THE RIGHT TO SHELTER (but loopholes aplenty)
This paper is about an inconsistency in the description of human rights which I believe is giving rise to intolerable and dangerous injustice and poverty.
When questioned about human rights, advocates and defenders of human rights legislation say that without legislation, the claim of the existence of human rights is pointless. Human rights don't exist unless there is a state and a law to back them up. Human rights COME FROM law, they say.
Whether this is true or just self serving, the statement makes it clear that human rights legislation is absolutely the expression of states. As such, we would expect any expression by the state to be entirely consistent with and supportive of the states’ own foundation values and purposes, which may or may not be consistent with what we might think were obvious human rights, like a right of access to the elements for life.
Private property rights are foundational to the particular states which wrote the United Nations Human Rights Declaration (UNHDR).
Land and property is of primary importance to the power of the states, as to landed and powerful individuals. The land, a gift of nature on which life depends, has been privatised and so "property rights" are protected by the UNHRD.
While the right to life features in the UNHRD and a right to shelter is also mentioned, no right of access to land upon which shelter DEPENDS is mentioned.
PROPERTY, MAJORITY OR PERSONAL RIGHTS
In order to uphold the privatisation of land and protection of property, the apparent contradiction between a right to life and the lack of protection of a right of access to land is niftily buried by declaring shelter rather than land access a right.
One problem with this is that state provision of shelter as welfare is expensive and so can be forgivingly forestalled indefinitely on the apparently reasonable grounds that tax payers are stretched. The poorer the state, the longer and more reasonable the delay would seem to be. For the poor, this is not just bad luck. I believe it is intentional in the declaration of a right to shelter, rather than to the land access upon which shelter must stand.
For a right to shelter to be sensible, access to land on which to build has to be a right too, but there is nothing obscure or justifying of delay about providing access to land. Land would be immediately accessible to all, and that would not suit the agenda of "the king".
Consequently, a right to the shelter which would end homelessness is not seen as a human right but as an aspirational goal.
Through the recognition of a right of access to land upon which people could build their own shelter, homelessness could be dealt with instantly anywhere in the world.
THE ‘DESERVING’ MAJORITY
In this construct of SHELTER as a right, it also becomes easy to see state welfare more as a matter of goodwill or charity than as a right. All sorts of qualifications, limitations, activity requirements can easily be legislated – and it is easy to demonise people who don’t "perform", as bludgers, abusers of good will and of charity.
In theory the law could be changed, but it’s not going to happen while the majority of voters have so much invested in their own property and see no personal advantage in thinking much about the genuine rights of the landless.
The BEST CHANCE for the landless poor would be to show that with their right of secure access to land they could be less dependent on tax for welfare.
So,everyone obviously has the right to build their own shelter and grow their own food
– but where?
‘RIGHT’ TO SHELTER?
We have recognised the right to life, which implies a right to the gifts nature provides to sustain life - air water sunlight and land. We couldn’t expect that what we need for life should be provided by any other person, simply that we should not be deprived of the gifts of nature by anybody - that would be murder, right?
Shelter involves labour. Shelter is not provided as a gift of nature – we have to work to construct it. Does the right to shelter mean we have a right to build our own shelter, or that we have a right to expect someone to build it for us? The very idea of a right to shelter is compromised and obscuring of the truth that it is land access that is our right.
While the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights says that shelter is a human right, some implications of this, like the right of access to nature’s gift of land, should also be specified. Not only would this clarify the right, it would help overcome unnecessary delay in the delivery of justice on the grounds of the cost of housing to the state versus its budget constraints. As it stands, reasonableness of having to wait for justice is built into the idea of a right to shelter.
RIGHTS & RESPONSIBILITIES COMPROMISED
A right of access to land is only implied in the declaration. As a result, many people are deprived of the opportunity to build a shelter and grow food to eat. They die from exposure and starvation because they are denied secure access to land which nature provided and on which life depends for shelter and food.
To make matters worse, at the same time as being obscure in this matter, the Declaration identifies the right to property without clarifying any limitations. Clearly, in a finite world any right to property must be limited, but more specifically, it must be limited by the amount of viable land others need to live their own life. It must also be limited by the amount of land society needs for its health, harmony and for the collaboration that enriches society as a whole. It is not at all clear that the Declaration is about the human right of access to land for shelter and food - in fact I would say it is obscured for a purpose!
GOVERNANCE BY RIGHT
The current system depends on property to motivate and engage people in its own service. If you don't have a property right in land, you can't have shelter until the state decides it is in its own best interest to meet your “right to shelter”, and so you may die from exposure while waiting.
To get a property right you must generally first prove your economic value to the system - or be continually assessed as being 'deserving' of taxpayer support.
It’s true that this property system has been a motivator for great developments. It has brought great wealth, and in Australia the majority has their dreams invested in home ownership. However the recognition of someone else’s right of ACCESS to land need not diminish your right to OWN land for food and shelter.
Native title has been an exception to this rule in Australia. Here an aboriginal customary and ongoing connection to the land may be recognised in a property right called native title - but with the drift of the young to urban life, even that only recently recognised right is being made irrelevant.
With native title rights becoming irrelevant for urban aboriginals, and native title land being progressively put to commercial purposes, native title becomes commercialised into ‘property’, and property shifts rapidly to whoever can best afford to buy it out. Shifting property to the rich and governing the poor to be productive in service is a familiar pattern - I would say it's the agenda.
URBAN RIGHT & RESPONSIBILITY
The human right of access to land is one that is inalienable - it cannot be sold or bought off, since that would lead back into the erosion of the right for future generations and to land grabbing.
For the poor, what remains is the more relevant question of a human right of access to land - a right which should be attached to people WHEREVER they go (particularly including urban areas) rather than being attached only to some people who are in continuing traditional occupation of a particular piece of land.
In some parts of the discussion, the question of urban land rights is occasionally mentioned, but the idea of property remains central, not the universal human right of access to land.
Equally important is the issue of redefining responsibilities associated with a right of access to land. The definition of responsibilities in relation to the right of access to land needs to recognise ALL positive investments, not just money or those activities which the system chooses because it can profit from or commercialise them.
A right of access to land must include the responsibility for behaving within the purpose of the right (maintain or develop housing, grow veggies,) and responsibility to the land itself so that right may be enjoyed by future generations (do it sustainably).
Properly defined responsibilities could be recognised as an appropriate investment in land and hence to the establishment of a "property" right (not ownership) which could then be protected by the law. If ‘the system’ trumps the right to life and continues to be the one to define an acceptable personal investment in current terms, the right of land access is easily negated and your life will depend on your value to the system ... or on 'charity'.
What should a low income person have to do to secure state provided protection of their rights?
ACCOUNTABILITY
One challenge in regard to recognising positive activities is said to be one of accountability - how can we know someone is doing something they say they are doing, and that they are doing it appropriately?
Perhaps certain responsibilities could be deemed to have been performed - children (like veggies in a garden) demand certain duties to be performed, so if the child is alive and well, it can be safely assumed the duties were done. An hour of house work should be seen as being as valid as an hour of brain surgery … or an hour of community gardening.
In the interest of the advancement of community, community organisations oversee volunteers in things they or community members initiate (like community gardening). In Australia, one group they do this for is unemployed people over 55 who are fulfilling Centrelink mutual obligation responsibilities through performance of community work. If a community organisation is willing to endorse an activity in this way, it can be confidently counted as a positive value, performed appropriately and fully accounted for. For people over 55, the government has accepted that 15 hours per week of such work justifies a payment of welfare benefits.
So accountability for such work outside the marketplace is not hard to achieve, whether it is “deemed" work or “community organisation endorsed" work.
LANDRIGHTS, NOT WELFARE
The opportunity enjoyed by the over 55’s needs to be extended to the under 55's as well. It is reactionary, not reasonable to assume that this would have any undesirable outcomes.
A simply a change in perspective to understand rights and responsibilities differently would be an essential and healthy change.
I think it is quite wrong to pretend that state welfare payments provide appropriately for the shelter and food. Access to these should be seen in the context of the underpinning birthright of access to land (now property). Additional public housing should be made available for all who would take on the responsibilities along with the right.
Welfare is not our birthright. On the contrary, welfare is designed to bring us back into the marketplace, not to protect or deliver our rights. The property system and the denial of a human right of access to land has been the main imperative for people to find employment in the marketplace or otherwise be seen as deserving of welfare or charity.
LAND, EQUITY & DEMOCRACY
Those whose access to land is low because of their low income, have a right of free access to enough land to bring them up to the level of their land access entitlement.
The simplest measure for our own land dependence against sustainability and equity is our INCOME. (Expenditure is the usual method, but income is more appropriate because it covers savings as well as expenditure). Since income equals resource access, which equals land access, only those with a sufficiently low income would have right to enough free land access to establish shelter and grow veggies.
We know that the current level of global income generation is damaging the environment, but perhaps we can hope that technology will start to resolve this, AND deal with a growing population and the developing nations demanding higher incomes for better lifestyles - perhaps.
Let’s say we already had the technology today to make today’s global income generation sustainable. Averaged over the global population, each person would be entitled to around $250 per week to buy things other than the food and shelter which we could generate ourselves from our land entitlement. Anyone earning more than $250pw would be eating into their birthright, dollar by dollar by their dependence on additional land elsewhere for the generation of that extra income.
So now we can say that in a country like Australia, only those on $250pw or less would have enough birthright to build shelter and grow food. Others would have to buy these things at market rates.
Whatever the case for the restoration of free access to land for shelter and food for the landless may be, why would the voter majority support change when the system continues to serve them well? Why would owners agree to free access to land for those without, when they have had to work so hard for their own housing equity?
‘LANDRIGHTS’ SOUNDS DISRUPTIVE
With a population of 7billion and rising some forms of access to land are no longer sustainable. The land needed for a hunter gatherer lifestyle for all would be unsustainable, but it is clearly untrue to say that there isn't enough space for everyone to have a home and a veggie garden. There is plenty of space for that.
The number of those eligible and wanting to claim free access to land with the associated responsibilities would not disrupt property markets.
Landlessness and low income wouldn’t be the only criteria for being able to claim a landright. Anyone claiming a right also has a responsibility to operate within that right, to use it solely for its purpose and not to abuse it. A right of access to land for food and shelter is for that purpose only.
Recognition of the right of free access to land for shelter and food is only relevant for someone who doesn't already have adequate land access - there is no birthright to double up on land access. If you were already drawing on land elsewhere for other purposes, (eg. for your fossil fuels) your birthright would be diminished in direct proportion to equitable and sustainable limitations.
Most Westerners already have more than their entitlement and couldn't claim any right to more land access, so we are not talking about a change that would disrupt property markets.
Far from being disruptive, recognition of land access as a birthright for shelter and food could be a very attractive alternative for both landowners and for the landless unemployed.
LANDRIGHTS FOR LANDLESS COULD BENEFIT ALL
Beyond the obvious moral case, I believe there are several things to say about why owners of property would agree to landrights for the landless.
• Globalisation is competitive and welfare adds to production costs.
• Welfare is an expensive way to maintain social harmony.
• Resentment and division deepen without commonality.
• Gated communities are fearful places to live.
• Kids of owners can become redundant and beaten too.
• Housing affordability is now a majority issue which demands a more cost effective solution to increase supply.
• Many more people are going to come to Australia needing food and shelter.
• The right of access to land to build shelter and grow food could end poverty and set us free from wage slavery.
• All rights have responsibilities – rightful access means no money, not no duties.
• Social inclusion will require new ways to contribute.
• The environment needs large numbers living much more simply now.
• We need low consumption skills more than we need high income lifestyles.
• Localism is a guarantee of social security that we need to develop.
• Localism makes neighbourhoods more vibrant
From the point of view of owners/taxpayers, any of the unemployed choosing to build shelter and grow their own food would be less dependent on welfare. They would also be contributing the benefits listed above. They would also be breaking ground in sustainable development for all – they would be doing essential work.
UNPRECEDENTED?
In Australia, many of the unemployed have public housing so an arrangement for access to land is already in place there, although not yet by any right. There is one opportunity I can see for the unemployed to demonstrate the benefits of recognising their right of access to land in their access to public housing (see NTW)
Eligible people can apply for public housing. Out of a welfare payment of say $250 a week they pay 25% for rent. If their income increases beyond $250pw, so does their rent until they pay full market value and their benefit entitlement reduces to nil as income rises. At that point any birthright that should be recognised would also have been entirely eroded by their higher income.
This would simply involve a change in perspective from land access in a “welfare entitlement” to land access as a human right. If the access these public housing tenants already have to public land was seen as their birthright, the rent they must pay can be thought of as the cost of maintaining a socially acceptable standard of building materials for their housing. To be consistent with a human right of free access to land, we would need to see this rent as for building materials and labour, not land access.
What's missing in this already well established equation is the recognition by government that responsibility for the right (or “mutual obligations”) could be properly met by other means than job seeking. Instead, people who chose to claim access as a human right rather than as a welfare entitlement would need to start learning to take on their birthright responsibilities - beginning and continuing with building and garden maintenance.
So, suitable land, housing and rental management systems for this are already in place with Dept of Housing, and the income payment and deduction systems are already in place with Centrelink, as is the mutual obligations accountability system - the necessary voluntary work accountability systems have been tried and proven in approved Community Organisations, and any necessary training could be made available through TAFE Outreach. All the elements are there, just awaiting a change in Centrelink's mutual obligations requirement to recognise community work.
COMMUNITY WORK IS WORK
Doing community work for approved organisations is already an option for unemployed people over 55. It should be extended to unemployed people of any age because forcing people to join the marketplace is unsustainable for all the reasons outlined, and it is unjust because it denies both the birth right and responsibility.
"Everyone obviously has the right to build their own shelter and grow their own food – but where?"
For a right to shelter to be sensible, access to land on which to build has to be a right too. Recognition of this right would serve us all.
It may be said to be too late for a revision to identify land access as a human right because the property system is now ubiquitous and, in a democracy, the interests of the majority who have “property rights” hold sway. Also, in Australia, the system provides everyone, even the unemployed, with enough money to pay for food and shelter, so it may even seem that there is no longer space or need for recognising land rights, but is this true?
The question is fundamentally about how access to land for food and shelter should work, and human rights are at the core of this question.
"Recently the UN has been moving towards a Right to Land as a Normative under the International Human Rights Code. As well the Peasants Declaration for Land Rights and the Voluntary Guidelines on the Governance of Land Tenure, all converge in pressing for a right to land for the poorest section of the society."
@landrights4all
This paper is about an inconsistency in the description of human rights which I believe is giving rise to intolerable and dangerous injustice and poverty.
When questioned about human rights, advocates and defenders of human rights legislation say that without legislation, the claim of the existence of human rights is pointless. Human rights don't exist unless there is a state and a law to back them up. Human rights COME FROM law, they say.
Whether this is true or just self serving, the statement makes it clear that human rights legislation is absolutely the expression of states. As such, we would expect any expression by the state to be entirely consistent with and supportive of the states’ own foundation values and purposes, which may or may not be consistent with what we might think were obvious human rights, like a right of access to the elements for life.
Private property rights are foundational to the particular states which wrote the United Nations Human Rights Declaration (UNHDR).
Land and property is of primary importance to the power of the states, as to landed and powerful individuals. The land, a gift of nature on which life depends, has been privatised and so "property rights" are protected by the UNHRD.
While the right to life features in the UNHRD and a right to shelter is also mentioned, no right of access to land upon which shelter DEPENDS is mentioned.
PROPERTY, MAJORITY OR PERSONAL RIGHTS
In order to uphold the privatisation of land and protection of property, the apparent contradiction between a right to life and the lack of protection of a right of access to land is niftily buried by declaring shelter rather than land access a right.
One problem with this is that state provision of shelter as welfare is expensive and so can be forgivingly forestalled indefinitely on the apparently reasonable grounds that tax payers are stretched. The poorer the state, the longer and more reasonable the delay would seem to be. For the poor, this is not just bad luck. I believe it is intentional in the declaration of a right to shelter, rather than to the land access upon which shelter must stand.
For a right to shelter to be sensible, access to land on which to build has to be a right too, but there is nothing obscure or justifying of delay about providing access to land. Land would be immediately accessible to all, and that would not suit the agenda of "the king".
Consequently, a right to the shelter which would end homelessness is not seen as a human right but as an aspirational goal.
Through the recognition of a right of access to land upon which people could build their own shelter, homelessness could be dealt with instantly anywhere in the world.
THE ‘DESERVING’ MAJORITY
In this construct of SHELTER as a right, it also becomes easy to see state welfare more as a matter of goodwill or charity than as a right. All sorts of qualifications, limitations, activity requirements can easily be legislated – and it is easy to demonise people who don’t "perform", as bludgers, abusers of good will and of charity.
In theory the law could be changed, but it’s not going to happen while the majority of voters have so much invested in their own property and see no personal advantage in thinking much about the genuine rights of the landless.
The BEST CHANCE for the landless poor would be to show that with their right of secure access to land they could be less dependent on tax for welfare.
So,everyone obviously has the right to build their own shelter and grow their own food
– but where?
‘RIGHT’ TO SHELTER?
We have recognised the right to life, which implies a right to the gifts nature provides to sustain life - air water sunlight and land. We couldn’t expect that what we need for life should be provided by any other person, simply that we should not be deprived of the gifts of nature by anybody - that would be murder, right?
Shelter involves labour. Shelter is not provided as a gift of nature – we have to work to construct it. Does the right to shelter mean we have a right to build our own shelter, or that we have a right to expect someone to build it for us? The very idea of a right to shelter is compromised and obscuring of the truth that it is land access that is our right.
While the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights says that shelter is a human right, some implications of this, like the right of access to nature’s gift of land, should also be specified. Not only would this clarify the right, it would help overcome unnecessary delay in the delivery of justice on the grounds of the cost of housing to the state versus its budget constraints. As it stands, reasonableness of having to wait for justice is built into the idea of a right to shelter.
RIGHTS & RESPONSIBILITIES COMPROMISED
A right of access to land is only implied in the declaration. As a result, many people are deprived of the opportunity to build a shelter and grow food to eat. They die from exposure and starvation because they are denied secure access to land which nature provided and on which life depends for shelter and food.
To make matters worse, at the same time as being obscure in this matter, the Declaration identifies the right to property without clarifying any limitations. Clearly, in a finite world any right to property must be limited, but more specifically, it must be limited by the amount of viable land others need to live their own life. It must also be limited by the amount of land society needs for its health, harmony and for the collaboration that enriches society as a whole. It is not at all clear that the Declaration is about the human right of access to land for shelter and food - in fact I would say it is obscured for a purpose!
GOVERNANCE BY RIGHT
The current system depends on property to motivate and engage people in its own service. If you don't have a property right in land, you can't have shelter until the state decides it is in its own best interest to meet your “right to shelter”, and so you may die from exposure while waiting.
To get a property right you must generally first prove your economic value to the system - or be continually assessed as being 'deserving' of taxpayer support.
It’s true that this property system has been a motivator for great developments. It has brought great wealth, and in Australia the majority has their dreams invested in home ownership. However the recognition of someone else’s right of ACCESS to land need not diminish your right to OWN land for food and shelter.
Native title has been an exception to this rule in Australia. Here an aboriginal customary and ongoing connection to the land may be recognised in a property right called native title - but with the drift of the young to urban life, even that only recently recognised right is being made irrelevant.
With native title rights becoming irrelevant for urban aboriginals, and native title land being progressively put to commercial purposes, native title becomes commercialised into ‘property’, and property shifts rapidly to whoever can best afford to buy it out. Shifting property to the rich and governing the poor to be productive in service is a familiar pattern - I would say it's the agenda.
URBAN RIGHT & RESPONSIBILITY
The human right of access to land is one that is inalienable - it cannot be sold or bought off, since that would lead back into the erosion of the right for future generations and to land grabbing.
For the poor, what remains is the more relevant question of a human right of access to land - a right which should be attached to people WHEREVER they go (particularly including urban areas) rather than being attached only to some people who are in continuing traditional occupation of a particular piece of land.
In some parts of the discussion, the question of urban land rights is occasionally mentioned, but the idea of property remains central, not the universal human right of access to land.
Equally important is the issue of redefining responsibilities associated with a right of access to land. The definition of responsibilities in relation to the right of access to land needs to recognise ALL positive investments, not just money or those activities which the system chooses because it can profit from or commercialise them.
A right of access to land must include the responsibility for behaving within the purpose of the right (maintain or develop housing, grow veggies,) and responsibility to the land itself so that right may be enjoyed by future generations (do it sustainably).
Properly defined responsibilities could be recognised as an appropriate investment in land and hence to the establishment of a "property" right (not ownership) which could then be protected by the law. If ‘the system’ trumps the right to life and continues to be the one to define an acceptable personal investment in current terms, the right of land access is easily negated and your life will depend on your value to the system ... or on 'charity'.
What should a low income person have to do to secure state provided protection of their rights?
ACCOUNTABILITY
One challenge in regard to recognising positive activities is said to be one of accountability - how can we know someone is doing something they say they are doing, and that they are doing it appropriately?
Perhaps certain responsibilities could be deemed to have been performed - children (like veggies in a garden) demand certain duties to be performed, so if the child is alive and well, it can be safely assumed the duties were done. An hour of house work should be seen as being as valid as an hour of brain surgery … or an hour of community gardening.
In the interest of the advancement of community, community organisations oversee volunteers in things they or community members initiate (like community gardening). In Australia, one group they do this for is unemployed people over 55 who are fulfilling Centrelink mutual obligation responsibilities through performance of community work. If a community organisation is willing to endorse an activity in this way, it can be confidently counted as a positive value, performed appropriately and fully accounted for. For people over 55, the government has accepted that 15 hours per week of such work justifies a payment of welfare benefits.
So accountability for such work outside the marketplace is not hard to achieve, whether it is “deemed" work or “community organisation endorsed" work.
LANDRIGHTS, NOT WELFARE
The opportunity enjoyed by the over 55’s needs to be extended to the under 55's as well. It is reactionary, not reasonable to assume that this would have any undesirable outcomes.
A simply a change in perspective to understand rights and responsibilities differently would be an essential and healthy change.
I think it is quite wrong to pretend that state welfare payments provide appropriately for the shelter and food. Access to these should be seen in the context of the underpinning birthright of access to land (now property). Additional public housing should be made available for all who would take on the responsibilities along with the right.
Welfare is not our birthright. On the contrary, welfare is designed to bring us back into the marketplace, not to protect or deliver our rights. The property system and the denial of a human right of access to land has been the main imperative for people to find employment in the marketplace or otherwise be seen as deserving of welfare or charity.
LAND, EQUITY & DEMOCRACY
Those whose access to land is low because of their low income, have a right of free access to enough land to bring them up to the level of their land access entitlement.
The simplest measure for our own land dependence against sustainability and equity is our INCOME. (Expenditure is the usual method, but income is more appropriate because it covers savings as well as expenditure). Since income equals resource access, which equals land access, only those with a sufficiently low income would have right to enough free land access to establish shelter and grow veggies.
We know that the current level of global income generation is damaging the environment, but perhaps we can hope that technology will start to resolve this, AND deal with a growing population and the developing nations demanding higher incomes for better lifestyles - perhaps.
Let’s say we already had the technology today to make today’s global income generation sustainable. Averaged over the global population, each person would be entitled to around $250 per week to buy things other than the food and shelter which we could generate ourselves from our land entitlement. Anyone earning more than $250pw would be eating into their birthright, dollar by dollar by their dependence on additional land elsewhere for the generation of that extra income.
So now we can say that in a country like Australia, only those on $250pw or less would have enough birthright to build shelter and grow food. Others would have to buy these things at market rates.
Whatever the case for the restoration of free access to land for shelter and food for the landless may be, why would the voter majority support change when the system continues to serve them well? Why would owners agree to free access to land for those without, when they have had to work so hard for their own housing equity?
‘LANDRIGHTS’ SOUNDS DISRUPTIVE
With a population of 7billion and rising some forms of access to land are no longer sustainable. The land needed for a hunter gatherer lifestyle for all would be unsustainable, but it is clearly untrue to say that there isn't enough space for everyone to have a home and a veggie garden. There is plenty of space for that.
The number of those eligible and wanting to claim free access to land with the associated responsibilities would not disrupt property markets.
Landlessness and low income wouldn’t be the only criteria for being able to claim a landright. Anyone claiming a right also has a responsibility to operate within that right, to use it solely for its purpose and not to abuse it. A right of access to land for food and shelter is for that purpose only.
Recognition of the right of free access to land for shelter and food is only relevant for someone who doesn't already have adequate land access - there is no birthright to double up on land access. If you were already drawing on land elsewhere for other purposes, (eg. for your fossil fuels) your birthright would be diminished in direct proportion to equitable and sustainable limitations.
Most Westerners already have more than their entitlement and couldn't claim any right to more land access, so we are not talking about a change that would disrupt property markets.
Far from being disruptive, recognition of land access as a birthright for shelter and food could be a very attractive alternative for both landowners and for the landless unemployed.
LANDRIGHTS FOR LANDLESS COULD BENEFIT ALL
Beyond the obvious moral case, I believe there are several things to say about why owners of property would agree to landrights for the landless.
• Globalisation is competitive and welfare adds to production costs.
• Welfare is an expensive way to maintain social harmony.
• Resentment and division deepen without commonality.
• Gated communities are fearful places to live.
• Kids of owners can become redundant and beaten too.
• Housing affordability is now a majority issue which demands a more cost effective solution to increase supply.
• Many more people are going to come to Australia needing food and shelter.
• The right of access to land to build shelter and grow food could end poverty and set us free from wage slavery.
• All rights have responsibilities – rightful access means no money, not no duties.
• Social inclusion will require new ways to contribute.
• The environment needs large numbers living much more simply now.
• We need low consumption skills more than we need high income lifestyles.
• Localism is a guarantee of social security that we need to develop.
• Localism makes neighbourhoods more vibrant
From the point of view of owners/taxpayers, any of the unemployed choosing to build shelter and grow their own food would be less dependent on welfare. They would also be contributing the benefits listed above. They would also be breaking ground in sustainable development for all – they would be doing essential work.
UNPRECEDENTED?
In Australia, many of the unemployed have public housing so an arrangement for access to land is already in place there, although not yet by any right. There is one opportunity I can see for the unemployed to demonstrate the benefits of recognising their right of access to land in their access to public housing (see NTW)
Eligible people can apply for public housing. Out of a welfare payment of say $250 a week they pay 25% for rent. If their income increases beyond $250pw, so does their rent until they pay full market value and their benefit entitlement reduces to nil as income rises. At that point any birthright that should be recognised would also have been entirely eroded by their higher income.
This would simply involve a change in perspective from land access in a “welfare entitlement” to land access as a human right. If the access these public housing tenants already have to public land was seen as their birthright, the rent they must pay can be thought of as the cost of maintaining a socially acceptable standard of building materials for their housing. To be consistent with a human right of free access to land, we would need to see this rent as for building materials and labour, not land access.
What's missing in this already well established equation is the recognition by government that responsibility for the right (or “mutual obligations”) could be properly met by other means than job seeking. Instead, people who chose to claim access as a human right rather than as a welfare entitlement would need to start learning to take on their birthright responsibilities - beginning and continuing with building and garden maintenance.
So, suitable land, housing and rental management systems for this are already in place with Dept of Housing, and the income payment and deduction systems are already in place with Centrelink, as is the mutual obligations accountability system - the necessary voluntary work accountability systems have been tried and proven in approved Community Organisations, and any necessary training could be made available through TAFE Outreach. All the elements are there, just awaiting a change in Centrelink's mutual obligations requirement to recognise community work.
COMMUNITY WORK IS WORK
Doing community work for approved organisations is already an option for unemployed people over 55. It should be extended to unemployed people of any age because forcing people to join the marketplace is unsustainable for all the reasons outlined, and it is unjust because it denies both the birth right and responsibility.
"Everyone obviously has the right to build their own shelter and grow their own food – but where?"
For a right to shelter to be sensible, access to land on which to build has to be a right too. Recognition of this right would serve us all.
It may be said to be too late for a revision to identify land access as a human right because the property system is now ubiquitous and, in a democracy, the interests of the majority who have “property rights” hold sway. Also, in Australia, the system provides everyone, even the unemployed, with enough money to pay for food and shelter, so it may even seem that there is no longer space or need for recognising land rights, but is this true?
The question is fundamentally about how access to land for food and shelter should work, and human rights are at the core of this question.
"Recently the UN has been moving towards a Right to Land as a Normative under the International Human Rights Code. As well the Peasants Declaration for Land Rights and the Voluntary Guidelines on the Governance of Land Tenure, all converge in pressing for a right to land for the poorest section of the society."
@landrights4all