Nothing Is Too Sacred

Guess what? The bumbling boobies at Housing New South Wales have messed my rent account up - again! I really cannot believe how absolutely incompetent the staff working for this state government department are. Up until a few months ago I was giving them the benefit of the doubt when it came to the 8 months of stuff-ups at their end over my rent account. But not any more. The saying goes: "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action", and I am declaring war on the bumbling incompetence of this agency.

It all started in May, 2009. My mother, an aged pensioner, moved out to live with my sister up on the North Coast of New South Wales. This meant I had to let my landlord, Housing NSW, know so that my rent could be reduced back to that of a single pensioner. That should have been simple - a week or so after Mum moved out I handed all of the documents required to one of their staff at the Belvoir St, Surry Hills office. A couple of months later a got a phone call from Mark at that office threatening eviction. According to their records I was a month or so behind in my rent. That was strange - my rent had been taken out of my pension as usual, so I should have been up-to-date. By the way, just to make it clear - I was paying the correct rent out of my pension all of that time - it was my mother's share that wasn't getting paid, because she no longer lived here. Housing NSW charges rent as 25% of household income, so two pensioners pay double the rent of one pensioner.

This was a serious issue for me - if you get evicted from government-owned housing, you finish up homeless - no other landlord will give you a lease. Apparently, somewhere during the 10 paces long walk from the front counter at Belvoir St to the desk of my client services officer, a mysterious time-space aberration (maybe a wormhole?) occurred & transported the paperwork advising that there was now only one occupant instead of two in my flat to a parallel universe - never to be seen again. Housing NSW were never able to give me an explanation on where that paperwork disappeared to.

That time I decided to be obstinate & not fill in all of the paperwork again, but in the end they wore me down with constant phone calls and letters threatening eviction. They were adamant I had not done the paperwork - my word that I had done the correct thing meant nothing at all to these bumbling bureaucrats. So, in August, I did the half-hour walk to Centrelink to get another statement of income, and filled the forms in at their Poets Corner, Waterloo office. I was even given the good news that my water account was $200 in credit, so I filled in more paperwork to get that credit transferred (Quick Quiz: I did that request in August 2009 - do you think that credit has been placed on my rent account yet? The answer is at the bottom of this post.)

So, my rent was now back at the single tenant's rate. But then my Mum moved back in. The North Coast was too humid for her, and we had sorted out a couple of issues that had previously made living together difficult. Of course, that meant more paperwork for Housing NSW, as the rent had to go back to that of 2 tenants. So we filled out the paperwork & handed that in to their office. Unfortunately for me & Mum, there was an error on her income statement from Centrelink - her $55000 lump-sum inheritance from back in 2004 was marked as assessable annual income. Obviously a mistake on Centrelink's end, and something that should have had the Housing NSW officer who was doing the rent adjustment scratching his/her head. How could a senior citizen be getting the aged pension, and also be earning $55K per year? Definitely something not right. But did Housing NSW call me to question this very obvious anomaly? What do you think - of course not! They just entered Mum's income as seventy thousand-plus dollars per year, and thus my rent went up to the market rate. Suddenly I was thousands of dollars in arrears, and Mark at Belvoir Street was on my case - again. Funny how fast Housing New South Wales acts when a tenant owes them money, but how slow they are when they owe a tenant money or urgent maintenance (such as getting rid of the rats in my roof) is required. More eviction threats again - fortunately this one was easy to fix. A quick visit to Redfern Centrelink & we had a corrected statement with a clarifying letter that the inheritance was not annual income. So, on the 10th of December 2009 that was handed to another officer at the Housing NSW Belvoir St office with assurances that it would be quickly fixed and there would be no more contact about my seemingly overdue rent. Hallelujah!!! My 8 month's of hell was going to be over - Housing NSW were finally going to list me and my Mum as the standard 2 non-working pensioners in a 2-bedroom flat, and all of the letters & phone calls threatening eviction would end.

