The House Standing Committee on Family, Community, Housing and Youth’s Inquiry into Homelessness Legislation reported in November that a 17 per cent increase in family homelessness and a 10 per cent increase in adult homelessness between the 2001 and 2006 censuses reflect issues associated with a decline in affordable housing and the private rental market. The definition of homelessness in the Supported Accommodation Assistance Act includes people who are at risk of eviction because their house or flat is too expensive. With 22.5 per cent of Australian households in housing stress (spending more than 30 per cent of their household income on housing and household debt) in 2005–06, and household debt increasing from $795 billion in June 2006 (RBA) to around $1.1 trillion in September 2008 (ABS), it seems that a growing number of people may fall under this definition. The number of Australians at risk of homelessness may number in the millions rather than the official figure of 105,000.

Now the homelessness sector is failing significantly to meet the increasing demand placed on it. The Salvation Army’s Crisis Housing Service says that it is seeing increasing numbers of middle class people who need crisis accommodation. Wesley Homelessness Services says that the Transitional Housing system is so clogged that people must stay in crisis accommodation in motels for months before they can move to transitional housing and there is simply nowhere for many people to go except back to the streets or horrendous boarding houses.

Figures only give us a partial picture. When people fall into homelessness they can approach a homelessness service. If they are a family and the service has funds, they may be placed in a motel. Anyone who saw the confronting Four Corners program ‘Last Chance Motel’ will understand the nightmare this presents for families: living in one room together, unable to cook, to have privacy, nowhere for the kids to play. So to be faced with the prospect of living this way for months at a time is a recipe for despair. This is now the reality for the homeless who are lucky enough to get placed. Wesley Homelessness Services sees 350–400 clients per month, placing twelve in transitional housing in 2009. There is a real problem.

Under the NRAS, the Commonwealth Government has pledged funds to support the development of 3000 dwellings in Victoria. The NRAS offers an annual National Rental Incentive of $6000 per dwelling per year refundable tax offset or payment and the State or Territory Government Incentive of $2000 per dwelling per year in direct or in kind financial support for a period of ten years. Participants include private land developers, real estate agents, non-profit organisations and local government, who will receive these payments in return for supplying dwellings to be rented at least 20 per cent below the market rate to eligible low and moderate income households.

Tenants who are eligible for the Scheme are those who qualify for rent assistance because they receive income support payments or Family Tax Benefit Part A, regardless of their housing affordability situation. The maximum incomes of those eligible range from $39,000 for a single age pensioner to $80,000 for a working family with three children under twelve. The dwellings will be managed by a Tenancy Manager, which would include private landlords and real estate agents. They will be subject to reporting requirements in relation to tenancy selection and management and continuing compliance.

Unfortunately according to the Victorian government Office of Housing these funds would need to be provided for ten consecutive years to clear the public housing waiting list. In Victoria the waiting list grows ever longer, increasing from 34,500 families in 2006 to more 39,000 and somewhere around 200,000 Australia-wide. The inadequacy of the scheme is hidden behind rhetoric which draws on the nation-building of the past—home ownership, the Australian Dream—but the times have changed. Today governments are too much in league with business to ever be able to provide housing as a social need rather than a commodity.

In a speech last year RBA Governor Glenn Stevens explained the way that speculation sets the price of housing rather than need. He argued that rents were rising at a rate higher than the CPI because there was strong demand for rental accommodation, and rents as a yield to the supplier had been unusually low. Earlier in the decade, Stevens explained, housing prices were increasing fast and capital gains returns were good, thus rents remained low. As housing price increases slowed, however, so did capital gains, so investors needed to increase returns. They did this by raising rents quickly. (Just prior to this, the Real Estate Institute and the Property Council of Australia conducted a media campaign ‘predicting’ large rent rises.)

We have a housing system where either rents need to be high or prices need to be increasing for stakeholders (that is developers, real estate agents and investors) to be satisfied, resulting, not surprisingly, in unaffordable housing. By its own logic this system will never deliver sufficient affordable housing for everyone.

