A counter-intuitive proposal to expand rooftop solar in the bush

 

The self-same sun that shines upon his court

Hides not his visage from our cottage but

Looks on all alike.

The Winter’s Tale Act four, Scene four.

 

My previous post was essentially a high-level review of an excellent book titled Guide to Housing and Infrastructure Standards in Town Camps (link here). I recommend readers peruse that post before reading this post.

In this post, I delve a bit deeper into just one of the thirty essential services issues addressed by the Guide — the under-reliance on rooftop solar power in remote communities — and make a high-level policy proposal to break the current structural deadlock that contributes to energy insecurity, poor health, and the sheer liveability of remote community housing infrastructure.  

The Guide’s analysis of rooftop solar

The Guide (section 2.28 on pp. 148 – 151) identifies solar energy as one of the thirty issues it deals with. The Problem is identified as energy insecurity. The combination of temperature extremes, poor housing design, associated high demand for electricity, in a context of high reliance on prepayment meters amongst town camp residents leads to high levels of energy insecurity. The Guide references academic research to report on extraordinary rates of multiple power disconnection events affecting 91 percent of prepayment meter households across the NT (link here). Under Regulations, the Guide notes inter alia that the payback term for installed rooftop systems is often less than five years, and suggests that the introduction of rooftop solar systems could be the key to climate proofing homes in Aboriginal Town Camps (link here). Under Solutions, the Guide points out that while the upfront costs of incorporating solar energy systems into community and housing infrastructure has often been used as an excuse for not installing them, it calculates for one town camp that the payback period from installation would be four years, and points to the additional benefit of reduced health costs arising from avoiding the adverse implications of temperature extremes.

The Guide backs up this analysis with an aerial photo of a town camp showing nine houses, with no obvious solar alignment, and with no use of solar panels: the heading is Roof-top Solar Panels are not often used in Town Camps. On the facing page is an aerial photo of 23 houses in Alice Springs, of which 16 appear to be utilising solar panels. Furthermore, it is striking that the houses are all solar aligned to maximise the benefits of solar radiation in winter and minimise costs and radiation in summer. The Heading is Roof-top Solar Panels and Solar Oriented Houses in Alice Springs.

Subsequent sections in the Guide deal with the related issues of Passive Cooling and Heating, and the use of Outdoor Rooms and Courtyards.

In a rapidly warming world, the importance of addressing these issues is inarguable. Yet very few people would be aware or conscious of the fact that there are systemic disparities between the way mainstream and Aboriginal communities are designed and operate in relation to these issues. The consequences for communities are both real and deeply unfair. The degree of unfairness is magnified when it is recognised that over the past decade there have been substantial subsidies available to homeowners designed to encourage the take up of rooftop solar infrastructure, but that social housing ‘owners’ (ie governments) have not seen fit to invest in installation of rooftop solar on public housing in the NT — and I suspect elsewhere. The levels of recognition amongst policymakers and the informed public of the degree of inequity and unfairness in solar provision appears to be close to zero.

Again, as pointed out in my previous post, the policy context is complex, but it is not beyond the technical capacity of governments to address. It does however appear to be beyond their political and policy capacity, even in circumstances where addressing the issues would harvest both financial and social benefits for disadvantaged First Nations communities and for society as a whole.

Given the lack of proactivity from governments on the issue of energy insecurity for remote community residents, it struck me that an alternative approach might pay dividends (so to speak).

A strategic reform proposal

The relatively new NT Aboriginal Investment Corporation (NTAIC) which has adopted the name Aboriginal Investment NT: (link here).  I have opted to use the name used in the legislation that establishes the entity. NTAIC is a Commonwealth statutory corporation established to administer a proportion of ABA funds. I was one of a number of critics of the design of this entity when it was first proposed in late 2021 (link here). While I am yet to be persuaded that I was wrong, the establishment of NTAIC provides a degree of Indigenous agency over the allocation of significant ABA funds which are broadly designated as being for the benefit of Aboriginal people across the Northern Territory.

My proposal (for the NT) is that NTAIC should consider initiating negotiations with the NT Government based on an offer to assist in accelerating the take up of roof top solar across remote community housing in the NT. Almost all remote community housing is social housing managed by the NTG. While arguably the responsibility for rolling out roof-top solar across remote communities belongs to the NTG, it is a responsibility that is patently not being implemented. Moreover, due to the systemic incentives in play which shape the allocation of scarce government funding, the NTG is unlikely to unilaterally initiate the roll out of roof top solar over remote community housing anytime soon.

