The “NO SURRENDER!” T-Shirts designed by Reg Mombassa are available at the Captain Cook Hotel and the The Hero Of Waterloo Hotel All proceeds of the sales go towards the Millers Point, Dawes Point & the Rocks Public Housing Tenants Group Fighting Fund.
With tough federal budget cuts flowing on to the states the pressure to sell off the public housing in Millers Point will only be increased. And then it will roll on to privatizing the next layer of inner city social housing in Glebe, Woolloomooloo, Newtown and so on ...and on. And with this punitive budget, the stresses on public housing tenants will increase in other areas of their lives as well. As it will for anyone else with a tenuous toe hold on inner city housing We need to ask the question: How sustainable is a city of housing available only to the wealthy? The garbage still needs collecting, the offices cleaned, the hotel beds made, the cafes staffed. And when people who do all this essential work are banished to outer Sydney and subjected to ever longer commutes then other problems multiply. It doesn't make much sense in plain economic efficiency terms, let alone in terms of environmental sustainability. And that's way before we get to the issues of social justice and just plain decency. Do we want to live in a place that is just for the wealthy that generates disasters elsewhere in the totality of the urban ecology of the city?
Liam Hogan's piece in The Guardian is well worth a read. Click on image above.