Stevens went on to argue that higher interest rates will eventually slow demand, and in due course it will get more difficult to raise prices. This does not seem to have been born out over the last twelve to eighteen months. In the June 2009 quarter, house prices rose 4.2 per cent and, in the September quarter, the housing affordability index dropped 3.3 per cent. The sting in the tail is that higher interest rates mean greater housing stress and increases in homelessness.

The Rudd government’s feted stimulus package with its raft of housing grants for first home buyers and tax concessions has kept housing prices high, according to Professor Julian Disney. Real Estate Institute of Australia president David Airey announced that prices are rising because the number of first home buyers has increased from 15 per cent of all new home loans to 27 per cent, which has led to competition with investors for properties. Speculators, of course, like a bit of healthy competition. It keeps the market ‘buoyant’.

If the purpose of the NRAS is to bring down the price of housing, this will undermine the housing market which is based on attracting investors and developers into the market to make a short-term profit. These stakeholders have an interest in ensuring housing prices remain as high as possible. The paradox is that to attract private investment to build more houses to maintain supply, we need high house prices and high rents. This pushes everyone on a normal income out of the market, and creates more homelessness and housing stress. The only way that housing can be made more affordable is if the government, that is the taxpayer, foots the bill for the profits of developers, real estate agents and investors.

Other criticisms are made of the NRAS which further illustrate the problem of the public–private approach of Rudd’s housing policies. For one, ACOSS has grave concerns that the proposed system of valuations raises the potential for manipulation or inconsistency. There is a high likelihood that real estate agents and speculators will increase their rents on NRAS properties to accommodate the subsidies, thus undermining the purpose of the scheme. ACOSS suggests that market rents should be set by reference to area median rents. But if rents are already inflated and rising as a result of market mechanisms—read speculation—this will do very little. The purpose of the housing market is profit and speculation, not the provision of social services.

Further, the NRAS subsidy will increase annually in line with the rent component of the CPI. Given the expectation of continued rent increases, predicted in January this year as between 5 and 7 per cent by Australian Property Monitors, the level of assistance to developers provided by government increases continuously. The quantity of government money being gobbled up by voracious developers will mushroom out of control.

Another problem with the NRAS is that it will probably not assist as many people out of housing stress as is being claimed. Dr Rachel Ong and Professor Gavin Wood from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) have analysed the potential impact of the NRAS. They found that 11,512 households of 50,000 randomly selected eligible households were above the 30 per cent benchmark (30 per cent of household income being spent on housing and household debt). Of these, only 4,614 (40 per cent) would be brought below the 30 per cent benchmark after their rent was reduced by 20 per cent.

This situation worsens when looking at the poorest 20 per cent of households, where rates of housing stress are extremely high at 54 per cent of household income. The NRAS lowers average net housing costs to 34 per cent of income for these households. Barely one in four of the poorest households would be actually lifted out of housing stress. The NRAS is less effective in reducing rates of housing stress because the net housing costs of the poorest 20 per cent of NRAS eligible tenants are more likely to be markedly above the 30 per cent affordability threshold. AHURI has recommended that targeting the NRAS to lower-income households, rather than a random allocation to rent assistance-eligible households, would improve the Scheme’s capacity to alleviate the housing affordability circumstances of a larger number of households. As we have seen with public housing waiting lists, restricting access ends up in a blow-out in demand. As the market fails more people, increasing numbers of people are forced to seek access to the Scheme.

Conveniently, the NRAS could also be a means of cutting government expenditure. AHURI points out that one of the ‘rarely mentioned’ potential policy benefits of the NRAS is that it could create savings in rent assistance expenditure. Rent assistance payment rules could see some reductions in the amount paid to NRAS tenants. AHURI’s modelling estimates that rent assistance payments could be reduced by $21 million or 5 per cent. Unfortunately for the government, these ‘savings are somewhat smaller than might have been anticipated’ because 37 per cent of rent assistance recipients eligible for the NRAS continue to receive the same amount of rent assistance after the rent discount. ACOSS points out that if some tenants are ineligible for rent assistance or receive reduced payments they may be worse off under the NRAS. Again, this suggests that such public–private arrangements really do very little for creating affordable housing for people on low incomes.

