ABSTRACT
The contractual relationship between the Tasmanian Housing Department and the people living in its homes was originally founded on two interlinked elements: home ownership and the subjectivity of ‘occupancy’. The former was provided through rent-to-purchase arrangements which conflated purchasers and tenants within the latter. Day to day, the relationship was maintained by rent collection and the work done by occupants, under supervision, to ‘improve’ their properties. Rents were calculated on an ‘economic’ basis, reflecting the cost of provision. These, and the requirement to tend to dwellings and gardens, reinforced the relationship between occupant-subjects and their homes, and the latter enrolled occupants in the collective creation of ‘show place’ estates. But the contractual relationship was reworked by changes to the Commonwealth State Housing Agreement, which reconfigured the discursive relations amongst occupants, rents and dwellings and, consequently, the practices of rent collection and home improvement. The introduction of ‘income-related’ rents for all tenants severed the earlier connection between rents and properties, relating rents to individual (in)capacity to pay. Landscaping of public space by departmental officers replaced gardening in private space by tenants and was used increasingly as a tool for reputation management and marketing. Public housing and its tenants were associated with poverty and dysfunction and, thus, were something to be concealed and disguised.
