‘Heartbroken’: Richard Wynne on life, politics and the social housing levy that crushed him

There isn’t a single defining moment in Richard Wynne’s life that drove him to this point, rather, an inherent awareness of how critical safe and affordable housing is to changing lives. A sanctuary means security; it means beginning to end the cycle of disadvantage, homelessness and poverty.

Labor’s former housing minister knew this not because it was an esoteric academic debate to be pored over at university, but because he witnessed how it changed the lives of his friends. He went to school and played with the children who lived down the road in public housing. When he graduated, he worked on the front lines in public housing as a social worker, and then as an adviser to housing ministers in the Cain, Kirner and Keating governments. For more than 40 years, he dedicated his life to the cause.

“At its core,” Wynne says, “it’s about understanding and supporting the most vulnerable people in our community, and understanding that [housing] is their opportunity to grow and thrive.”

For more than 40 years, Richard Wynne has dedicated his life to social and public housing. Credit: Darrian Traynor

I’m meeting Richard William Wynne at Bar Rosella in the heart of Fitzroy to talk about life and politics following his retirement from cabinet in June. The 66-year-old has been the Labor member for Richmond since 1999, and the minister for housing between 2006 and 2010, and then again from 2018 until two months ago.

When he announced he would step away from politics at the upcoming state election, many saw it coming. He had had a good, long stint in the Victorian parliament, and a heart attack just weeks after the 2014 election that prompted speculation he would retire in 2018. But his sudden departure from the ministry during a major cabinet reshuffle came as a huge surprise.

Wynne represents a dying breed in the Labor Party: an old-school social warrior who sees good government as not being defined by its infrastructure agenda but by the way it changes the lives of society’s most vulnerable and disadvantaged.

He arrives at the Italian restaurant just after midday in signature hat and long coat.

Wynne orders split prawns with sea herbs and gremolata. Credit: Darrian Traynor

He orders split prawns with sea herbs and gremolata, while I order risotto taleggio with mushrooms. I can never say no to roast potatoes, and Wynne, who hasn’t had brussels sprouts in almost three decades, is keen to try the brussels sprouts with pancetta and sage.

I never find out why he hasn’t eaten the humble veggie in so long because he is too busy sharing that information with the waiter, and then enthusiastically agreeing why he must try it on this day.

Richard Wynne hasn’t had brussells sprouts for three decades, but is keen to try it on this day.Credit: Darrian Traynor

The food is secondary. The member for Richmond is more focused on the conversation, and you feel his energy when he talks about the two loves of his life: his family – wife, Svetlana, and two sons – and good public policy.

Wynne lives in North Melbourne with Svetlana, an art curator for the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. His eyes light up when he tells me about her, and the “extraordinary support” she has provided, while pursuing her own career to become one of only two people in Australia in her field.

How did you make life and politics work, I ask. He acknowledges it was hard, especially for his children, now in their 20s, who went through all the highs and lows of public life with him, but he made sure he took them to school each morning.

“I would be there every morning, [screaming], ‘Come on, hurry up, we gotta go’,” Wynne says, smiling, as we’re interrupted by our lunch arriving. “Mmm, that looks very, very good,” he tells the waiter, before turning back to me.

“Sunday lunch was often a very good thing to do, the yum cha type stuff. Friendly place in Flemington, I’m telling you, it was very, very good, which I will recommend to you. We would go regularly for about five years to Dangar Island.”

He doesn’t have firm plans about what the future holds, but says Svetlana will not let him stay home. He will end up doing not-for-profit work in the social and public housing sector.

Wynne has few regrets about his career, but there is an issue that continues to hurt him: a social housing levy that was lauded by public housing advocates who saw its potential to provide a long-term funding solution for Victoria’s nation-leading shortage of social housing. Five days after announcing it, the government killed it off fearing a scare campaign.

As Victoria was exiting its second COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, Wynne and Premier Daniel Andrews announced the state would pump $5.3 billion into building more than 12,000 homes within four years in the biggest spend on social housing in the state’s history. The Big Housing Build was an attempt at rectifying decades of under-investment that led to social housing waiting lists in Victoria ballooning to about 50,000.

Wynne was simultaneously working on the social housing levy he believed was far more profound and would provide a steady stream of long-term revenue for governments to build social and affordable housing. Various COVID-19 lockdowns dented his ability to roll it out and when he finally had a window to announce it, in February this year, it was bad timing.

Outside 1 Treasury Place on February 18, Wynne and Treasurer Tim Pallas announced from July 2024 all newly built developments with three or more dwellings or lot subdivisions would be required to hand over 1.75 per cent of the expected project value. The tax, to be known as the Social and Affordable Housing Contribution, would rake in about $800 million a year and flow into the existing Social Housing Growth Fund to pay for about 1700 new social and affordable homes each year.

The public housing sector welcomed it, but the property industry immediately railed against it.

Bar Rosella’s risotto taleggio with mushrooms. Credit: Darrian Traynor

The Property Council claimed the levy was tantamount to a 38.8 per cent increase in stamp duty and would add $19,600 to the price of a new median house in metropolitan Melbourne. In releasing those statistics, the council handed the opposition potent material for a scare campaign heading into the November state election. Desperate to cauterise the issue, the government five days later killed it off.

“I was heartbroken, I’ve not recovered,” Wynne says, in his first comments addressing the issue. “Sure, this may have been a legacy for me but, my god, it would have been an enduring legacy: 1700 units every year, year on year on year, and with the capacity to partner with the federal government. We were going to completely change the way housing was delivered, and I was dudded.”

Wynne says the Property Council’s modelling was “completely false”, and the levy would apply to the land, not the building. Two days after announcing the levy, part of a suite of packages designed to reap developers billions of dollars in benefits from a new streamlined planning approval process, Wynne and Pallas met the property industry lobby groups, including the Property Council, Master Builders Association, Housing Industry Association and the Urban Development Institute of Australia.

Wynne claims the Property Council announced it would support the levy. The Property Council has always maintained there was never agreement between the council and the government over the rate of 1.75 per cent.

Rosella’s roast potatoes with rosemary.Credit: Darrian Traynor

“But what I realised after I absorbed this massive blow was the actual contempt they had for me, and I found that really distressing,” Wynne says. His voice is tinged with anger, but mostly it’s distress.

“I thought, ‘you cannot in any way put your head above the rampart and see there was a greater good here, that your modelling was nonsense, that we were given assurances – no question?’

“It’s very sad for me, but very sad for our community. It was elegantly designed, beautiful public policy.”

How much responsibility does Labor bear, though, for Victoria becoming a laggard in social housing?

The party has been in power for 29 of the past 40 years. Only 3.2 per cent of Victoria’s housing stock is social housing – about 81,000 dwellings – below the national average of 4.2 per cent. Infrastructure Victoria released its 30-year blueprint in August, and said the state needed to build an extra 3900 to 4900 homes every year for the next 10 years – between $6.5 billion and $16 billion extra by 2031.

Wynne doesn’t believe it’s the fault of successive state governments. When asked what went wrong, he points to the Rudd government’s decision to abandon the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement.

“If you look back on it now, and you ask, what was wrong with it? Well, not much. It survived for 40 years or more. It was a relatively simple agreement: $2 from the Commonwealth, matched by $1 from the state, and then specialist programs for homelessness and family violence, and so forth. I hope our new federal government will be prepared to go back and have a think about some of this.”

Wynne was the housing minister in July 2020 when the Andrews government placed nine public housing towers in North Melbourne and Flemington under an immediate hard lockdown.

Ombudsman Deborah Glass in December of that year found the government’s decision violated the human rights of about 3000 tenants and has urged it to apologise. She said the immediate isolation had affected residents’ health and wellbeing while the rest of the state had the chance to prepare for restrictions.

The government refused to apologise, and Glass this week reiterated her criticism that she was “incensed” by that decision.

“The response was ‘we make no apology for saving human lives’. This is not what I said they needed to apologise for,” she said on Tuesday. “The point I made ... which the government pointedly avoided in its failures to apologise, was there were reasonable alternatives that would have respected people’s rights without compromising public safety.”

Wynne maintains the decision to place the towers in a hard lockdown was the right one. He says just 50 metres away from one of the North Melbourne towers, there was a 12-storey building with elderly residents who had serious underlying health conditions.