But, my faith in the Housing NSW staff was sadly misplaced. This morning (6 weeks after everything was "fixed") I got another phone call from Mark at NSW Housing. Since he seems to be their "repo-man" & obviously enjoys kicking disadvantaged people out of their subsidised housing (this man is definitely in the wrong job - he should be trying to keep those with nowhere else to go in their homes, not finding reasons to kick them out) I instantly knew what he was going to say. So I pre-empted him by asking if he was calling to advise that the error on my account had finally been fixed and how much in credit my account now was (because Mum & I had been paying a bit extra rent anyway). A sharp intake of breath from his end, and the usual "I haven't got any paperwork from you about this". AAAARRRRGGGHHHH!!!!!! Back at square one!!!! Housing NSW continue their inept ways. I quickly made a phone call to my personal client services officer Michael to ask what the heck was happening. Only 2 weeks ago he had assured me that everything was in-hand. He again tried to reassure me that everything was going to be okay, but I am getting tired of the sympathetic lines such as "I'm hearing you" & "I feel your pain". I want action on this, not empty promises. For God's sake - we are two pensioners living in a flat. How hard can it be to work out our combined income???

Housing NSW has probably half-a-million tenants on their books. Many suffer from intellectual disabilities, whether it be the early stages of Alzheimer's or (for sake of a better term) mental retardation. Many others have poor English skills. I'm fortunate that I am capable of chasing an issue like this up until it is resolved, but there are many others who are not. If 2 minor occupancy changes within a year on just one property cause Housing NSW's system to completely break down, then there must be thousands of other tenants also being put through complete hell by the incompetent landlord that Housing NSW has become. What worries me most is that there must be many people who, through no fault of their own, are now homeless because Housing NSW got things wrong, and the poor tenants were not capable of arguing their case properly.

Housing New South Wales seems to be suffering from a serious lack of leadership. Having once been a public servant myself, I do know that there will always be some staff not as capable as others. But when all of the staff seem incapable of doing their job properly, then the blame has to lie with their management who appear not to be providing the workers with the tools and leadership to do their jobs properly.

All I want is to be able to sleep at night without worrying if I will lose the roof over my head due to someone else's incompetence. Quality sleep has been a rarity over the past 8 months due to these ongoing Housing NSW issues. Surely this can't go on forever.

Thanks for reading.

Quick Quiz answer: Of course the $200 water account credit balance has not been transferred across to my rent account!  After all, it is money Housing NSW owes me, not the other way around. I had to fill in a second request in October 2009 - hopefully the simple balance transfer should be done by 2015 if they put my request on high priority (BTW, that's sarcasm folks).

I know this blog is turning into a bit of a ranter's haven, but the Kristina Keneally-led NSW Labor government just keeps on showing time & time again that waste and inefficiency have become endemic throughout government departments, especially Housing NSW.

Seven years ago this March I moved into my subsidised flat in Redfern. At the time I mentioned to the Housing client service officer (now that is a real oxymoron) that the carpet in the stairwell was worn & torn - not in good repair at all - and she promised that it would be replaced within the next year. Nearly 7 years later, and the same carpet is still there. It has holes in it that residents trip on. It stinks of shit, piss, vomit (much of that due to the fact that we are the only Housing NSW block I am aware of without a securely locked entrance, so drunks and drug-addicts sleep in the stairwell). The neighbours' 3 large dogs have made things even worse. But apparently Housing NSW has not yet been able to find in their mega-budget the few hundred dollars that it would cost to replace the carpet. I guess they want the residents to live as hermits, too ashamed of the squalor they live in to have friends or family visit. Fixing the broken security door is probably in the budget for the 2019-2020 financial year.

So, in seven years Housing NSW can't find a few hundred dollars to replace a worn & stinking carpet. But they can afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars building Taj Mahal-style rubbish bin bays. Last  year they built a new bin-bay for a block I pass on the way to the shops. Seriously - my mother & I thought that they were replacing the old bin-bay with a new granny flat. It took months to build, and even has a beautiful roof over it. I reckon it would have cost around $50,000 to build that rubbish bin receptacle. And now they are building another just up the road from me. One Saturday before Christmas I watched them as they worked for several hours with concrete trucks, concrete pumps, front-end loaders & bobcats. That single day (on weekend rates too) must have cost well over ten thousand dollars - all just to lay a concrete slab for garbage bins to sit on.

