The Liberal state government in New South Wales has announced plans to impose a “bedroom tax” on public housing residents, adding $2.2 million to government coffers from the pockets of low income earners. Tenants will be slugged with a weekly charge for “under-occupying” their houses or flats unless they agree to leave their homes and be placed in smaller accommodation.

Ned Cutcher, senior policy officer at the Tenants Union of New South Wales, told Red Flag that the tax is “all stick and no carrot”. He explained, “People will be forced to choose between an economic or social cost.”

Singles in public housing with a spare bedroom will have to pay a $20 per week levy, and the price rises to $30 per week for couples. The tax could leave a pensioner in public housing with $36 a day to live on. The unemployed could find themselves with as little as $21 a day to cover transport, food and expenses.

The only other option is for public housing tenants to leave their houses and be relocated by the government, possibly ending up kilometres away from friends, family, community and support networks.

The state government has been busy soaking the poor. The Tenants Union noted that the tax “comes on the back of the Clean Energy Supplement’s inclusion in a tenant’s assessable income [and] changes to welfare payments that leave single parents in social housing worse off”.

The median weekly rent for a house on the private market in Sydney is $500, making it Australia’s most expensive city. An estimated 180,000 renters in NSW struggle with high housing costs.

With Housing NSW advising that applicants will wait over a decade on average for public housing in many areas, the system is at breaking point. What is needed is serious investment. Massively expanding the public housing system could at least provide some relief to the thousands of families struggling to pay the rent.

Instead, the priority for the government has been to shift the cost of public housing on to those who can least afford to pay.

The bedroom tax mirrors a similar scheme introduced in Britain, where the social consequences have been dire for low income earners already struggling to cope with austerity policies.

David Orr, the chief executive of the UK National Housing Federation, told the BBC, “The impact is at least as bad as we had anticipated, in many respects even worse.”

Orr was speaking after the suicide of Stephanie Botrill, who had lived alone in her three bedroom house after her children moved out. She faced a choice between leaving her home, or losing 80 pounds a month to the bedroom tax. Her suicide note, left for her children, read: “Don’t blame yourself for me ending my life. The only people to blame are the government – no one else.”