This week brought the news that “an alarming number” of former residents of Melbourne’s Gatwick Hotel are now in jail.
The residents had been evicted to make way for renovations conducted under the aegis of Channel Nine program The Block. One social worker told the ABC that at least 32 women who were removed from the building are either now in prison or have spent time there since being evicted.
It’s not like no one could see this coming. It has been obvious since the start that closing the Gatwick hotel was going to displace a lot of very vulnerable people. The building, which is on Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, has operated as a boarding house since the 1960s, and as the ABC report explained, it had long been “a place of last resort ... of comfort and nonjudgmental available residence” for a variety of Melbourne’s most at-risk residents, including sex workers, addicts and those just out of jail.
The local council and Victoria’s government did work with housing services to re-home the people they evicted, but the waiting list for public housing in Melbourne is 82,000 people long, and many ended up on the streets.
It’s worth asking what Channel Nine’s duty of care was to these people who ended up on the streets. But we should also ask what it says about the national psyche that viewers continued to flock in droves to a program that presented the transformation of a decrepit building into fancy apartments for the rich as a challenge for plucky renovators, rather than a life-altering disaster for the building’s residents.
It’s easy to see The Block’s general appeal: it brings together several distinctly Australian obsessions, including the dream of home ownership and our attendant passion for renovating and real estate, and combines them with the personal drama and inherent competitiveness of a reality TV show. It’s a winning formula.
This season was different, though. On the show, the affluent renovators entered the building and gasped in horror at the state of the place. That horror wasn’t born of concern for the people who had been living in these conditions, but at the amount of work they’d have to do to make the place liveable.
The Gatwick hotel season took two tactics of which our governments have been very fond over the past couple of decades – venerating the rich and demonising the poor – and presented them as entertainment. It exemplifies a fundamental shift in the Australian dream, as the egalitarian hopes of the 1950s and 1960s have mutated into distinctly individualistic ones.
Australia now bears little resemblance to that dream. The deregulation that started under Hawke and Keating and accelerated throughout the Howard years transformed both the economy and society, and one result is undeniable: the rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer, and we’ve moved away from the idea that we can all prosper.
Australia may have never been a land of true equality – and certainly not for anyone who wasn’t white. But to celebrate the disenfranchisement of the poor on prime-time TV is taking it to another level.
St Kilda’s newer, more affluent residents and businesses complained loudly about the Gatwick, as if the place’s very existence was an affront to them and their investments. And now they’ve got their wish: the building is going to be just another block of multimillion-dollar apartments.
And if the boarding house’s former residents end up on the streets, well, for every winner, there’s gotta be a loser, right? That’s the price, it seems, we’re willing to pay.
• Tom Hawking is a freelance writer based in Melbourne