Security of tenure remains an issue under the scheme. According to ACOSS, the NRAS does not provide tenants with longer leases or additional rights beyond those required by relevant landlord and tenant legislation. Dwellings occupied by very disadvantaged or high-needs households are more likely to need support to sustain their tenancies. Without that support, even if low-income and high needs households are given priority access to housing, they may be unable to sustain tenancies for extended periods. ACOSS raises doubts about the capacity of real estate agents to operate this type of housing. There is a real danger of these properties becoming hot spots for social problems and for the same people to continue to circulate through the homelessness system. Additionally, there is a genuine risk that, after ten years, private developers will simply sell off the stock and collect the capital gains, returning the housing stock to the open market and making a healthy profit.

A system where profit and speculation fix the supply and value of housing and where the government attempts to regulate this through indirect macroeconomic measures has resulted in housing that fewer and fewer people can afford to buy and rents that leave a large section of the population in housing stress and in danger of homelessness. People treat the housing market as a strange unpredictable beast, struggling to understand or calculate its next move. With increasing interest rates, many are now in danger of getting their heads bitten off. The government’s NRAS will do little to influence this monstrosity. In fact, I suspect, as with most PPPs, the government will simply end up paying out twice as much to private interests and the same people will continue to find themselves circulating through the merry-go-round of the housing system.

There are two basic ways of framing a resolution of relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. I will call them the ‘sacramental’ and the ‘pietistic’. In religious talk, sacramental paths to spiritual grace require a collective and ceremonial act. Pietistic ones are those of the individual in quiet communion with the divine.
Pietists stress a one-to-one relationship with the deity, unmediated by priestcraft or the collective witnessing of a symbolic sacrifice. Pietism is in some ways much more at home in an age of individualism than in ages of greater corporatism and communalism. The sacramental-sacrificial approach represents the reverse. It also goes back deep into Old World prehistory, to a time when animals and humans, not symbols, were sacrificed in human rituals.

That is about it, except for a few passing comments that do not add to this basic description. For Sutton, ‘sacramental’ is really a code for government-sponsored public programs paid for out of tax dollars, endless reports and posturing by politicians, all of which have failed dismally. In the second quotation above he has deviously added ‘sacrificial’, which is another category altogether and largely left alone. By contrast, ‘pietism’ acts as a catchword for private and personal ways of working in the world, outside the programs that seem to have failed. Why choose the terms sacramental and pietistic when collective and individual would have done perfectly well? Are they merely camouflage for criticisms of social democratic approaches and a championing of liberalism? Why do his criticisms of collective, government-sponsored projects sound like commentary by Miranda Devine or Andrew Bolt? Is not the ideology of the individual one of the worse aspects of colonialism itself? And what is the role of theology in debates over reconciliation?

In what follows I will try to answer these questions, although in the end I argue that Sutton has confused matters. What really is at issue is at best obscures by these terms: agency. Sacramentalism acts as a cover for one-directional agency, coming from the non-Indigenous and directed towards Indigenous people. By contrast, pietism conceals a pattern of mutual agency, consultation and joint decision-making. Yet Sutton has unwittingly raised another issue: the implicitly theological nature of many of the key ideas used in debates over reconciliation. Before I get to those matters, a few words on sacramentalism and pietism are in order.

Sacramentalism
First, the evil term: sacramentalism, which is a deeply Roman Catholic term. As one might expect in theology, fine distinctions bedevil any simple overview. But some patience is needed, since Sutton uses the term loosely, so much so that he badly misrepresents theology and confuses his own analysis (and his readers). Sutton claims that sacramentalism is collective and ceremonial, sacrificial and pre-historic.