“I don’t shy away from the fact that this was an unprecedented action, but I knew it was the right decision,” he says.

“No doubt in the first couple of days, things were very, very tough. But once the full array of supports were put in place, it was a really thorough intervention by the government and the community welfare organisations.”

When Wynne goes in November, the Greens could finally end up winning his inner-city seat, which takes in the suburbs of Richmond, Fitzroy, Collingwood and Clifton Hill.

The Labor stalwart has been stemming the green tidal wave for more than two decades, but came close to losing the seat in 2014. The seat swung back to Labor during the “Danslide” 2018 election, but the Greens’ candidate, Gabrielle de Vietri, is confident of capitalising on Wynne’s retirement by highlighting the Andrews government’s record on climate change and housing policy.

A 2003 photo of Labor MPs on the steps of Parliament. [L-R] Rob Hudson, Richard Wynne, Daniel Andrews, Jacinta Allan, Maxine Morand, John Lenders, Alistair Harkness and Bruce Mildenhall. Credit: Michael Rayner

Wynne has been seen internally in the Labor Party as a statesman and a steady hand who has balanced the gentrification of Richmond with its traditional blue-collar constituents and migrant communities. He has established rapport with local community groups, and earned the trust of housing commission tenants who see him as a fierce advocate, as well as members of the LGBTIQ community.

Wynne doesn’t hold back on his criticism of the Greens.

“The simple opportunism of the Greens, I find really distasteful,” he says. “It was very elegantly put by Paul Erickson, the national secretary of the party at the National Press Club lunch, where he said, ‘The thing with the Greens is they’re always two steps to the left of us, they’ll either appropriate anything that’s progressive of ours that we’ve done and [say] the only reason we’ve done it is because of them, or we haven’t done enough’.”

It was this statesman-like reputation that prompted Andrews to tap Wynne in 2014 and appoint him into the planning portfolio. Wynne’s predecessor was Matthew Guy, the current state opposition leader, whose time in the portfolio between 2010 and 2014 was controversial.

Andrews wanted someone who would keep planning out of the news cycle. Wynne was that safe pair of hands, who has been pejoratively described by some as cautious. Critics have said Wynne takes a long time to make decisions, that planning applications can remain on his desk for long periods, that Victoria no longer talks about a vision for the way Melbourne ought to look like in the future.

“That observation is wrong,” Wynne says. “We continued to make timely decisions; decisions that were informed by appropriate professional advice and I make no apology for that.”

“When I started in planning, I’d never seen a more demoralised workforce; they were completely demoralised from my predecessor. So I had to try to rebuild it all and say, ‘No, I respect the public service, I respect your professional advice, and I will act on that advice. Sometimes I may not agree with you, but give me the arguments and give me the alternatives’.”

And then the department, he says, finally turned its attention to population growth, mitigating climate change, heritage overlays and planning controls. He doesn’t agree that the government no longer talks about how the future of Melbourne will be reshaped, but says the tools are finally in place, and that the COVID-19 pandemic has completely shifted our initial ideas on what Melbourne will look like in two or three decades.

Perhaps it’s this cautiousness that has saved the skin of not just Wynne but Andrews, who heads to this election seeking a third term and with an integrity cloud hanging over his head. IIn October 2018, The Age published its investigation into allegedly corrupt planning consultant John Woodman, who planned to steer the rezoning of land in Melbourne’s south-east that would reap millions in profits for the landowners.

According to state government documents seen by this masthead, Wynne did not reject the application, as his own department had advised, instead seeking a compromise position. The publication of the story in 2018 sent alarm bells ringing, prompted Wynne to halt his decision, and then led to an anti-corruption commission investigation.

The Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission is expected to recommend a suite of reforms, but the draft report is held up in the courts by Woodman.
Wynne says the government will consider the report in detail.

″⁣No doubt, it will go to the question of checks and balances in planning, and that’s not a bad thing,″⁣ he says. ″⁣The matters relating [to that application] are subject to IBAC considerations and I have no comment to make on it.″⁣

Fascinating answers to perplexing questions delivered to your inbox every week. Sign up to get our new Explainer newsletter here.