Although housing affordability is one of the key issues worrying voters, public and social housing solutions have hardly been a mainstay of the battle between the big parties this election campaign. “Our major parties are spending more time competing over transport infrastructure than over the most basic of infrastructure needs – a safe, secure home,” said Victorian Public Tenants Association executive officer Mark Feenane. “The basic right to have a home should be a top priority for our political leaders.” The Ascot Vale public housing estate. Credit:Eddie Jim Last month, before the campaign began, Labor pledged 1000 new public housing units if re-elected, mostly in Geelong and Ballarat.

The Coalition has promised to cap building heights to two storeys on a public and private housing proposal in Ashburton (Labor had promised up to five storeys). The opposition has yet to outline its plan on public housing, with shadow minister Georgie Crozier saying more is to come before the campaign's end. Late last month, Premier Daniel Andrews conceded more needed to be done on public housing. “If you were to build 2000 or 3000 units a year, there would still be demand for additional effort on top of that,” he said. But unlike the swag of votes politicians see in new roads and rail lines, public housing struggles to attract dollars. The Greens, for their part, have made a dramatic pledge – albeit one they are unlikely to be called on to deliver. They want 40,000 new and refurbished public housing units over the next six years, followed by another 40,000 after a further six years.

These days extra public housing, when promised by Labor or the Coalition, appears to need to at least partly pay for itself. Both major parties have opted to pour most resources in the sector into growing community housing run by groups outside government – moving responsibility for the most vulnerable off Treasury's books. A rally on Friday afternoon at the State Library will attempt to focus attention on one element of this effort: Labor's Public Housing Renewal program. The plan will see developers offered the land for sale that almost a dozen inner-city estates sit on. In return for large plots of prime land in sought-after locales, they must rebuild the housing for the disadvantaged, plus at least an extra 10 per cent. Clare Hanson will be among speakers at the event opposing the plan.

She has lived in her Ascot Vale apartment for eight years, and is appalled that many of the buildings on her 17-hectare public housing estate may soon be among those demolished. The sprawling site will be sold to developers in stages. Ms Hanson moved to Melbourne in 1986 and previously owned a house in Kensington before “making a foolish mistake of selling”. She said the plans for her estate were “not renewal, it’s demolition and sale to developers”. Ms Hanson on her balcony on Thursday. Credit:Eddie Jim She said the "wonderful" apartments on her estate needed refurbishment, not demolition. Finding public housing for her and her teenage son, after the end of her marriage, was “an absolute lifeline”, she said.

While her son stayed with another family, she “couch-surfed" and "slept rough” until she got a public housing unit and was able to raise her boy again. “Without this place, I don’t believe he would have been as successful as he was – he was first-class honours at university, and it was because he had this secure home in an engaging community,” she said. Housing expert Patrick Fensham, from SGS Economics and Planning, said the total stock of public housing had “plummeted” across Australia in the past four decades. “Up until the 1980s, social and public housing was considered essential economic infrastructure – from the end of [World War II] to the long boom during that long Menzies torpor. It's now morphed into a residual safety net.” Mr Fensham, a planner, said it had been “consigned to that role during the Hawke and Keating governments. [They] basically bought the neo-liberal line that … all you needed to do was top up incomes; you didn’t need a public sector providing affordable housing”.