He is mostly mistaken, for the word actually has two senses, neither of which suits his purpose. First, the word may refer to a ‘sacrament’, such as baptism or communion. The problem is that—strange as it may sound—the church has nothing to do with the effectiveness of a sacrament. Technically, a sacrament works through the act itself (ex opera operato). God transfers grace through the act and does not rely on any person, institution, state of mind or whatever. The act is sufficient; it is an objective act on God’s part. It is a little like the story of the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, and the horseshoe. Bohr lay ill out on his farm; a friend called and noticed the horseshoe above the door to his room. ‘I thought you didn’t believe horseshoes made you well’, said the friend. Bohr replied, ‘I’m told it works even if you don’t believe in it’. Clearly Sutton does not mean this sense of sacramentalism, since that would mean the objective, disinterested act of, say, adequate healthcare, an apology or a treaty, would be enough. Out of the four ways Sutton describes sacramentalism—ceremonial, collective, sacrificial and pre-historical. Is the sacrament ceremonial? Yes. Is it collective, sacrificial and pre-historic? No.

Perhaps Sutton means the ‘sacramentals’ (to be distinguished from the ‘sacrament’). These are acts that convey God’s grace only through the intercession of the church (ex opere operantis ecclesiae). What kind of acts? Grace at meals, a blessing, a ring at marriage, a simply act of kindness and so on. There is no definitive list, for a sacramental is the process through which human activities are made holy, mediated by the church. Now we have a collective dimension, since a sacramental relies on the church. But it is not necessarily ceremonial (it may be, but is not necessarily so), sacrificial or pre-historic.

So the theological terms don’t actually fit Sutton’s definition of ‘sacramentalism’. Or rather, they have a partial fit, depending upon what element one chooses. What is really going on with Sutton’s use of the term? I would suggest that sacramentalism for Sutton is quite bad camouflage for social-democratic, hand-wringing, lefty approaches to Indigenous and non-Indigenous reconciliation. But then he includes in this collective mix state-sponsored programs, reports and legislation. All of which comes under the umbrella of a theological term that is less than useful.

Two final observations: Sutton plays into an old Protestant polemic with his use of sacramentalism, for the word is usually connected with Roman Catholic theology. A strange move this, since it harks back to the major issue of religious conflict in Australia back in the 1950s and earlier, namely the Protestant–Roman Catholic divide. Riots, debates, political allegiances, mutual suspicions, bans on marrying across the divide—these were part of the social and religious scenery at the time. It is hardly useful to resort to those differences once again.

Further, a pernicious subtext also appears with Sutton’s description of sacramentalism as sacrificial and pre-historic. He hints that it is pre-Christian, but there is a dangerous slippage to an image of Indigenous life before Europeans arrived. Does he want to suggest that before the arrival of Christianity and its theological terms, Indigenous people too were prehistoric, given to animal and human sacrifice? On the surface, of course not, but beneath the text the hint is there.

Pietism
The favoured term is pietism, which Sutton describes as a one-to-one relation with God, one undertaken by an individual in quiet communion, more suited to an age of individualism (our own?). No mediators here, no priests or church or state, just individuals doing the best they can. For Sutton this is the way forward for reconciliation, although he does need to replace God with another human being. All that is needed is a ‘personal moral adjustment’ (p. 203) to interpersonal and collaborative reconciliation between two persons. Sutton uses the examples of individual acts of private reconciliation, in which people get on in their day-to-day lives, and in which the non-Indigenous person becomes a vocal critic of racist state policies: Lancelot Threlkeld and Biraban in the 1820s–1840s, Ursula McConnel and Billy Mammus in the 1920–1930s, and Lloyd Warner and Mahkarolla in the 1920s.

Is pietism up to task? At one level it is. Pietism has a distinct history with complex threads, but it is clearly a very Germanic, Protestant (especially Lutheran) and relatively recent development dating from the late 17th century. Its central concern was a life of deep religious commitment, rooted in inner experience and manifested in outward acts or the ‘practice of piety’.

So far, so good, at least for Sutton’s purposes. The catch is that pietism was ultimately a collective movement with strong political overtones. It sought to revive the church from within rather than break away from it. Indeed, the main stream of pietism was warmly welcomed by pastors and theologians in the German Lutheran Church in the 18th and 19th centuries and quickly became seen as a way to renew religious life. It soon spread to other parts of the world whether Lutheran Protestantism was strong, especially Scandinavia, Greenland and North America.

