Australian households are directly responsible for 20 per cent of Australia’s carbon emissions. Yet the persistent focus on individual responsibility to reduce our carbon footprint ignores the fact that most Australians have little to no control over the biggest contributor to household emissions – the energy efficiency of their homes.

Government subsidies for Airbnb owners impacted by COVID-19 expose how speculative property investment is now expected to return a guaranteed economic reward.

Despite decades of advocacy, renters’ struggles remain socially marginal, with little scope for renters to self-represent, demonstrate collective power, and exert political force. As the pandemic exacerbates the quotidian struggles of renters and people in precarious housing, it is increasingly clear that a militant collective response is required.

I remember the last pandemic to really hit Borroloola. The Hong Kong flu came in the 1960s and changed the way we lived forever. My mum sat us down and said, ‘this flu will come and kill our people.’

We can continue to deny a fundamental right in the name of investment opportunities, or we can imagine a future where everyone has a roof over their head. Now is the time to push for change and include in our demands a national housing guarantee. If the last few weeks have proved anything, it is that change is only ever a pen stroke away.

The more compassionate economic responses to this crisis have shown that the workings of our society could be changed at any time. Keeping up the political pressure to make currently-equitable changes permanent will require a lot of work, but the benefits will be beyond most people’s wildest dreams.

Grenfell Tower shows that to understand class and power, we have to understand housing, because the question of how and where people live is right at the heart of modern capitalism.

Negative gearing and the economics of housing – a cartoon by Fury.

Since 1996, reports from the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur have stated that there is a major hidden housing crisis in Australia and their subsequent annual reports have reiterated this. The 2006 Report stated that the Special Rapporteur was ‘particularly troubled by the inadequate housing and living conditions’ and that, ‘unfortunately, this situation is not acknowledged by the authorities’. The crisis remains unacknowledged by authorities ten years later.

There are three broad avenues into any conversation on this debacle. One is the brazen illegality of what transpired. Another is the cultural mourning. And the last one is a concentrated nausea toward developers who act unscrupulously. A general revulsion at what went on is the communal hangover.

I get the sense that Brutalism is in need of getting dressed; clothed in white, perhaps, or some other colour in the Taubmans paint box, in order to push back the grey we already see all over our cities. It is the palette – the veneer – that needs to be rendered differently.

Two dramas recently showing in Australian cinemas, 99 Homes and Time Out of Mind, vividly chronicle life in post-GFC America. Each, in its own way, is an essay on the decline of the American dream as it pertains to one of its core tenets: home ownership. But where, I found myself wondering after the credits had rolled, was Black America in all this?

Until last Friday, around twenty homeless people had set up camp in Melbourne’s City Square, creating shelter where it elsewhere eluded them, as a public petition for more secure, affordable housing in Australia’s second most populous city. The presence of the camp was also a visceral risposte to claims, which appeared in the mainstream media last week, that homeless people had been behaving unpalatably, including asking passers-by for money in an aggressive fashion.

I turn the situation obsessively, calculating routes and modes and travel times, but the result is always the same. I’m spending almost as long travelling to work as actually working. I’ve heard it said that Melbourne is a most liveable city, but how can that be? Travel between regional towns and centres, and the city, has stretched to unbelievable lengths for what is a twenty-first century, first-world context. The median cost of rent has jumped to over $400 a week in Melbourne.