"I am not being paid for the work

I have done so why should I do any more?" 

There is yet another piece in today's paper about the government's failure to pay the "tradies" or tradesmen for the work they are doing on social housing sites. Apparently some of them are owed as much as $70,000 and have been owed this for as much as twelve months.

The government got rid of a lot of the social housing some years back. They gave the people who had lived in the small houses for many years the opportunity to buy them at very reasonable prices. Many of those who could afford it did just that. One of the reasons they did it is that these were the tenants who had come in under an old scheme where the rent was fixed. They had lived in the same place for many, many years. They were doing their own maintenance because they knew the government was never "going to get around to it".

We once lived next door to a woman who was one of those responsible for setting this scheme up. Mum's brother benefitted from the scheme when he was working for the government. He was eligible because he spent a good deal of time elsewhere working on a space research project. The government had decided that such workers were in need of a permanent base in the city. My uncle could have had a house but, not being married at the time, he opted for a small flat not far from where his parents lived. It was in a big block of such flats. The block is still there but the last of the tenants on the old scheme died some years ago. When she did the government undertook some "maintenance" of the entire block. It was painted, doors were fixed and some plumbing issues sorted. Now the government can charge hundreds of dollars a week in rent instead of twenty dollars...and it does.

One of the locals who does maintenance as a sideline from his other job told me yesterday that the government still has not paid the people who worked on this. He thinks the job could have been "better done" but he also said, "of course it had to be done at a certain price".

I can imagine this. The government would want the work done as cheaply as possible. They would not want the best quality materials used and, as long as it looked good, they would not be too concerned about the quality of the work. Add the piles of paperwork involved for anyone participating in doing the repairs and maintenance and I doubt that tradespeople would be making money out of it. 

If the work has been done however and the paperwork has been put in and someone has been to inspect the site then the government should pay. The money is apparently there. It is no doubt earning interest but why pay people if you can get them to work, at least for a while, for nothing? 

I can imagine what the paperwork is like. There would be pages of it. There would be multiple forms. They would ask for at least some of the same information twice or three or even four times. There would be photographs to take and reports to write. There would be delays while waiting for permission to be granted to do something differently. It would not be a simple matter of "getting on with the job" or simply contacting the person in charge of the site and explaining a problem. 

There is unused social housing which should be available but needs repair. Perhaps it is time to rethink the way the repairs can be done - and one way might be to pay people who do the repairs.