black mold, with leaking roofs or with doors and windows that won’t lock — and we’re paying for the privilege of that. It’s partly due to weak regulations governing rental and construction standards and partly from underinvestment in public housing.

We’ve known about these issues for a long time and have only recently started calling it a “crisis.” That’s because in addition to hurting poorer people, it’s now starting to hit those who were once seen as well-off. The income you need today to afford a house is at least one and a half times the average wage.

They don’t do anything. At the end of the day, they provide nothing of value. They don’t provide housing — the workers that built the house provide the housing. All landlords do is own houses. That’s not productive. In fact, it’s the opposite.

In Australia, you’ve got this landlord class that’s on average older and better off — and they’re getting wealthier. That’s because landlords take advantage of other people’s work, using rent to subsidize their mortgages — or, for the richer ones, their lifestyles. Even if they got into the property market thanks to a well-paying job, being a landlord isn’t a real job. It’s literally a passive income. What admin work there is, they outsource to property managers.

It’s not just that landlords don’t contribute — they’re making things worse. By building multiproperty investment portfolios, they’re driving up prices and contributing to artificial scarcity. Based on Australian Tax Office statistics, twenty thousand investors rent on six or more investment properties. What that means is that whenever someone can’t get a place to live, those individuals are directly to blame. No one needs seven homes — they’re property hoarders.

Our political class is overpaid, out of touch, and spends too much time sexually assaulting women. The lowest salary you can get as a federal MP is like $220,000. Those people don’t know what it’s like to be on an average wage, let alone to live in a shitty rental or to experience homelessness. They don’t get it and they never will — and why would they want to?

On top of that, politicians are overwhelmingly landlords. Tony Burke, the Labor minister for home affairs, owns two residential properties, one in Sydney and one in Canberra. On top of that, he has another four investment properties. Why would he listen to renters when he’s directly making money from them?

The housing crisis boils down to housing being too expensive. Housing costs have skyrocketed, making it increasingly difficult for average Australians to secure stable, quality housing.

To be clear, I don’t like looking at housing purely as a market issue. I believe housing is a fundamental human right and not a commodity to be traded for profit. But that’s unfortunately the reality under our current capitalist system. So a good first step would be the government taking a much more active role in housing provision. There’s a prevalent narrative that governments don’t or can’t build housing, And it’s true that currently, they don’t. But they absolutely could if they wanted to. The fact is, they’re choosing not to.

Public housing also needs to be a core part of the solution now. By increasing the stock of public housing, we increase supply, effectively reducing overall housing costs. And meanwhile, we also build up a public housing sector that isn’t subject to the same profit-seeking that drives the private market.

Ultimately, we need to stop seeing the housing crisis as an inevitable outcome of market forces and start seeing it as a policy choice. It’s pretty simple when you think about it — with the right political will, the government builds houses for people who need them, not for speculators and property hoarders.

There’s a meme going around comparing antihomeless architecture in capitalist and socialist societies. Under capitalism, park benches and other things incorporate hostile design to prevent homeless people from sleeping there. But under socialism, antihomeless architecture is simply public housing. That’s the core of it. In a socialist system, the government builds housing for people who need it.

This is an excellent question and it’s one I get asked a lot. My basic answer is, “Why not do both?”

My more elaborate answer is that I believe community organizing and campaigning are more important than trying to win seats in parliament. But electoral campaigning can both strengthen that and help us win smaller victories.

To explain what I mean, politicians determine the methods and severity by which we are exploited. If we can lessen exploitation even a little bit while we campaign in our communities for better, then I think that is a win.

But on a bigger scale, I agree with [Vladimir] Lenin. He argued that participation in a bourgeois parliament helps bring about its destruction. What I understand by that is that if socialists can win a big enough following, in elections and otherwise, then we can prove in practice that the ruling class isn’t going to just let us abolish capitalism by legislation. When Lenin said that socialists should participate in parliament to prove that it’s “politically obsolete,” it meant using elections to strengthen a mass movement that can transform the system at a deeper level.

In more day-to-day terms, I want to use this campaign to stir up and amplify discontent, and to give voice to the millions of renters who currently don’t have one. Hope is important and can be a motivator. But discontent is a more powerful force for change. Hope can have a more passive, “white moderate” flavor that I think encourages a passive “I’ll be fine” kind of attitude. Mass discontent, on the other hand, breeds urgency. It leads to a “we’re going to fix this now, because we’re stuffed if we don’t” mentality. For me, that’s where real change begins.

