Everything about the 4 Corners episode (“Unaffordable. Australia's broken housing promise”) was wrong, wrong, wrong. The program misstated or misunderstood the key issues, confused the facts, relied on anecdotes rather than hard evidence, was visually and audibly horrible, and had far too much of the featherweight reporter. It was so irredeemably awful that it may have actually regressed the issue publicly.

Misreporting the key issues

Housing is arguably the major issue in society these days. It deserves a serious, long-overdue forensic look. It’s central to so many social problems: housing insecurity leads to mental and physical health issues, and punishing rental regimes and a lack of social housing encourage crime, homelessness, and suicide. It’s at the critical centre of all indigenous health and welfare issues.

Our once ‘she'll be right, Jack' egalitarian society has been driven asunder, with rising inequality at the heart of Australia's social upheaval. The wealthy own 10 or more houses, whilst a third will never own a house; all the while, homelessness increases.

This is serious. Any one of a dozen researchers or public intellectuals could have steered them towards a worthwhile discussion. But this inquiry into affordability was flawed right from the start, making rookie errors and misrepresentations with frivolous or marginal anecdotes.

Confusing the facts

Among those housing issues, they picked the low-hanging fruit and dropped it. If you want to talk about affordability, you first need to distinguish between housing affordability (to buy) and affordable housing (to rent).

Secondly, in rentals, you need to distinguish between affordable housing (based on a discount of the building value) and social housing (based on a fixed rate of the tenant’s income).

Those key definitions were never made clear, so the whole program rested on misunderstandings for the tortured 44 minutes. They even had ‘Capital A affordable housing’, which I never heard in 50 years of housing design and policy (but AI tells me the SMH invented it two years ago).

At the start, the reporter says, “We were promised a solution to the housing crisis." Well, no, we weren't.

We were promised 1,200,000 new homes in 5 years, with only 20,000 (or 1.7%) being directly federally funded affordable homes, and a Housing Affordable Future Fund (HAFF) delivering a further 55,000 (or 4.6%) new social and affordable homes. No expert thinks that’s a solution.

It’s a series of small interventions and a long way from what’s needed, more like 10% social and 10% affordable. Just saying those numbers in ‘the plans’ would be more illuminating about the extent of the issues than anything presented in the program.

Needless to say, in this property-obsessed culture, the focus from then on was on economics, not on dignity, social justice, and human rights.

Anecdotal nonsense

Two projects were explored, one in NSW and one in Victoria, but both got mired in anecdotal cul-de-sacs, leaving the ideas muddled.

The ‘Chimes’ in Potts Point is a building of 80 small apartments that a consortium, including James Packer, has purchased for redevelopment into 23 affordable and 21 luxury apartments. Its transformation from many small to a few luxury units is turbocharged by the NSW Infill Affordable Housing Act, which allows an extra 30% floor area and 30% height if 15% of units are affordable for 15 years.

The Act is fatally flawed for its limited value and devastating impact on locals, which everyone except the planning minister acknowledges. But all that failure is lost in the program, as it spends precious minutes concentrating on an elderly owner who paid out for her apartment. In Australia’s greatest concentration of homelessness, she seemed the least aggrieved ‘homeless’.

In this analysis, based on superficial anecdotes, viewers fail to grasp the magnitude, breadth, and depth of the rorting of affordability rules, even if the plans identified the horrible concept of a ‘poor door’.

The Victorian project is by ‘Assemble’, regarded by many, including your columnist, as a fine example of mixing social (25%), affordable (50%), and market (25%) homes. We could quibble about the proportions, but the beauty of the Victorian legislation is that the social housing remains in perpetuity, and the affordable housing is kept for 25 years.

A potential tenant who didn’t meet the income ‘band’ (it’s not clear why) is quizzed, and then 5 minutes are wasted making an arcane point about a few affordable houses that haven't yet been let. Hard facts are in short supply, but that doesn’t stop the reporter from rudely confronting the federal housing minister about that minor issue. Clare O’Neill deserved better respect and much tougher questioning.

Two more: at the Macquarie Park development, social and affordable housing rules are confused. Whilst upsetting for the tenant to have her rental increased by Mission Australia, it is within the terms of affordable housing, not social housing. And the reporter and guest are guessing how much affordable housing rents might be in Wollongong. Ten minutes of research would give you the numbers.

Experts vs. the vox pop

In addition to those anecdotes, there are a few articulate experts, but not enough. Peter Phibbs, from the University of Sydney, has a most admirable non-academic turn of phrase, calling the current affordability laws “bullshit”.

Independent, Alex Greenwich is great on TV but is not someone with his hands on the levers of housing policy. That’s Rose Jackson in NSW Labor. In one illuminating passage, her colleague Paul Scully, the planning minister, shows why he is so poorly regarded in both politics and policy.

Rather than a vox pop of aggrieved tenants, I’d prefer to hear from John Engeler, Chair of National Shelter, or UNSW’s City Futures’ Hal Pawson, Chris Petit, and Bill Randolph, who together lead Australia's best researchers on housing and affordability. These people devote their lives to understanding complex problems with accurate figures, rather than selective, isolated, hearsay, and cherry-picked anecdotal evidence.

And if the experts are interviewed next time, some skills are needed. The abrasive interview approach to both the NSW and Victorian planning ministers, centered on particular individual cases, rather than inquiring into the fallacies of the overall planning laws. It made it easy for the planning ministers to sidestep, even past the rude interjections.

Horrible to watch and listen to

As watchable TV, it was equally terrible. Time-wasting mood shots of unidentified buildings and beautiful scenery, with little to do with affordable or social housing. Often erroneous. Having mentioned King's Cross, the image is of St James's railway station, 5 km away. The Chimes is confused with Aaron Bolot’s 17 Wylde apartments, and on and on, coated with entirely unnecessary musical interludes instead of detailed analysis and argument.

Messy content was served up as a slapdash series of TikTok videos in an undergraduate Insta reel.

The peripheral reporter at the centre

And then there’s the ‘reporter’, who thrusts himself into the limelight at every opportunity. He will remain nameless, while we slam the amateurish way in which the program was presented. My advice would be to step away from the screen and stop being in every frame (and, as an aside, remove the lollies from the top shelf of your car)—a junior journalist presenting a fruit salad of a program.

And finally

4 Corners is an ornament to Australian TV—the very best of investigative reporting and in-depth analysis on critical societal issues. The housing crisis, at the center of inequality, health, crime, and many other societal ills, is a serious issue, equal to political corruption. It deserves far better from the ABC than this confused and counter-productive porridge.

Must try harder.

Cross-Sections are Friday musings from Tone Wheeler, formerly of Tone on Tuesday. Amateurs draw plans; professionals draw sections – never at cross-purposes.

Tone Wheeler

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