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Since the Robert Menzies Liberal government first began undermining the once great public housing scheme, state and federal governments have continued to favour sell-offs to developers over making safe, affordable housing a basic human right.

Despite the , governments are selling off , continues.

shows as at April 30 there were 65,758 households waiting for social housing: 11,161 were waiting for priority housing. 

���Բ�������������’s&�Բ�����;�Ѳ�������&�Բ�����;shows private rentals are now completely unaffordable for those on minimum wages or pension incomes. The result is an unprecedented power imbalance between landlords and tenants, which is driving a .

It is a particularly perilous matrix when your landlord is also your government.

According to the January , the term “public housing” now includes state-owned and managed public housing, social housing, Indigenous housing, community housing and Indigenous community housing. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s  report equates that to 824,000 people living in 446,000 dwellings.

Yet, despite record funding in the , Labor is yet to rise to the enormity of the task, amid  failures.

Maintenance backlog

said in June last year it had received 24,592 urgent maintenance requests for that financial year and conceded it was not keeping up. “We know current response times on maintenance requests have deteriorated,” it said in what can only be described as an understatement.

In response,  promised a simpler process for logging and tracking repairs, saying management would go back to being in-house, but the work would still be done by contractors.

Tenants say the breakdown in communication between contractors and the department is the primary problem and going through the “correct channels” to negotiate solutions has become pointless, with frustrations reaching boiling point.

Slater and Gordon, representing thousands of tenants living in substandard public housing in remote communities across Western Australia, has  in the Federal Court of Australia.

A group of Canberra’s social housing tenants, who also want their day in the , has had the way cleared for a class action against the ACT government over its plan to move them from their homes under its “” program.

 may well be next, as desperate tenants increasingly seek  and  redress, saying the  is rigged against them. The tenants say Homes NSW has still not addressed chronic maintenance delays and , as liveable but .

Amid major difficulties with departmental communications, &�Բ�����;—&�Բ�����;�ڲ����dzܲ�����clueless about how much it  — is accused of refusing to engage directly with the community as contract maintenance and disabled modification systems continue to fail.

In posts to the NSW Housing Misconduct Reporting Facebook page, frustrated tenants took aim. “Elected officials have a responsibility to accurately represent and serve the people in social housing” .

“Engaging directly with the community would provide valuable insight. Maintenance has not improved and residents continue to live in unacceptable conditions with significant safety concerns.”

Unsafe living conditions

Many of the problems the tenants raise have been well documented.  as it has .

 remains a significant issue as the lingers and works schedules stall. Disabled tenants are being trapped in and out of units with , creating catastrophic fire risk.

Tenants using walkers or wheelchairs are often unable to  in their homes due to the dysfunctional patchwork of schemes, approvals and delays of the disabled modification scheme. 

Should a tenant have  or a , the complexity of application only intensifies as departments play pass-the-parcel on costs and responsibility.

Some properties, for structural reasons, are unable to be appropriately modified. Given the government’s continued championing of the neoliberal model, it is unable to concede the  it created leaves those tenants nowhere else to go.

While the public housing management merry-go-round continues, residents’ physical and mental health is suffering as they mourn more members of their communities. New data shows a  among people experiencing homelessness, with people dying decades earlier than the general population because of critical shortages in housing and support services.

Inappropriate housing and lack of support services is also making mental health worse for public tenants, with often .

A recent Mental Health Australia report, , said the government needs to do more to expand the availability of housing options, support sustained tenancies and improve early intervention and response services for the growing crisis in mental health.

One tenant, who wished to remain anonymous, told 91������̳ they had heard it all before. “The government budgets billions and has a big press conference but, for us, nothing ever changes,” they said. “And they treat us with such disrespect.”