Rethinking the politics of distribution: the geographies and governmentalities of housing assistance in rural New South Wales, Australia.

Housing, while a necessity of ‘life’, goes beyond this definition in this research to also become a technology of government in the domestic distributional geopolitics of nation-states. Employing a Foucaultian approach to power and governance, this research examines how the provision of housing assistance was used in the government of rural public housing communities. Data for this research were collected through a series of archival resources that focused specifically on the transitional periods of 1935-1955 and 1985-2005. Data were also gathered through a questionnaire and interviews with public housing tenants and staff from four towns (Griffith, Cootamundra, Junee and Tumut) in the ‘Riverina’ region of south-western New South Wales (NSW), Australia. This research makes five contributions to geographical understandings of distributional politics. First, the thesis contends that poststructuralist theoretical approaches to the analysis of power and governance enable innovative critical engagements with the distributional geopolitical agendas of governmental processes. The research also found that the distributional geopolitical agendas of Governments have been pursued through more than just the redistribution of fiscal resources, but also include the redistribution of human resources. In particular, housing assistance has been, and is used today, to perpetuate certain internal migration patterns to aid this human-distributional agenda. Third, the study argues that – while the broad shift to advanced liberal forms of government have resulted in changes to how distributional geopolitical agendas are pursued – ‘distribution’ remains an integral feature of the geopolitical objectives of those who seek to govern in advanced liberal ways. This work also shows how these new advanced liberal distributional objectives remain open to being problematised and/or resisted at the local scale. However, while such governmental processes are always uncertain and open to contestation, these changes have brought about a new set of ethical and political consequences. We need to be alert to and critical of the ways in which these new distributional geopolitical agendas impact on our own and others’ ‘freedoms’