Event speech: ENOUGH! Standing together for Victoria’s public housing

Event image by @artfuldolebludger on instagram

Transcript of my speech at the ENOUGH! Standing together for Victoria’s public housing event at the Capitol Theatre, 23/10/2025.

“Walawani njindiwan. Nayaga Keiran, nayaga-din wani-wandian. I hope you all had a safe journey here, my name is Keiran and I'm a proud Traditional Owner of wani-wandian country from the occupied yuin Nation, and here on behalf of RAHU and the BPU.

I want to start off by acknowledging and paying my respects to the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung people of the Kulin Nations and paying my respect to their elders, past and present.

This land, like all land across this vast continent, is unceded lands under an illegal colonial occupation. It always was, and always will be Aboriginal land.

This occupation presents a contradiction when we talk about public housing, and in fact when we talk about practically all forms of housing and property.

I want to mention here that I am a firm supporter and believer in the right of housing for all people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous.

But I must also acknowledge that housing and property rights has, and continues, to come at the expense of First Nations people.

Our displacement, our dispossession, the concentration camp policies of the missions and reserves, our genocide, and the occupation of our lands were the precursors for the modern colonial-state of australia that we all reside in today, including the public housing that the colonial state of victoria.

This displacement from our homes and dispossession of our lands continues to this day and is evident in the stats. When we look at First Nations homelessness, we see that our people are over 8 times more likely to be homeless than our non-Indigenous counterparts.

Alongside world leading rates for incarceration and child removal, we also suffer from some of the world's highest rates of homelessness.

Prior to colonisation, our people did not suffer from homelessness. Our people had strong kinship and cultural ties to their traditional homelands, and as a result, housing was something that was as accessible to us as food, water, and the air we breathe.

In an ideal world, First Nations Sovereignty and self-determination would be empowered, the colonial occupation of australia would be abolished, and we could once again return to a state that ensured housing not just for our people, but for all people who have come to call this land home.

After all, when we speak of caring for country, we don't just mean the land, the waters, the plants and the animals, but the people who live on that country as well, Indigenous and non-Indigenous.

But we don't live in an ideal world.

Instead, we live within a colonial-capitalist hellscape, where housing is not an accessible right for anyone, Indigenous or settler.

Until we do live within that ideal world, until we see the fall of the colony, we must ensure that the most vulnerable within the community are looked after as best as we can.

In this situation, it means putting aside that contradiction and pushing the colonial state of victoria to stop its abolition of public housing and instead to invest in it; not to knock down public housing towers but to build more public housing on our occupied lands.

This push is especially crucial for First Nations people, whose households currently stand at 5x more likely to be public housing than non-Indigenous households.

We don't want to see a continuation of displacement from, or denial of a home, a continuation that is being ramped up by the Victorian state government's push to privatise public housing and demolish public housing towers.

We want to see housing for all.

We must stand together, and we must do whatever we can to ensure public housing is an accessible right for all.

That means empowering and defending residents of housing towers who refuse to leave.

That means supporting mutual aid campaigns that ensure families can access housing.

That means lobbying, campaigning, protesting, direct action, and whatever avenue is available to you, to ensure that this colony makes whatever concessions are necessary, to ensure that they provide housing to all.

And above all, that means thinking long-term beyond this fight, and ensuring you continue to show up and support First Nations liberation, so that one day, we can all once again return to a point where housing is as accessible as food, as water, as the air we breathe, and as any other basic requirement for life.”