Given this context, the NTAIC might offer to fund a significant proportion (or even all) of the capital costs of a multi-year roof-top solar installation program on the condition that the NTG commits to the ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure along with the associated repairs and maintenance of the social housing assets. A second and crucial component of any such deal would be a commitment that the financial benefits in terms of lower power costs of the installation of rooftop solar would accrue to the householder and the local community. Such an arrangement would appear to fit squarely within the statutory functions of NTAIC as laid out in section 65BB of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (link here). While it is not entirely clear to me whether this fits within the NTAIC current Strategic Investment Plan (link here), this need not be an absolute barrier to initiating good and common sense ideas.

The same model might be explored across WA, QLD, SA, and indeed the NT by Indigenous Business Australia (IBA), or in the NT potentially by NTAIC and IBA jointly. I acknowledge that the negotiation of a pure funding transfer with state and territory jurisdictions may not fall directly within the remit of IBA (see sections 147/148 of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Act 2005: link here). However, if developed along with arrangements for the utilisation of Indigenous firms to install and maintain infrastructure on behalf of these jurisdictions, the proposal could be easily brought within he IBA remit. This constraint would not apply to NTAIC in the NT, but would nevertheless be worth considering in any case.

I understand that this idea is counterintuitive insofar as it lacks a commercial rationale and may also appear to undermine the responsibilities of the relevant governments to provide and pay for social housing. However, when governments are not delivering on their responsibilities, and thus failing in their raison d’etre, and as a consequence Indigenous people are worse off than they should be, it seems to me that there is a case for Indigenous leaders appointed to roles on boards such as NTAIC and IBA to take action. While there is not a commercial return to the potential funders under my proposal (ie NTAIC and/or IBA), there is clearly a strong economic rationale.

The findings of the Guide discussed above that roof-top solar effectively pays for itself within 3 to 5 years (let’s say five years for simplicity) in effect tells us that there is a rate of return on the investment of at least 20 percent. I venture to say that NTAIC and IBA would struggle to identify any other broad scale placed base initiative across remote Australia that could match this return on investment.

The sticking point will be the definition of ‘investment’. It turns upon the difference between a commercial return (where the financial returns accrue to the investor) and an economic return where the financial returns accrue to the householder. Bearing in mind that both NTAIC and IBA are Commonwealth corporations utilising what are effectively public funds to operate, it strikes me that they should decide whether they exist merely  to beef up their own bottom lines, or to address the financial exclusion of a swathe of disadvantaged Indigenous communities. My point is strengthened when we take into account the positive externalities of addressing energy insecurity earlier rather than later, in terms of improved health, improved food security, and poverty mitigation.  

The proposal I have made has the potential to drive tangible increases in real incomes for remote families and thus deliver myriad financial and health benefits for thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander residents of the north. Moreover, the adoption of my proposal by NTAIC and/or IBA would mean that action is initiated much sooner on what would necessarily be a multiyear effort and would ensure that governments would eventually accept that they had the responsibility to replace roof top solar infrastructure as it reached its end of life as a normal part of social housing provision.

Of course, a potential argument against my proposal is that it implicitly means that other opportunities will not be funded. If so, I suggest that the responsibility falls to NTAIC and IBA to identify just what those higher priorities are. One way of mitigating this consequence, and simultaneously driving further strategic change aimed at underming structural inequity, would be for the NTAIC and/or IBA to seek to have the NAIF provide concessional finance to assist in financing their contributions. See my recnt post on the NAIF (link here).

Conclusion

We hear a lot about self-determination, and Indigenous leadership as the prerequisite for effective policy outcomes. It strikes me that the opportunity to drive a major upgrade of rooftop solar across remote communities presents the boards of NTAIC and of the IBA with a once in a generation fork in the road: they either take the initiative to drive strategic change or they accept that failing governments should be left to continue to fail remote Indigenous communities.

The evidence of egregious and myriad policy exclusion by governments is inexorably accumulating. It is incontrovertible that remote communities have unequal access to essential services and are at greater risk arising from energy insecurity in a warming world. Governments, and our system of politics and policy development, have failed because they design and implement exclusionary policy frameworks which treat remote community and town camp residents worse than the residents of major urban centres. In these circumstances, the NTAIC and the IBA should step up and use their undoubted financial leverage to drive strategic policy reform.

 

Further reading:

Longden, T., Quilty, S., Riley, B. et al. Energy insecurity during temperature extremes in remote Australia. Nat Energy 7, 43–54 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-021-00942-  (link here).

 

Solar solutions could be the key to climate-proofing homes in Aboriginal town camps By Stephanie Boltje, The Drum  (link here).