Today, I have been sitting at my window watching another example of waste going on for more than 4 hours. The classic "lawn maintenance" scam that so many government departments seem to have fallen victim to lately. How it works? Easy. For all of my 44 years living in Sydney it has been the general rule that a lawn only needs mowing once a fortnight in Summer, and once every 3 or 4 weeks in Winter. But we now have lawn-mowing contractors who mow the lawn every week, Winter or Summer, rain, hail or shine. The beautiful green lawn we had a few years ago is now brown & mostly dead from being over-mowed during the hot Summer months. The lawnmowers are set to mow as close to the ground as possible, exposing the grass roots to the hot sun. And we can't use the lawn anyway. These people apparently have the contract to maintain the lawn, but Housing NSW does not require them to kill the prickly bindi-eye at the start of each Summer, so catching a bit of sun on the lawn is out of the question.

As I am typing this a man using a noisy leaf-blower has been walking around the 5x10 metre patch of ground below my window blowing dead leaves from tree-to-tree - for well over an hour now. Why do they need to spend taxpayer funds blowing leaves backwards & forwards between trees? It seems to be for no other reason than to give some poor soul a job.

I was trying to work out the costs of this wastage of NSW taxpayers' money - it must be enormous. Think about it. Three or four lawn mowing contractors on each job - that must cost around $80 to $100 an hour at least. Multiply that by the 4 unnecessary hours per fortnight they spend on each government-owned housing block of units (must be at least 1,000 of those). That comes to around $400,000 per fortnight. Multiply that by 26 fortnights & you have the New South Wales government wasting approximately TEN MILLION DOLLARS per year on unnecessary lawn mowing & leaf blowing.

And despite wasting $10,000,000 of public money per year on unneeded contracting services, they still can not find less than $1,000 to replace a stairwell carpet that stinks of piss, shit & vomit.

That folks, is the tired & dysfunctional NSW Labor government at work. It's sad that the only thing they are good at after more than a decade in office is mismanaging & wasting taxpayers' funds. No wonder life-long Labor voters like me are praying that they get annihilated at the next election. Even we have limits to our patience.

Thanks for reading.

Just as we all thought that the New South Wales Labor government could not get any more unpopular, it has now stooped to a level lower than the gutter. Yes folks - the once great political party that has received my vote for the past 26 years has found a new way to inspire community loathing.

As I have mentioned previously, I am a disabled pensioner who lives in government-owned (Housing NSW) subsidised public housing with my aged pensioner mother. On our limited income we certainly don't live the life of Reilly, but we were able to get by with a few comforts such as heating in Winter & a fan to cool us during the hot Summer months here in Sydney. But thanks to the sneaky tactics of Housing NSW & the electricity agencies, we won't be able to cool down for the rest of this (or any other) Summer, and it will have to be extra jumpers instead of heating during Winter.

Four months ago the electricity to my unit was charged at a rate of 12.7 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), 24 hours per day. Then we received a letter that our electricity meters were being changed to "improve our service". Always be aware folks - when a government agency says it is improving a service, that actually means they are telling their constituents to bend over and take it up the rear with a smile & a thank-you. There was absolutely nothing on the letter to state that our electricity charges would be going up as a result.

So you can imagine my shock when I received my latest electricity bill from AGL & saw that my electricity charges had been close to tripled from 12.7 cents per kilowatt hour to 34.9 cents per kWh. And our charges are going to be increased by another 10% from this Friday (January 1st).

Apparently, the modernisation of our electricity meters also involved us being changed from flat-rate to peak & off-peak rates, without us being informed that this was going to happen. So, low-income residents (who are home during peak times) now have to pay triple for their electricity from now on.

I don't think the dysfunctional NSW government thought this decision to triple the charges for pensioners through at all. Pensioners are usually at home during the day, and this is when the maximum peak electricity rate will be accrued. My mother is now talking about video taping her soap operas during the day, so she can watch them late at night when the electricity is cheaper. I enjoy my blogging & working on my website, but now I don't know if I can continue to run my computer during daylight hours. It looks like we may soon be restricted to just listening to an electricity-frugal wireless during daylight hours.

The elderly (nearly 80 years old) lady downstairs has given away her heater as she will no longer be able to afford to run it. Her place gets quite cold in Winter, because a huge tree shades it for much of the day. And the elderly Russian couple in the flat next to her are talking about cancelling their subscription to the Russian television news, as they have to cut back on costs due to the extortionate hike in electricity charges.

