Aidan Ricketts, The Nimbin GoodTimes

There are things government can do well, there are things business can do, but for everything else there’s community.

Government is at its best when we tax wealth and spend it on equitable programs that benefit the community and protect the least fortunate and the environment. It is at its worst when it is captured by vested commercial interests, and corporate economic theories.

By the end of the 1970s we probably came as close as we have to a reasonable balance between private wealth and provision for the public good, especially in terms of public housing.

Since then, decades of neoliberal economics has shrunken government programs, privatised public functions, and provided tax cuts and rorts for the wealthy, particularly property investors.

The net result has been a dismal tide of declining government services, obscene wealth disparity, and out-of-control homelessness and poverty.

The spiralling cost of homes to buy or rent in Australia is an intergenerational crime, and a ponzi scheme that benefits very few. Homeowners don’t really benefit from the high onpaper value of their home, as replacing it will cost just as much, and young people are squeezed out of purchase and rental markets; and the banks’ net share of national wealth escalates.

Two things support this ridiculously overpriced property market, one is investor rorts that encourage predatory landlordism, and the other is the complexity of the planning system and the hoops that we have to jump through to build a ‘dwelling’ to gold plated first-world building standards.

Despite the potentially wellmeaning motivations for the endlessly complex building codes that we have, building red tape has become an enforcer of a wealth divide.

There’s no point in having an aspiration for a gold-plated planning system and building code when it is being actively undermined by economic policies that push much of the population below the poverty line.

If society genuinely wanted to insist on every building being built to a wedding cake standard, then we would need to back that aspiration with massive investment in public housing, and proper taxation of runaway wealth. If we are not prepared to do that, then our planning system simply becomes the gatekeeper of poverty and exploitation.

When government fails, the community needs to step in. We saw this when the government tried to impose an industrialised fracking industry on the Northern Rivers, and only concerted and united community resistance was able to turn that train wreck around.

We saw it again in spades during the 2022 major flood event when the community stepped in to rescue thousands while the government was overwhelmed by the scale of disaster; and in the recovery where the spirit of communally-driven mutual aid (the Lismore free state) brought us through the most difficult days in living memory.

So too, with the housing crisis. Government and business have both failed spectacularly to provide a solution to homelessness and poverty and so community self-help and mutual aid is again our necessary response.

Fortunately, we have been here before in this region. Starting from the 1970s, throughout the Northern Rivers groups of like-minded people joined together, purchased rural lands and established rural land-share communities.

The result was a grand social experiment that defied the logic of the real estate markets, openly disobeyed the planning rules of the day but nonetheless successfully delivered a lower cost housing solution to thousands that remains to this day.

It wasn’t an easy ride, the laws didn’t support the movement, councils complained and threatened demolitions at times, but bit by bit the inevitable logic of ‘better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission’ prevailed, and government adapted to an empowered community by finding ways to legalise the many beautiful owner-built paradises that popped up and gave the Northern Rivers its unique flavour.

Now in 2025, we find ourselves again faced with a homelessness crisis of immense proportions that will not be solved by going cap-in-hand to government and developers.

The community needs to once again pursue bold self-help solutions. Government of course will have a role to play, but as is often the case in crisis it may be to ultimately recognise and facilitate the innovative solutions that community finds for itself.

Whether this takes the form of more rural landshare communities, more granny flats, more tiny homes on larger blocks, more facilities for van-lifers, or an enthusiastic collective embrace of squatting idle buildings, community-led solutions have become more than urgent.

Already we have a positive and community-oriented squatting movement emerging to caretake and occupy some of the now publicly-owned homes in the Lismore flood plain. While we all want to see buildings eventually moved to higher ground, we also know this will take years, and meanwhile these buildings can play a part in relieving homelessness.

Being a North Lismore resident myself, I am one of the nearest neighbours and have been impressed at how positive, respectful and community-driven the North Lismore squatting project has been.

Where we used to have tents hidden in the landcare area, we have seen a few streets transformed into busy little open communities housing locals and travellers and providing respite for so many. This group actively liaised with neighbours, with former owners as well as with the Reconstruction Authority and with police.

This is a positive development. In a time of crisis, it is far better to encourage open communicative self-organising communities of this sort than to drive the problem underground with aggressive responses, and for the most part this is what we have seen so far.

Sadly, in the last few weeks there appears to be a very ideologically driven campaign on social media to denigrate the emerging mutual support community in North Lismore, employing all of the usual slurs, negative tropes and false accusations that typify punch-down campaigns of this kind.

Hopefully with wider community support, these attacks will fail and sensible conversations can be had.

Unity and mutual aid are the values that get our region and people through crises. It is a very important time for us as a broader regional community to have a grown-up conversation about homelessness, impoverishment and the very real ways that community can step into the vacuum left by decades of poor policy to provide innovative and humane solutions for those most in need.

To that end, the Law School at Southern Cross University is hosting the ‘Land sharing and the law’ conference on Friday 28th February, with the explicit aim of facilitating just such an important conversation.

The conference brings together academics, experts, government, and homelessness advocates, to host an open and hopefully productive discussion on how community can step into the breach and address homelessness and how government, council and business may be able to support. Conference attendance is free, but you should register to ensure your place at: www.scu.edu.au/ business-law-and-arts/events/land-sharing-and-the-law.

This article appeared in The Nimbin GoodTimes, February 2025.