 

18 December 2024

 

Infrastructure shortfalls in Alices Springs town camps

Comparisons are odorous

Much Ado About Nothing, Act three, Scene five

 

According to a 2019 NT Government policy document (link here), there are 43 town camps across the NT, of which 18 are within Alice Springs.  ABS census data from 2021 (link here), identifies 1055 residents of 18 town camps in Alice Springs. The population comprised 275 families and 256 families. The median age was 30. The median weekly household income was $756. There is much more demographic information available from the ABS web page linked to above. Anecdotally (and reflected in many NT government publications) there is a large but variable cohort of temporary visitors resident in Alice’s town camps. This cohort reflects the ongoing high mobility of families between surrounding communities and Alice Springs. At peak visitation periods, the population of the town camps may reach around 2000 residents.

I recently came across an extraordinary new book on the infrastructure and essential services needs of Alice Springs town camps (h/t Brad Riley). Authored by five researchers associated with the University of Newcastle and Tangentyere Council,  Chris Tucker, Michael Klerck, Anna Flouris, Vanessa Napaltjarri Davis and Denise Foster, and published by Australian Scholarly Publishing, it is prosaically titled Guide to Housing and Infrastructure Standards in Town Camps (link here). The Guide’s design and presentation is excellent, and its photographs, maps and illustrations ensure it is both extremely accessible and intellectually persuasive. Yet counter-intuitively, it eschews an explicit narrative, leaving readers the task of imagining the underlying narrative. Instead, the Guide is simultaneously a practical and straightforward account categorising the myriad shortfalls in essential services provision within Alice Springs’ town camps, but also a window into the wider systemic challenges facing all town camp and remote community residents across the NT and beyond. I will say a little about both these contributions.

The Guide’s Alice Spring contribution

The Guide has three parts: Part One deals with the mainstream Regulation and Design Standards applicable in Alice Springs. It also includes a short and succinct history of the town camps, and their support organisation Tangentyere Council. Included is a fascinating account from 1993 of Tangentyere’s history and prospects by Geoff Shaw, its then General Manager and one of the key Indigenous leaders responsible for making Tangentyere one of the most respected and longstanding Aboriginal community-controlled organisations in Australia.

Part Two summarises issues raised in Local Decision Making meetings within town camps, identifying a list of essential infrastructure, and describing for each issue in a single page the problem, the relevant regulations, and a specific solution.  Each of these issues is complemented by maps and most powerfully, by dual sets of photographs which illustrate examples of the issue in the town camps and for comparison, photographs illustrating the provision of the same essential service in mainstream Alice Springs. The combined effect of these comparisons spanning thirty separate essential service issues (including kerbs and gutters, stormwater drains, safe play areas, street lighting, road signage and rooftop solar energy provision to name just six) is a devastatingly effective exemplification of unequal service provision. The Guide is arguably more persuasive for its matter-of-fact tone, and while it doesn’t avoid criticism, there is no ideological rhetoric, no blaming and no gratuitous emotion.

Part Three provides both high level aerial and more detailed colour coded maps of the Local Decision Making processes for each town camp. In doing so, the Guide has created in a tangible form one template amongst many potential templates, for a regional atlas.  The innovation of overlaying existing infrastructure based on aerial photographs with colour coded potential additions provides a tangible record of community aspirations at a point in time, and I suspect represents one of the first comprehensive, detailed and technically documented records of Indigenous advocacy for improved essential services provision in the country. While I am not an expert in this area, I feel confident in asserting that this Guide, and the detailed action-research that underpins it, is a pathbreaking initiative that deserves wide distribution, and more importantly, a public and thorough response from the Commonwealth Government as well as the Northen Territory Government and the Alice Springs Town Council.

There is a wealth of detailed technical and regulatory information embedded in this Guide, all referenced to academic standards, and clearly written and presented. I won’t try to summarise it. I will however pick out a couple of policy relevant issues that struck me as significant and which reinforce the implicit message that the challenges facing the residents of these town camps are both considerable and ongoing.

The first general point to be made is that the Guide explodes the commonplace misapprehension that essential services are limited to power, water and sewerage. Essential services include safe playgrounds, community shade provision, and appropriate traffic constraints, controls and crossings. It also demonstrates that housing and essential services (broadly defined) are together part of a single policy system and must be dealt with by policymakers as such.

On page 10, the Guide references almost in passing Tangentyere’s response to a 2016 Government Inquiry into housing repairs and maintenance on town camps which noted that “the Alice Springs Town Council is unprepared to deliver Municipal and Essential Services on any town camp.”

