It’s no secret that Australia is experiencing a housing crisis. There’s an ever-widening gap between those who own and those who don’t, exacerbated by a tendency to view property as an asset rather than a basic human right. The system is set up to fail anyone without inherited wealth of some kind, or who isn’t part of a couple with a dual income. Sex workers are thus in an extremely difficult position—it is hard to get a loan as someone self-employed, and especially in an industry that is perceived as risky. Many sex workers hope to find themselves in situations in which a client buys, or helps them to buy, a place to live.
More often than not this turns out to be a poisoned chalice. I know of girls who have had a client buy a property for them in exchange for long-term service arrangements. I know of clients who have bought properties for sex workers, but kept them under their own names—thus turning the home into a bargaining chip to prolong the professional relationship or to demand excessive requests. It can become a way for a wealthy man to own a property and a woman.
I recently experienced something like this when, on mentioning how hard it is to get a loan as a sex worker, an extremely rich long-term client of mine offered me a mortgage loan. He made a spiel about how generous he was being, telling me he would only want repayment on the interest and that he could lend me as much as I wanted. Later he emailed the terms, which were 5 per cent interest (by comparison, banks are around 6 per cent). They also included a clause allowing him to terminate the agreement with a six month notice period, so that he could reclaim the money by forcing me to sell the asset and repay him. Had I taken up this offer, I would’ve been paying my client half my yearly income in interest alone. In exchange he would’ve felt like my pimp, a man pocketing my hard-earned cash out of a supposed “act of generosity”. There was no risk in it for him; he was guaranteed to make money off my need to borrow, and if I couldn’t make repayments the asset would be sold and he would recoup his costs.
In many faiths, including Islam, it is forbidden to charge interest on loans as it is considered unethical and usurious. This makes complete sense to me, especially when it came to this situation, in which my client was happy to extend my credit indefinitely without regard for my ability to pay him back. The more indebted I would become, the more money he would make from me. In the end it didn’t matter to him whether I ended up owning my home or not. He was setting himself up as my bank, fattening himself on my profits, but without the checks and balances of a real bank loan. And he called that generosity?
Of course, I could have benefitted from this, as many people would have. I could have used the loan to buy an investment property that I could then resell for profit or rent out and have as an asset. The system is so rigged that almost the only way to win is to play into it. I can’t bring myself to do this, though. Having seen my hometown desecrated by the housing crisis so that not locals are priced out, I would feel sickened to make money in this way. For me the only good reason to buy property is for the security of having a home to live in, for the rest of your life and without being at the whims of a landlord. I also think it is doubly morally wrong to financially benefit from property in Australia, in which most of us are settlers living on stolen land.
And so I’ll continue renting, even though the protections in Australia for renters are meagre, and let the extremely Australian dream of homeownership die.
