ABSTRACT
In policy, public and even academic debate, it is taken for granted that the Australian public housing system is broken and that the only remedy is radical reform to restructure the system into one more diverse, contestable and entrepreneurial. These arguments are not unique to Australia, with similar issues facing state housing systems in other parts of the world. According to existing analysis and research, the history of public housing is central to the form it takes today, and the dominant factor has been the emergence, adoption and application of neoliberal modes of government across the public sector. A Foucauldian archaeological reading of the archival evidence has the potential to reveal something more. The documentation produced in one case, that of the Housing Department of the small Australian state of Tasmania, offers an opportunity to test this potential. Through scrutiny of this archive, it is possible to determine the discursive relations that condition the content and practice of housing policy, past and present and, from this, the contingencies that produce our knowledge of what public housing is, could be and should be.