They've changed the electricity meters on a lot of public housing properties over the past few months, and I think that will be the final death knell for the Kristina Keneally-led NSW Labor government. Pensioners, the unemployed, and low-income families traditionally vote for Labor in elections. But every local person I have chatted to in my electorate of Heffron over the Christmas period has said that they are changing their vote to either the Greens, or (against all of their instincts) the conservative Liberal Party. Even the Socialist Alliance has been mentioned by one or two. If that is happening in one of the safest Labor seats in New South Wales, then Keneally & her team are looking at being wiped out in the March 2011 election. She has an opportunity to make up some ground in other areas, but the quarterly electricity bills will be a constant reminder to the elderly, the disabled and the underprivileged about just how evil and immoral the New South Labor government has become.

Extorting money from pensioners is not a good image for a government. Kristina Keneally still has time to reverse this decision to massively increase utilities costs to pensioners. Does she have the guts to do it & win back the support of traditional Labor voters? I honestly don't think she has. New South Wales Labor has become hostage to developers & money-making corporations over the past decade. Our illustrious Premier would have a very hard time telling the electricity corporations to slightly reduce their profits so that the elderly, the frail, and the sick can use a heater during the cold Winter months & run a cooling fan during the Summer heat.

The New South Wales government, Housing NSW, and the electricity retailers should all hang their heads in shame. I never thought that I would see the day where an Australian state government uses those worst off in society as a cash-cow. This decision will cost lives, especially in the inland suburbs of Sydney where Winters are much colder & Summers much hotter.

Shame on you New South Wales Labor. Shame on you Kristina Keneally (and former Premier Nathan Reese). Shame on NSW Housing for not advising us that upgrading our meters would triple our electricity charges. I really am just fed up with the whole lot of them. They are just a bunch of useless, immoral, unethical, money-hungry scoundrels.

Thanks for reading.

Sorry for the coarse language in the post title, but that is just how I feel about Coles supermarkets at the moment. I've just got back from another frustrating shopping expedition at their Surry Hills store, and am still shaking my head.

Why do people still shop at Coles? Their prices are increasing at around 50% each year, and the products are shrinking in size. This means the double-whammy of paying a lot more for a smaller amount for the customer. The only reason I go to Coles now is because I don't have a car to take me to a competitor, and Coles have got the supermarket monopoly in the Surry Hills-Redfern area.

To top it off today, after nearly keeling over from a heart attack after seeing a couple of my favourite products rise in price by around 20% (that's happened at least 4 times this year alone), I got stuck in the express lane checkout, behind a couple of brain dead women who thought that "12 items or less" means 12 bags of groceries or less! Why the checkout operators are not trained to tell these idiots to go to a non-express checkout is a real failure of management, and another frustration for those customers who do the right thing.

I guess the only good thing about Coles prices is that I am losing weight & getting healthier. They have become so expensive that I've been able to cut my grocery shopping there by about 50%, and I buy a lot more fresh fruit, vegies & meat from the local greengrocer & butchers, who have better quality & fresher produce at lower prices. It is a funny way to help customers save money though. Most stores want you to buy more, but Coles wants you to buy less.

However, there is a silver lining to all of this. Aldi at Marrickville have now become a serious option for me, as the savings I will make there compared to shopping at my local Coles will more than offset the bus or taxi fare I would need to pay to bring my groceries home. My downstairs neighbours have been grocery shopping at Aldi for quite a few months now - they could not handle Coles extortionate prices any more.

The quicker foreign competitors can open supermarkets in Australia the better it will be for all of us. I try to support Australian businesses whenever possible, but even a dill like me knows when he is being conned by the locals.

Thanks for reading

I've been living in Sydney for 43 years, and in all that time I have never seen a sight like the one that greeted me when I looked out of the window this morning. I could barely make out the cars parked on the other side of the street. Not because of fog, or heavy rain, or anything like that. Rather, a massive dust storm has blown in from outback New South Wales, dumping red dirt & topsoil from the inland all over my beautiful harbour city (see photos below).

Over the years I've seen dust storms on the news enveloping cities like Melbourne & Canberra, but I've never seen one hit Sydney. Usually the prevailing winds blow in a different direction & carry the dry dirt South, but this time the winds are blowing to the East, carrying the choking dust across the Blue Mountains and dumping it in the coastal Sydney basin.

Here is what Sydney normally looks like on a clear day & evening:
And here is what has greeted the residents of Sydney this morning:
It really is freakish isn't it? It is starting to clear now as I type this at 9am, but the Weather Bureau is now predicting gale force winds will hit the city later this morning.

I wonder if climate change means that these types of unusual events will become more common on Australia's East coast.

Thanks for reading...