Millers Point residents supported Albanese in the fight to save his council home in the 1970s.
Millers Point residents supported Albanese in the fight to save his council home in the 1970s. Photo: Harry Martin









Like many residents of Millers Point, I was raised in a
public housing property where I was born in 1963. My first
community-based political campaign in the late 1970s, was fighting
Sydney City Council, which had decided to sell our council house in
Camperdown.




It was a battle that was fundamental to my identity and critical to the person I am today.



My mother had been born in this home in 1936 and was raising
me there as a single parent. Her parents had been the first residents in
the home after the Alexandra Dwellings estate was built in 1927.



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For my family, this was more than just bricks and mortar. It was our home for three generations.



It sat in the centre of a proud working class community, made
up of people as firmly anchored in the inner city as my own family.



The sense of community was enhanced by it being something of
an island - surrounded by the Children’s Hospital, factories and light
industry.



It was our home. We cared for it as though we had built it
with our own hands, renovating and painting it at our expense to keep it
up to scratch.



Yet the council was, as my worried mother said at the time, treating us with no respect. It was as though we did not matter.



My school friends from Millers Point at St Mary’s Cathedral
School, supported our campaign because they understood the importance of
security of home and community.



Months of tension and uncertainty followed, until the
conservatives lost control of the council to Labor and the sell-off was
shelved.



I lived at Camperdown for years afterward as I completed my education.



It remained my mother’s home until she passed away in 2001.



Today about 400 residents of Millers Point facing eviction at
the hands of the NSW Liberals are suffering the same apprehension and
uncertainty I remember so well.



For many, the first they heard of the government’s plan to
sell their homes was a cold-hearted eviction notice slid under the door.



No respect.



The government appears to have made no attempt to weigh the
financial gains of a sell-off against the social losses involved in the
devastation of a community.



I was pleased to read in The Sydney Morning Herald on Monday that the National Trust is opposing the move because of the heritage value of the buildings at Millers Point.



But heritage is about much more than just buildings.



It’s about people.



Miller’s Point is a community – a living, breathing mixture
of people that adds to the diversity of the broader Sydney community.



Successful cities are not disconnected enclaves of privilege
and disadvantage. They are diverse. Their people come from a mixture of
backgrounds.



The logic that only wealthy people should be able to live at
Millers Point is a formula for a divided city based on haves and
have-nots.



It also points to further public housing sell-offs in Sydney down the track.



That’s out of line with the values of most Australians who
understand that a community is only as good as the way in which it
treats its least-advantaged members.



Recently I read in The Sydney Morning Herald an
elderly resident of Millers Point quoted as saying: “These people cannot
come in and walk all over us and turf us out like we are rubbish’’.



It was as though I heard my own mother’s voice ringing down the years.



More than 800,000 Australians live in social housing, including a quarter of a million in NSW alone.



They matter.



Sydney, we can do better than this.







Anthony Albanese is a former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia.