Heena Sinha Cheung
Independent

Summary

Policies & Commentary

Hold on to your ballots, folks, because I think I just found the single best Housing Policy in this entire election.

Heena Sinha Cheung has a solid background in Public Health, particularly in the disability sector, entrepreneurship, and community engagement. On her website, Cheung talks frankly about her experiences as an abuse survivor, identifying this as a driving motivation in her work with other survivors and with empowering women, especially women of colour. Her mission statement reads like a textbook example of what a good Independent candidate should be:

My vision for Victoria is a community that thrives on diversity, innovation, and inclusivity. I believe in leadership that listens, acts decisively, and delivers meaningful change. Victorians deserve a Senator who will fight for equality, champion bold ideas, and create opportunities for all.

Now, that’s nothing I haven’t read before. The difference is, Cheung’s policies absolutely back up this vision.

Let’s start with Cost of Living. Cheung is a big fan of oversight, calling for regulatory bodies to keep energy, fuel, and grocery prices in check. At the consumer level, there are policies for targeted energy relief, managed cuts to the fuel excise to combat “surges”, expanding the allowance for cooling and heating to encompass all seniors and disabled folk, affordable childcare, and tax cuts for low and middle income earners. To further drive down prices, she suggests greater support for primary producers and accelerated investment in renewables.

This isn’t just wishful thinking, either. Cheung has policies designed to bring in the revenue needed to fund her cost of living initiatives. These are aimed squarely at the highest income earners in Australia, and at corporations. There is no wiggle room here; Cheung wants the tax loopholes that allow billionaires to pay less (or even no tax than the lowest income earners not just closed, but slammed shut and welded over. Corporations would also be compelled into mandatory public reporting of their profits.

Then there’s Housing. And here’s where I fell in love with Cheung.

Reading these policies is like a dream. There are concrete, long-term measures to increase housing supply, especially affordable and social housing. There are proposed rent caps to prevent predatory landlords pricing renters right out of their homes. And there is a call to institute a vacant home tax, which would incentivise investment property owners to rent out their properties to renters – or else provide the government with more revenue to fund housing relief.

For the regions, Cheung has a full suite of policies aimed at encouraging people to move out of major cities for both living and working. These include high speed rail (Drink!), public transport, NBN/5g rollout, funding and tax breaks for those who want to establish business or work in regional healthcare. Along with these Cheung suggests decentralising government services, subsidising a relocation allowance for those willing to move, and a public information campaign to make sure everyone is aware of the benefits.

Now, obviously, Cheung’s Housing policies would attract a huge amount of expenditure, and that does raise the question of exactly how all these initiatives would be funded. Here, I suspect, Cheung is relying heavily on revenue from closing those loopholes mentioned earlier.

Nonetheless, this is the only Housing policy suite I’ve looked at in this election to run full-tilt towards tackling the real problem with both ridiculously high rents and overpriced house sales – supply. Cheung goes further than both the majors, in backing up her promise to increase supply with building the necessary infrastructure to encourage the decentralisation that we have been in sore need of for decades now. It’s by far the most sensible thing I’ve read on the subject.

In terms of social policies, Cheung’s focus is very, very narrow – and this reflects her work outside the political sphere. She focuses on two closely linked areas, family violence and child sexual abuse.

With regard to the latter, her policies attack every shortcoming in our current system, from the lack of support for survivors to the fact that court systems are weighted towards accommodating alleged perpetrators rather than helping victims. Her solutions include mandating acceptance of video evidence, shielding minors both in court and in the process of reporting, and supplying trained navigators to help shepherd victims and their families through the process. Offenders, she argues, should not be able to use the courts to prevent survivors from speaking out. Sentences should be toughened, and a system put in place that operates similar to the UK’s Child Sex Offender Disclosure Scheme (or Sarah’s Law), where parents, guardians, and carers can ask police to tell them if someone has a criminal record related to sex offences.

Cheung is no less demanding when it comes to the issue of Family Violence. She calls for more funding for crisis accommodation, 24/7 hotlines, culturally safe and disability-inclusive services for Aboriginal women, LGBTIQ+ survivors, and CALD communities, and immediate and ongoing support for those fleeing family violence. Along with this is a promise to expand Victoria’s Safe At Home program, which provides victim-survivors with safety and support services to help them stay in their homes, while perpetrators are removed. Her policies go further than relief of immediate crisis, though, advocating the provision of assistance to survivors through rent subsidies, job pathways through TAFE, and financial counselling.

On the subject of education, Cheung is firmly in favour of across-the-board training in dealing effectively and sensitively with issues of family violence, from schools, to police, to healthcare personnel. Crucially, she also calls for prevention education, so that those who work in these first-contact positions can spot the signs of abuse.

In the area of Climate Change, Cheung offers another suite of comprehensive policies that – refreshingly – all start from the position that climate change is not only real, it’s an urgent problem and we need to bring in a climate strategy that moves beyond half-measures and contradictions. Some of her initiatives are grand, sweeping projects, such as: phasing out coal and gas with re-skilling of workers in those industries; massive investment in renewables; and a complete overhaul of our infrastructure with a view to creating “green” communities. Others are small, but would have a huge impact. For example, Cheung calls for hospitals to have mandated heatwave preparedness protocols, and public cooling centres for vulnerable groups such as seniors and the unhoused.

Overall, it’s hard to find fault with any of Cheung’s policies, and that, friends, is a rare and wonderful thing in politics. If I had to nitpick, it could only be in terms of costings. Though Cheung has a potentially huge source of revenue built into her cost of living initiatives by making the top income earners pay their fair share of tax, it’s simply not possible to know if that would finance her vision for Australia.

That being said, it’s not like other Independents or even bigger parties have been forthcoming with the costings for their promises. Labor only released their numbers today, and we still have no idea if the Liberal Party will get theirs out before the media blackout comes into effect. And at least Cheung has provided at least some strategies to increase revenue.

What really stands out to me, though, is just how much thought has gone into developing these policy areas. In each case, the problem has been identified, then attacked from several different directions, which shows that Cheung is very much across her subjects. And I keep coming back to her Housing policies as some of the most sensible and comprehensive that have ever been offered. When you couple these with her advocacy for renewable energy access to housing and building “green” dwellings, you get a candidate who understands that our issues don’t exist in neat little vacuums.

Honestly, this is some of the most intelligent work I’ve read in many years of wading through policies. The major parties and the Greens would do well to read Cheung’s policies very carefully, and take copious notes. This is how you do it right.

If you’re Victorian, I’d encourage you to put Cheung at the very top of your ballot. Her voice in Parliament would be a welcome injection of sanity, practicality, and compassion that could mitigate – even slightly – the tendency for legislative wrangling to devolve into a chaotic mess. And god knows we need that.