I think massive investment in public housing is the most important thing, and I don’t mean the bare minimum — I mean abundant public housing that’s accessible to anyone who wants it. And to build it, we could set up a publicly owned not-for-profit developer.

At the same time, we obviously need to abolish negative gearing and the capital gains tax exemptions for investment properties. And we need a more prohibitive vacant land tax, as well as a ban on short-stay accommodation that should be used to house people long-term. Those measures would push housing prices down.

To protect renters, another thing I want to push is a national agency — with renters on its board — that sets rent controls. That way, rents could be capped so they reflect the real value of properties and renters’ incomes.

A national agency could also set and enforce minimum standards and punish landlords and real estate agents that do the wrong thing. If you’re renting out a property and you know it’s unsafe, you get more than a slap on the wrist — the worst landlords and agents should face jail time. And the onus should be on landlords to provide safe, decent places. They should have to get a “rent-worthy certificate” on any property they want to lease out, like if you own a car.

And politicians who own investment properties should be forced to sell before taking a seat — or at least they should be banned from voting on things that are a conflict of interest. There are so many other things we should do — but those points are a good start.

I get asked this question a lot. I’d also like to preface my answer by saying I like the Greens, and particularly the Queensland Greens, who are doing a lot of things right.

But ultimately I’m a socialist and the Greens are not a socialist party. There’s a really good Jacobin interview where Adam Bandt [leader of the Australian Greens] discusses this. He stresses working alongside socialists and acknowledges that some Greens consider themselves socialists, and as he says, “That’s fine too.” Fair enough, and of course leftists should work together. But it also points out that the Greens aren’t consistently against capitalism in the way socialists are.

Basically, the Greens as a party believe in engaging with and negotiating with capitalism, to achieve better outcomes for people under this system. I believe in the destruction of capitalism, the capitalist class, and its institutions.

Also, the Greens have landlords in parliament. And I hate landlords. Victorian Socialists have rules that ban landlords and class traitors from being candidates. So that’s a big plus.

RAHU does amazing work, and it draws on a tradition that many people don’t know about. Historically, we had really strong tenant unions all across Australia. They were member-owned organizations that fought hard for renters’ rights. And they were successful to the extent that governments started building public housing, mostly after World War II.

This changed the way we think of renting — it became seen as a temporary step on the path to homeownership, rather than long-term housing. This shift had a big impact on tenant organizations. While they haven’t disappeared completely, many have transitioned from being member-owned to government-funded. This dramatically altered their approach to advocacy. In the past, tenant unions were more militant, for example, organizing rent strikes to put direct pressure on landlords and the government.

Now their activities are more focused on providing services like legal advice. Don’t get me wrong — these services are crucial and help a lot of people. But there’s a noticeable gap between what these organizations do now and what they used to do. Groups like RAHU are now trying to fill that gap with more militant tactics and by pushing for systemic change.

The union movement more generally hasn’t been as forthright as it could be. This is just me speculating, but I think one reason is because the average union member — and certainly the average union leader — is older and owns their home. It’s not that they don’t care, but it’s not as pressing an issue for them

But here’s the thing. If unions don’t engage with issues like housing that disproportionately affect younger people, they miss out on potentially recruiting young members. Young people are more likely to join unions if they see unions fighting for things that matter to them.

I’ve been arguing for and helping to organize squatters, both as a way to get a roof over their heads, and because it’s one way to directly tackle the problem of vacant properties. And I noticed that the same people who were angry about it were often the ones with Zionist symbols in their profiles. It’s like, how can you be against squatting in vacant homes but support the violent occupation of Gaza and the whole of Palestine?

Look, it’s obviously not a perfect comparison. One is an armed, violent occupation, and the other is reclaiming unused space, which is actually legal to do. But the reaction I saw online made me wonder: How can someone be against peaceful adverse possession while supporting the violent occupation of a whole country? Isn’t there a disconnect there?

I think it comes down to property and racism. How can you be pro-squatting when it comes to colonizing Australia and taking land from indigenous people, and then be anti-squatting when it comes to landlords? If you’re pro-squatting then and anti-squatting now, it might be a racist thing. It might be because you support property for white settlers, but not Aboriginal people or Palestinians — or renters, for that matter.

We know that politicians aren’t listening. So the most important thing to do is to organize to make them listen. When we come together as a collective and make politicians realize “oh, these people are organized and they vote, they could cost me my cushy salary” — that’s when the government will act.