Victorian Public Housing Towers: Decades of Neglect Exposed
By Direct Democracy
The Buildings That Governments Forgot
If you've ever driven along Flemington Road or through Fitzroy, Carlton, or North Melbourne, you've seen them: the brutalist concrete towers that have defined Melbourne's inner suburbs since the 1960s. Victoria's public housing high-rises - 44 towers in total, housing roughly 65,000 people across the state - were once a bold postwar experiment in affordable urban living. Today, they are monuments to decades of bipartisan neglect.
The condition of these buildings is not a matter of dispute. It's documented, reported, and repeatedly ignored.
What the Evidence Actually Shows
The Victorian Auditor-General's Office has repeatedly found that Homes Victoria (the state agency responsible for public housing) has failed to maintain its stock to acceptable standards. A 2023 audit found that the agency could not accurately account for the condition of a significant portion of its portfolio, and that maintenance backlogs had grown substantially over the preceding decade.
Some specific findings paint a damning picture:
- Lifts in many towers are routinely out of service for days or weeks at a time - a serious safety and accessibility issue for elderly and disabled residents who cannot use stairs
- Mould and water ingress are endemic, linked to respiratory illness among residents, including children
- Electrical and fire safety systems in some towers date back to original construction, with upgrades deferred repeatedly due to cost
- Waiting lists for public housing in Victoria now exceed 100,000 applications, with average wait times stretching beyond eight years for many applicants
The state government's own figures show that Victoria spends approximately $1.2 billion per year on housing and homelessness services - a significant sum that sounds impressive until you consider it is spread across a portfolio worth tens of billions of dollars in deferred maintenance and an ever-growing unmet need.
A Bipartisan Record of Failure
It would be convenient to blame this on one party, but the record is clear: both Labor and the Coalition have failed public housing residents over the past 30 years.
The Kennett government's savage cuts to public housing construction in the 1990s set the trajectory. Between 1996 and 2006, Victoria's public housing stock actually shrank in net terms, despite a growing population. Labor governments under Brumby and then Andrews increased some spending, but never at a scale sufficient to reverse the structural decline. The $5.3 billion Big Housing Build, announced by the Andrews government in 2020, was the largest housing investment in the state's history - but critics, including the Victorian Council of Social Service (VCOSS), noted that the net increase in public housing (as distinct from affordable housing managed by community organisations) was far more modest than the headline number suggested.
Meanwhile, the federal picture is equally bleak. The Howard government abolished the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement architecture that had funded public housing construction since the 1940s. Its replacement, the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement, provides states with funding but with far less obligation to build new social housing stock. Federal housing investment as a share of GDP has fallen dramatically since the 1980s.
| Era | Key Decision | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Kennett (Vic, 1992–99) | Slashed housing construction budget | Net reduction in public housing stock |
| Howard (Fed, 1996–2007) | Wound back Commonwealth housing agreements | Structural underfunding entrenched |
| Andrews (Vic, 2014–23) | Big Housing Build ($5.3B) | Modest net public housing gain; maintenance backlog unaddressed |
| Albanese (Fed, 2022–) | Housing Australia Future Fund | Criticised for insufficient scale and slow delivery |
Who Benefits From the Status Quo?
This is the question that rarely gets asked in polite political coverage. Public housing neglect doesn't happen by accident - it persists because it serves certain interests.
Private developers and property investors benefit from constrained public housing supply. Every year governments don't build, the private rental market tightens and yields improve. The political donor class in Australia skews heavily toward property ownership. Research by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) has consistently shown that housing policy in Australia is shaped more by the interests of existing property owners than by those of renters or housing-stressed households.
Residents of public housing - who are disproportionately First Nations people, people with disabilities, refugees, and single-parent families - are not a powerful political constituency. They vote at lower rates, they are geographically concentrated, and they are routinely stigmatised in media coverage that frames public housing as a social problem rather than a social asset.
Politicians respond to incentives. When your donor base owns investment properties and your marginal voters are homeowners worried about prices falling, the incentive to build and maintain quality public housing is weak.
What Would Voters Actually Choose?
Here's the thing: when Australians are asked directly, they support public housing investment. Polling by the Australia Institute and others consistently shows majority support for increased government spending on social and affordable housing, even when respondents are told it would require tax increases.
The gap between public opinion and public policy is not a mystery - it's a structural feature of a system where major parties respond to donors, lobbyists, and safe-seat calculations rather than the genuine preferences of citizens.
This is exactly the problem that direct democracy is designed to solve. If Victorians could vote directly on whether to fund a genuine, large-scale public housing maintenance and construction program - and if their elected representatives were bound to act on that result - the outcome would almost certainly look different from what 30 years of major-party government has delivered.
The people living in mouldy, lift-broken towers in Flemington or Collingwood are not asking for luxury. They are asking for safe, functional homes. The evidence says they are being failed. The question is whether voters - all of us - have the power to demand something different.
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