Governmentality as critique: the diversification and regulation of the Australian housing sector

Abstract

As the housing affordability crisis in Australia deepens, policy-makers have expended considerable resources in establishing new regulatory practices to enhance the role of the community housing sector. Ostensibly, the rationale for a new tier of regulation is to assure potential institutional investors (e.g. pension funds, investment trusts and banks) that community housing organisations are accountable and safe places to invest. Our paper adopts an alternative reading of diversity and housing regulation, drawing upon the governmentality thesis advanced by Michel Foucault in an empirical study about the early stages of regulation of affordable housing providers. Amongst our claims are: first, that policies to diversify and regulate the housing sector constitute a radical political project to commercialise welfare provision and second, these policies are likely to generate additional bureaucratic burdens and close off possibilities for progressive reform. The paper also considers the value of the governmentality approach for critical investigations in the field of housing.

Keywords:

• Australia
• housing policy
• regulation
• governmentality
• Foucault

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Richard Ronald and the anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions to improve the paper. Our thanks to Tony Gilmour, Viv Milligan, Rhonda Phillips and Bill Randolph for work on the AHURI funded project on which this paper is based. Finally, we express our gratitude to all the interviewees who agreed to participate in the AHURI study and share their expertise.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A national system of regulation has recently been established after several years of negotiation between State Housing Authorities and the Commonwealth Government (Australian Government, 2013).

2. Our understanding of neoliberalism in the context of the paper is as an ideological rationality that provides legitimacy for commercial agencies to establish a foothold in areas that are traditionally managed by government. Our view can be contrasted with Will Davies’ (2014, p. 3) neat depiction. He views neoliberalism as an attempt to ‘replace political judgment with economic evaluation’, including, but not exclusively, the evaluations offered by markets’.

3. For discussion, see McKee (2007).

4. This can be contrasted to the ideological concerns that inform the experience of quality assurance initiatives by professional (see Strathern, 2000; Travers, 2007).

5. Indigenous community housing was 19,512 units in 2008 and 16,733 in 2012 (Productivity Commission, 2014).

6. The ‘disjuncture’ arises not due to bureaucratic burdens or even different ideologies, but because most people recognise that the policy of expanding the sector will not work without substantial government investment.