Housing campaigner Jordan van den Lamb, also known as Purple Pingers, is the Victorian Socialists’ lead Senate candidate. He spoke to Â鶹´«Ã½â€™s Chloe DS about solutions for the housing crisis and tactics to build renters’ rights and housing affordability.
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What made you stand up for the rights of renters and those without secure homes?
I was incensed by the injustice and seeing it made me want to do something about it. At the time, during COVID-19, I was working in child sex abuse. I wanted to talk publicly about the injustices I was seeing but I couldn’t. The next closest thing [to talk about] was renting. So that’s what started it.
How can the housing crisis be solved? And how much do the solutions that you might have challenge capitalism?
The good thing is that there are so many ways that we can solve the housing crisis.
We’ve had hundreds of Senate and parliamentary inquiries into the housing crisis and thousands of recommendations that all say the same thing, over years and years. It’s actually relatively easy from a political perspective. But as socialists, we know that that’s not going to happen. The ruling class will never do that.
The problem is that it’s really easy for the ruling class to do this. But there are heaps of policy solutions we can talk up, like massively improving public housing, massively building public housing, rent cuts, rent freezes backdated to 2021 levels when rent was relatively more affordable. We could audit empty homes and establish a national bank to provide home loans without a profit incentive for first home buyers.
We can do all of that. It’s really simple. But they won’t do that.
The solution needs to come from working-class people. There are heaps of things that we can do. For example, rent strikes, squatting and occupations. Things like that would really put pressure on the ruling class.
If it happened en masse around the country, not paying off mortgages would put mad stress on the housing market. It would require banks to foreclose on those properties, which would massively crash the price of housing.
There are heaps of things that we can do that don’t require the ruling class to be nice to us.
How are the major parties’ policies falling short? Why do you think they use racism against migrants and refugees to sell their housing solutions?
First, all the studies show that refugees and migrants are not the cause of the housing crisis. The cause is the ruling class failing to provide public housing for all who need it. The data shows housing supply has increased far greater than the rate of population growth.
When Labor leans into that argument, it cedes ground to the Liberals and the further right, outwardly racist parties.
The major parties say the problem is “supplyâ€. That’s their argument. [But] we have a distribution issue, not a supply issue. Yes, we do need to build more homes. Yes, we do need to build more public housing.
But, at the moment, in Victoria, the last census had 30,000 people experiencing homelessness in the entire state. In metropolitan Melbourne alone, excluding the Mornington Peninsula, which is technically metropolitan Melbourne but has an overwhelming amount of holiday homes, there were 97,000 empty homes.
So, we have a distribution issue. There are more than enough houses for everyone, but they are being land banked by the owning class and developers. Let’s distribute homes equally and build public housing.
The ruling class have policies that do literally nothing for renters. And their policies on home ownership will increase the cost of housing.
Can you talk about the scaremongering about squatting?
If you don’t want someone to squat in your empty house, don’t have an empty house. It’s pretty simple.
People who are experiencing homelessness in your community are your neighbours and you should care about them. If a squatter moves into an empty house next to you, they’re your neighbour too, just like they were if they were sleeping rough and you should care about them, regardless of whether they have a roof over their head or not.
What could a socialist voice in parliament achieve?
So much. We saw a little example when [Prime Minister Anthony]
Having a socialist in parliament would allow us to build class struggle, amplify class struggle, use that exorbitant salary by putting it to good use — a strike fund or community organising.
There’s so much stuff that we could do outside of parliament if we had a voice in parliament. We saw examples in this country, like with Fred Paterson, using his office to shout at the ruling class, hurling accusations at the oppressors sitting directly in front of him. That’s what we’d do.
There’s a lot of interest in minor parties in this election, as people increasingly don’t trust the major ones.
Why should people vote socialist?
Vote socialist this election if you want to build the power of the working class, if you want wages to rise, if you don't want to suffer with a 30-year mortgage that you can’t afford, if you want politicians put on a working wage so that they’re more in line with the things we are experiencing and suffering from.
Vote socialist if you want services to be nationalised, affordable, free and provided for by the government, because we have enough money to do that. You should vote socialist if you disagree with spending $400 billion on a couple of [nuclear-powered] submarines and handing over tens of billions in subsidies to landlords, property developers, banks and oil companies.
It’s been a privilege being able to support people like Socialist Alliance’s Sue [Bolton] and Sarah [Hathway] in this election. I hope we get to do more in the future.