Ideas@TheCentre
Homeownership for remote Indigenous communities
As part of the ‘Apology to the Stolen Generation,’ the Rudd government promised to spend $1.6 billion on a five-year housing strategy for remote Indigenous communities.
One year on, how has this strategy unfolded?
The government has certainly kept its promise to spend more money on Indigenous housing. Funding of $48.7 million has been provided to build new houses in four troubled communities in the Northern Territory.
But is this the solution to the housing crisis in remote communities?
Over the last 30 years, governments have sunk billions of dollars into public housing in remote communities with very little to show for it. The trend today is to build houses from materials that are costly and require specialist labour. As a result, the cost of new public housing has spiralled out of control and stalled any attempts to reduce the backlog in unmet housing needs. In spite of large injections of cash, the actual number of occupied houses in remote communities has fallen.
Instead of continuing to pour money into a bottomless pit, the Rudd government should seriously consider options for private homeownership in these communities.
The personal, family and social benefits associated with homeownership are strong arguments for shifting government funding from unsuccessful public housing to programs that would enable Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders living on communal title land to become homeowners.
The lack of private property rights on most Indigenous land is the principal barrier to private homeownership. Even for those Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who can afford to purchase a house, banks will not provide financing for home loans without individual title over land.
For Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to have the same opportunity for homeownership as other Australians, a lease scheme that allows communities to decide how to sublet their land needs to be introduced. ‘Community leases’ could operate like company title with eligibility rules and conditions for membership. This way private homeownership in remote communities might actually become a reality rather than mere rhetoric.
Sara Hudson is a policy analyst in the Indigenous Affairs program at CIS. Her report From Rhetoric to Reality will be available from CIS on Wednesday.
