ALL WAS EXPOSED

Well, the sky didn't fall in after all at the mysterious meeting held at the retirement village last Monday week.
It was a very interesting meeting nonetheless.
A male public housing tenant, our self-styled leader, took the floor claiming he had asked the general manager to call the meeting.
But what about the email I had sent him telling him I wanted to call one to which he did not respond?
He seemed to have been chosen by management to go into bat for PHTs whenever a problem arose as someone who sounded credible but who was not prepared to rock the boat too much.
The local newspaper had been invited to attend the meeting, but he insisted the journalist leave.
Nonetheless, our fearless leader was very upset about public housing tenants officially being made 'second class citizens' by changes to the Retirement Villages Act.
In particular the removal of the 'joint venture' clause which on paper gave public housing tenants living in retirement villages where Housing NSW is involved in a 'joint venture' with other parties the same legal protection as the self-funded residents living there too.
Now the only legal protection we have is the same as public housing tenants who live in houses or blocks of units.
Housing NSW acting head lawyer, Chris Valacos, said he had the legislation changed to 'clarify' the situation.
Now we were the same as all other public housing tenants.
We were saying we wanted to be treated as equals with the self-funded residents and he was saying we were now equals with all other PHTs.
He suggested we were up ourselves if we dared to argue with that.
Well, our living situation is entirely different for a start.
We also pay a fortnightly levy for 'services provided' by the management of the retirement village which other PHTs don't have to fork out of their pensions.
Our fearless leader asked why an act of parliament had been changed just because one PHT had tried to take legal action against the retirement village. He may well ask ...
For a while I thought changing the law to deny someone their legal rights was called perverting the course of justice, but I looked this up and found out this is not the case.
I did find a couple of emails from the abovementioned lawyer in my Housing NSW file urging the Office of Fair Trading to remove the 'joint venture' clause in response to my legal action in the Consumer Trader & Tenancy Tribunal under the Retirement Villages Act.
The CTTT determination went against me on somewhat spurious grounds.
The HNSW lawyer said that although this ruling was in his favour, he was not content with it because it had only been made in a lower court, not in the Supreme Court.
I had said in my email to OFL that I wanted to call a meeting of PHTs to discuss the ramifications of the changes to the Retirement Villages Act, and to hopefully establish a public housing tenants forum.
OFL shouted my latter suggestion down, saying it would create an 'us and them' situation with the self-funded residents.
But wasn't that what he had been complaining about earlier?
About how the change to the act had now made this official?
I could see it was a 'no win' situation.

GRAND SOCIAL EXPERIMENT IN PUBLIC HOUSING FAILS

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