For Sutton’s argument pietism is useful in some senses but not in others. Inner experience, the place of God in one’s heart, lives lived in quiet faithfulness, and the impetus for individual philanthropic activity—all these elements work quite well for Sutton’s purposes. But he ignores the other elements of pietism, such as the collective and institutional nature of mainstream pietism, its desire for reform within the institution and its tendency towards conservatism.

Once again, I suggest that Sutton’s dip into theology is less useful than he might think. Pietism doesn’t simply mean individual relations, for it is also a deeply collective theological practice. In this respect, the word becomes in Sutton’s hands a cover for the sort of liberalism championed by Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, or their lesser followers in Australia like Andrew Bolt or Miranda Devine. Individual enterprise is the key, not collective approaches (which become totalitarian) or state intervention (the evil of ‘big government’).

Agency and Theology
Sutton’s use of the opposition between sacramentalism and pietism is in the end a caricature. By picking certain features and making them definitions of the whole, he has distorted both traditions, using them as poor camouflage for state-sponsored and individual solutions. However, I suggest that what lies behind Sutton’s argument is really the issue of agency. With sacramentalism he seems to mean agency from one quarter and moving in one direction: from non-Indigenous governments to Indigenous people. The former decides what is appropriate, depending more on the vagaries of electoral cycles, ideological positions, the power of lobby groups, and individual political careers. And then it acts, assuming it can fix all the problems with the latest program—the NT Intervention is the obvious recent example of this one-sided approach.

However, by pietism Sutton is pointing towards mutual agency, one that involves two or more people (I would add groups) who realise their own needs, shortcomings and limits, but above all the need to come to an understanding of one another and the need to act on that understanding. It takes little imagination to determine which approach is more desirable. The catch is that Sutton seems to think that this process is primarily an individual one, an argument that is ideological (in the bad sense) and hardly progressive.

My final question picks up another issue: the theological tenor of the reconciliation debate as a whole. Of course, a good of discussion has taken place on these matters within the progressive wings of the Christian churches, where debates and resolutions concerning reconciliation have been cast in explicitly theological senses. However Sutton, as a leading anthropologist, has done what the churches have not been able to do, since they so often remain closed circles: somewhat unwittingly, he has brought out and made public the underlying theological nature of the debate by invoking explicitly theological terms, even if he misses the mark in the specific terms he has chosen. In short, I would suggest that much of the terminology and mindset of reconciliation uses what may be called secularised theological ideas. Emptied of their theological content and refilled with political and social content, they still trail many theological assumptions behind them. For example, reconciliation itself is one such term (between God and human beings), as is the idea of guilt (collective or individual—an issue in the Howard years), and even covenant or treaty.

However, before we rush in to claim theological ideas for resolving the relations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, we need to investigate those terms carefully, especially since Christian theology came with European invasion, embodied in the person of Samuel Marsden who filled the role in the early colony of both clergyman and judge. The problem is that all of these key terms assume an unequal relationship, God on the one side and human beings on the other. Guilt is what one feels towards God for having disobeyed and sinned; reconciliation is for human beings alone, since we need to be reconciled to God; a covenant is made between unequal partners, one more powerful and the other less so. This imbalance often carries through to the secular uses of such terms.

So I would suggest that in the current debates we would do well to investigate the implicit theological assumptions of the key terms. Who is the more powerful one in the process of negotiating a treaty? Who is the guilty party? The NT Intervention shifts the guilt squarely onto Indigenous people, who then need to be ‘punished’ for their ‘sins’. But then those who oppose the intervention argue for the guilt of the colonisers, who then need to make amends. And is it possible to produce a process of reconciliation that either recognises the thereby seeks to negate the imbalance of power, or is it possible to come up with a reconciliation that removes such imbalance?

Apart from taking voyages by ship and cycling as far and as often as he can, Roland Boer is a writer and a critic based at the University of Newcastle. His intellectual background is in theology, political philosophy and Marxism and he is finishing a five volume series called The Criticism of Heaven and Earth (Brill and Haymarket).