Ideas@TheCentre
Government furphy on Indigenous homeownership
In a media release on the Indigenous Affairs part of the 2012 Budget, the federal government insists it ‘will continue to prioritise access to the new program for people seeking to move into home ownership on Indigenous land’ – but this is a furphy.
The government is well aware that people living on Indigenous land will not be able to access money from the new Indigenous homeownership program as long as they do not have security of tenure. To pretend that they are serious about helping people living on Indigenous land move into their own home without mentioning how exactly this will happen is misleading.
The current lease arrangement for Indigenous lands is extremely unpopular, and the only community that has private housing leases is the Nguiu township on the Tiwi Islands.
Communities could potentially bypass the controversial head lease arrangement for the 99-year leases initiated by the Howard government in 2006 if land councils issued residential leases to communities. But land councils have demonstrated myopic thinking on this issue.
When the residents of Baniyala, a small community in East Arnhem Land, approached the Northern Land Council (NLC) for 99-year leases on their land, the council refused to issue leases and told the residents they could build private housing without leases.
Kim Hill, chief executive of the NLC, said in an article in The Australian that residents should be ‘well aware that leasing is not required for charitable construction on Aboriginal land.’
This comment completely misses why residents are applying for leases on their land. They know charitable organisations can help construct buildings on their land – this is already happening – but there is no legal clarity on who would be the owner of these buildings.
Under the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act 1976, the ‘owner’ is the NLC. But for residents to actually own their home, they need to have secure title.
Without leases, Baniyala families are not only denied the government grants available to all other Australians purchasing a home, but they also cannot access funding under the Homeownership on Indigenous Land program. Nor can they apply for a mortgage from a mainstream bank, insure their houses, or leave their home securely in their wills to their children.
The situation is a farce. Land councils happily lease land to mining companies for commercial operations but won’t lease land to residents. Instead, residents are expected to rely on charitable aid for new housing. Baniyala residents requesting help from the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) with their lease negotiations with the NLC were told the government could not help them.
Like other areas of the federal budget, the government’s supposed largesse for Indigenous homeownership is a sleight of hand that does not hold up to scrutiny.
Sara Hudson is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and author of From Rhetoric to Reality: Can 99-year Leases Lead to Homeownership for Indigenous Communities?
