ABSTRACT
The history of public housing in Tasmania is marked by a discontinuity in the way in which public housing is thought about and acted upon. This discontinuity can be seen in six shifts in the content and practice of public housing discourse: the displacement of the Housing Department as speaking subject by the ascendant community sector; the replacement of property-related rent-setting methods with an individualised, income-dependent one; a retreat from promoting the appearance of Departmental homes, gardens and estates in favour of using landscaping to hide public housing from external, critical gaze; a change in the status of rental rebates, from a necessary guarantee of housing for all to a component of the welfare ‘burden’; reworking of the Department’s relationship with estates into procedurally mediated interactions with tenants; the redefinition of the broadacre, from ‘show place’ to dysfunctional failure. The discontinuity was produced by a larger discursive reconfiguration which can be labelled ‘neoliberalism’ but is better understood as a change in the order of discourse. In the earlier discourse, subjects were constituted by their environment; the contents of the later discourse are organised around the independent individual. At the level of policy, the change is to the purpose of public housing: from providing all people with permanent homes, it now provides individuals in need with a temporary service.
