Councillor for the Gabba Ward, Jonathan Sriranganathani, is organising an occupation of post office square Brisbane to challenge the Brisbane City Council's failure to provide public housing for the homeless.
The image is of Jonathan Sriranganathan look at the West Village development in West End in Brisbane.
Here is a rough transcript of some of his speech:
COUNCILLOR Sriranganathan:
Thanks. I rise to speak on homelessness, gentrification and city planning. Approximately 10,000 Brisbanites are currently experiencing homelessness and roughly 30,000 homes are sitting empty long term. If you walk this city's streets late in the evenings, you'll see people sleeping on park benches, in bus stop shelters, back alleys and shop doorways, and there are also many, many more struggling out of sight, sleeping in cars, homeless shelters, precarious short-term rentals, abandoned warehouses and parking lots and couch-surfing in overcrowded homes of friends and relatives.
In the last 10 years homelessness in this city has increased at a much higher rate than general population growth. Developers and investors have been allowed to knock down cheaper housing and replace it with overpriced apartments that are often left vacant. This problem has been ignored for too long and now our community's foundations are starting to crack. The City Councillors in this room are among the most powerful people in the city. You have the power to do more to fix this and I'm calling on all of you to get off your arses and step up.
CHAIR: Councillor Sri...
COUNCILLOR Sriranganathan: The roof's leaking and all you're doing is placing buckets under the drips.
CHAIR: Perhaps, I mean I understand the sentiment, but just a classier term please.
COUNCILLOR Jonathan Sriranganathan: Sorry, arses isn't classy enough.
Some would say that we as Councillors don’t actually have much real control over our city, that in fact the big developers, property speculators and bankers shape our metropolis and make the real decisions. But if that's true, it's only because the major party politicians who run our system have sold out to the corporate sector. You've handed over the keys to the city behind closed doors and now our communities are suffering as a result.
Our high rates of Aboriginal homelessness and youth homelessness are particularly shameful, as is the chronic shortage of crisis accommodation for people experiencing domestic violence and family violence. Too many people remain in abusive relationships because they can't afford to move out. It makes me wonder what good is all this so-called economic growth if wealth inequality is still rising, wages are stagnating and more and more people are struggling to afford a home.
If someone were to burn down the offices of an exploitative real estate agency, you would condemn them vociferously. Yet every day when agents and landlords evict families into homelessness because they can't afford rising rents, you say nothing.
Shelter is a fundamental human right, but leaving the provision of housing up to the private sector has failed spectacularly. Too many investors would rather rent their properties out to wealthy tourists via Airbnb or leaving them empty long term instead of dropping the rent. Supply will never meet demand because the demand for profit is insatiable and if private property prices ever stop rising for a few months, the developers stop building. Not only is our current housing system exploitative and unjust, it's also economically unsustainable.
