This article is a background to political economy, and why it matters in policy advocacy – in this case, in an approach to public housing. But it is also about political messaging, channelling Henry Lawson into a 2-minute housing video, and calling out neoliberalism.

This piece began as a background to the making of a short SACOSS video on why public housing matters, but ended up trying to explain what political economy is and what it offers to (and challenges in) social change advocacy.

Political Economy

The doyen of Australian political economy, Frank Stilwell describes the political economy approach as having four key features (in contrast to mainstream neoclassical economics). Political economy has:

• A central focus on inequality
• A pluralist method engaging different economic traditions
• An interdisciplinary inclination
• An ethical orientation in explicitly putting values, as well as facts, at the heart of analysis.

I plead guilty to all of the above. I would also note that the focus on inequality is a systemic one, not one based on individual differences, and that in a pluralist and interdisciplinary inclination, people’s stories matter. People are not simply economic actors or statistical units. They have unique stories and their representation matters.

This latter perspective is standard fare for advocacy in the charitable sector, but often at the expense of systemic analysis. This approach is encouraged by the demands of media and communications for powerful images and personal stories, but can end in disempowering “poverty porn” rather than social change.

But how do we do and communicate political economy, foregrounding the systemic nature of inequality, people’s experience and values?

Public Housing

This was the challenge for me at work earlier this year in developing a campaign call for a significant investment in public housing.

South Australia once had a national (and even international) leading public housing system, but over the last twenty plus years it has been diminished by aging stock and the sell-off of houses and land. Where public housing tenants made up 44% of renters in 1994, and 12% of the total housing market, in 2020 those numbers had reduced to 17% of renters and less than 5% of the total housing market (ABS data).

Unfortunately, the need for public housing had not diminished in that time. At 30 June 2020, the public housing waiting list was over 17,000 applicants – equivalent to 53% of total public housing stock (Productivity Commission data).

This decline and deficit was not an accident. It was driven by government policy and a significant ideological change in seeing public housing as a last-resort welfare measure (at best), or at worst simply overly expensive and counter-productive. This contrasts with the earlier vision of public housing as a market intervention at scale which reduces housing costs for all by increasing supply – a piece of public capital conditioning the private rental market.

In an era of neoliberal dominance where economists and governments had already decided that public housing is old-fashioned and a burden on the taxpayer, we were told it was best to highlight the waiting list and identify people/groups in need that were missing out. To appeal to sympathy in telling those personal/representational stories of stress and homelessness.

This approach ticks the box of a values-based policy, and it is a much easier policy and communication ask. With it, perhaps we could eek out some investment to house some more vulnerable people. But it would takes us back to the neoliberal frame of public housing as a welfare measure – the very approach which is part of the problem.

Economic Approaches to Public Housing

To develop this argument more, I again borrow from Frank Stilwell, in particular his categorisation of modern economic thought into conservative, liberal and radical schools.

In this framework, a conservative economic view sees a housing stress and homeless as an individual issue and government intervention in the housing market as counter-productive. Such intervention competes with productive capital and stops the market’s efficient allocation of housing. I know the theory, but personally, I just can’t see that the problem with Australia’s insane housing market is too much public housing!

A liberal approach might see homelessness as a market failure requiring intervention – for instance, subsidies or supports for individuals. While such interventions may be useful, by the nature of the underlying analysis, they are narrow in their focus and constrained within a market framework.

A more radical political economic approach would see housing stress and homelessness as systemic and relating to more than market supply and demand – a problem that also encompasses income, geography and infrastructure, cultural expectations, competing property rights, and entrenched and reinforcing patterns of inequality.

If this political economy analysis is correct, then it is easy to see how the provision of public housing at scale will help address the problem. Beyond just the provision of housing to those in need, it puts supply into the market creating downward pressure on all rents. It also provides for a different property regime (public rather than private ownership) where tenants have more rights through rent capping and tenancy protections. In contrast to fixed term private leases, public housing also provides a security of tenure and a permanency that challenges a cultural perception that renting is simply a pathway to the preferred status of home-ownership.

That is why public housing is important – and why ideology matters. The different ideological assumptions and analyses drive policy. And in this case, arguably the dominant schools of thought simply don’t have the breath of focus or the scale to address problems of housing stress and homelessness.

Henry Lawson and the video

And so, we arrived at the point of how to sell a political economy perspective on public housing. A short video would be nice!

Enter Henry Lawson. From my childhood I remember the great Australian poet’s “Faces in the Street”:

I wanted to channel that anger, the personalness of it, into a systemic ask that was not about poverty pornography or a charitable helping of the unfortunate. But I also knew that Lawson’s Red Revolution’s marching feet was probably not a winning argument!

So, I drafted words, and my colleague put music and images to create a short video. Thanks to her, it turned out to be much more than I anticipated.

It remains an amateur production with basic technology and limited resources. And it is a short piece which can’t do the full political economic analysis. But as a prototype, from my point of view it does a few things of particular interest/importance:

You can view the video here.

It is for others to judge whether the video is successful in making its point, or ticks all the boxes of a political economic analysis, or is useful as a communications tool. But regardless of the video, I remain convinced that the key issues around housing and homelessness (and much more) are ideological and political-economic, not ones of charity or welfare provision.

With apologies to Mr Lawson: