Those opposing an emphasis on public housing and strict controls on the housing market argue that such an agenda does not work in practice. They say it is outdated and goes against the world trend of privatisation, “user-pays” and neo-liberal deregulation.

There is a huge problem with that argument, however. In Australia’s largest trading partner, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the direction over the last decade and a half has been explicitly towards public housing and strict regulation of the housing sector.

In the decade from 2008, the PRC provided 70 million additional public housing dwellings for her low and lower-middle income people. Proportionate to population size, China delivered in ten years, one and a half times the amount of public housing as what the Greens promise to provide in low-cost accommodation over twenty years.

As a result, today, the percentage of China’s urban population in public housing is nearly ten times higher than Australia’s. Moreover, the PRC’s public housing drive continues. Last year, the PRC provided an additional two and a half million public rental dwellings for her people. In percentage terms, this is equivalent to 45,000 dwellings here.

That means proportionate to population size, Red China in just one year provided one and a half times as much public housing as what the Albanese government promises to deliver in privately-owned “social and affordable” housing over five years.

And unlike here, China does not have a homelessness crisis. Despite China (which is still trying to pull herself up from her impoverished pre-1949, capitalist days) having a per capita income some three to five times lower than Australia’s, Chinese international students entering Australia, the U.S. and Western Europe are shocked at the level of homelessness in these richer countries compared with their socialistic homeland.

The PRC’s public housing drive is part of Beijing’s official housing policy that is aptly titled; “Houses are for living, not for speculation.” The PRC takes the opposite stance towards housing speculation compared to successive Australian governments. For example, most Chinese cities ban households from buying more than two homes.

Needless to say, Australia’s big end of town hate the PRC’s policies. That is why their media seek to denigrate it at every possible instance. Last year, they seized on the troubles of a Chinese capitalist developer hit by the anti-speculation campaign to claim that the PRC’s “Houses are for living, not for speculation”-policy was soon going to cause the Chinese economy to collapse. Needless to say, that never happened!

Today, while the capitalist Australian, American, British and German economies are either in recession or on the verge of one, the PRC’s economy surged by 4.5% last quarter. More importantly, socialistic China’s workers continue to enjoy, by far, the world’s fastest growth rate in real wages.

All this is why the Western capitalist powers see China as an “existential threat.” They fear that the successes of China’[s] socialist alternative will encourage their own masses to also demand a system that puts the masses’ needs above big end of town profits. Frankly, that is the kind of “threat” that working class people in the capitalist West need!

Let’s help “infect” Australia’s working class population with sympathy for Red China’s “Houses are for living, not for speculation” policy and her system that underpins it.

The fact that China’s transition to socialism is incomplete, bureaucratically distorted and endangered by hostile elements — including by the capitalist powers internationally and by its own capitalists who long to have the right to “freely” exploit as in “normal” (that is capitalist) countries and who have a layer of academics, lawyers, journalists and politicians in the right wing of the ruling Communist Party of China doing their bidding — actually makes socialistic rule in China more in need of defence, not less.

Let’s oppose the U.S. and Australian régime’s military build up against the PRC! Let’s refute their lying propaganda attacks against China! And let’s oppose the anticommunist groups within China that they support in their quest to destroy socialistic rule there!

(Emphasis original.)