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GOVT HOMEOWNERSHIP SCHEMES STILL FAILING INDIGENOUS PEOPLE
The great Australian dream of owning one’s own home has been denied to Indigenous Australians by excessive government bureaucracy, says a report being released on Thursday.
The report, From Rhetoric to Reality: Can 99-year Leases Lead to Homeownership for Indigenous Communities? by Sara Hudson from the Centre for Independent Studies says that ‘despite spending billions of dollars, successive Australian governments have delivered failed policy after failed policy on indigenous housing since the 1950s.’
Some 70,000 Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders live on communal title lands, in overcrowded and poorly maintained public housing.
‘The lack of private property rights on communal title land has made homeownership on that land impossible, even for those who can afford to purchase a house,’ says Hudson.
‘In the Northern Territory and Queensland, recent legislative changes have enabled 99-year leases to be established on communal land, but excessively bureaucratic rules make it too hard for indigenous people to access leasing agreements on their own land.’
A better approach to community leasing would include:
- The government letting go its top-down control of head leases and allow communities to control these instead.
- If communities agree to 99-year head leases over their land, they could consolidate themselves as a legal corporate body to determine eligibility rules for membership and what conditions to put on head leases.
- In conjunction with shire councils, communities could draw up town plans to determine how much land to set aside for public use and which areas would be residential or commercial
Unfortunately, the Rudd government’s plan to promote homeownership on communal title land appears to be more rhetoric than reality. The government appears set to revisit the policies of the past that simply converted rent into mortgage repayments.
The embargoed report is available at www.cis.org.au/policy_monographs/pm92.pdf
Sara Hudson is a Policy Analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies.
She is available for comment.