On page 12, the Guide references target 9b under the national Closing the Gap framework which identifies that Aboriginal people who live in town camps must ‘receive essential services that meet or exceed the relevant jurisdictional standard … and meet or exceed the same standard that applies generally within the town’ — in this case Alice Springs. The Guide goes on to make a point that this Blog made two years ago (link here), namely that the Productivity Commission Closing the Gap data dashboard reports that the data does not exist to enable it to monitor progress in meeting target 9b.

On page 14, the Guide refers to the Tripartite Agreement between the individual Alice Springs town camp associations, the Commonwealth and the NT government, and the requirement in that agreement for three yearly independent reviews to assess the essential services needs and the costs of meeting them for the Alice Town camps. The Guide notes that since 2009, there should have been five such reviews, but in fact there has only been one which only partially filled the obligation in the Agreement.

These four points comprise elements of a deeper policy issue which encompasses complex issues related to land tenure, local government funding, and Commonwealth/Territory financial and policy relations. While the challenges are longstanding and undoubtedly complex, they are not insurmountable. The Commonwealth in particular which is a major funder of local government, and of the NTG both through the Grants Commission and through Specific Purpose Funding, clearly has the legislative and political authority to broker or force a solution, but clearly lacks the vision or the political will to do so.

The Guide’s wider policy contribution

Over the past decade, this Blog has spilt much metaphorical ink on the systemic or structural challenges facing remote Australia (link here). They extend beyond essential services and infrastructure, and include issues such as education, economic opportunities, unemployment, policing and justice, food security and digital access to name perhaps the most obvious. Nevertheless, while the data is invariably persuasive it is also abstract, and the comparative evidence relates to remote regions (which by definition have few voters and low political influence) and non-remote regions which are more politically influential and largely oblivious to the realities of remote communities and remote regions. The bottom line is that quantitative analysis, while powerful and revealing to those prepared to devote time and energy to understanding it, is of limited value in building a political constituency for policy reform. Quantitative analysis will continue to be relevant to policy discussions within government and between jurisdictions over the design and specification of policy reforms, but what has been lacking has been the development of a political constituency. It strikes me that this Guide is important not just for what it tells us about the exclusionary treatment of town camp residents in Alice Springs, but for the innovative and pathbreaking approach that it has adopting to making the case for wider essential services reform. The template it has adopted should in my view be used more widely (and perhaps in a more simplified and targeted way) to make the case for increased policy support for remote essential services provision more generally.

Furthermore, the issues raised in the Guide are in large measure replicated not just across the other 25 town camps in the NT, but (to a greater or lesser extent) across all the significant remote communities across the north. While the NT Government, and its local governments and town councils are and have been seriously complacent about the plight of remote community residents, they are not alone. To varying degrees, the state governments of Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland are similarly complacent. So too is the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth used the 2020 revision of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap to effectively step back, leaving the policy responsibility for addressing Indigenous disadvantage and the myriad service delivery shortfalls to the states and territories. The current Government has done nothing to reverse that step.

What is particularly clear from the Guide is how exclusionary institutional complacency emerges in myriad instances of quite prosaic neglect: the absence of footpaths, of surveyed lots, of safe play grounds for children, of street signs, of shade and community shelters; in short, this neglect reflects the longstanding and widespread refusal of mainstream institutions such a local governments to see their roles as universal rather than sectional. The details vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but the impacts are longstanding and have a certain consistency.

What is absent from the Guide (this is not in any way a criticism) is a strategy to ensure the pathway forward that it lays out for essential services policy reform, both in Alice Springs and more broadly will be adopted and implemented. There is no established mechanism, either in Alice Springs, or more broadly, to take these issues forward. Which politician or bureaucrat is likely to read the Guide and commit to pursuing the solutions identified therein, or even just discuss the identified problems, across the thirty issues identified? This is an institutional gap or absence.

In economic theory there is a concept of market failure, where markets do not operate effectively to meet societal demands. In the present case, the conditions appear to exist for an analogous concept, political failure, where our democratic polity is not meeting basic societal needs and expectations. We have been here before in the Indigenous policy domain. For example, on land rights: the political system gridlocked and efforts to address dispossession were stymied. Eventually, this led the High Court to step in and recognise the existence of native title. In the case of essential services reform, the mechanism to break the gridlock remains unclear; one possibility is that the worsening climate crisis might lead to the development of a universal policy response as temperatures rise across the north (see page 34 in the Guide).

While a fully determined strategic pathway to drive action on reform is not able to be mapped out, I see at least three preliminary steps which Indigenous interests might pursue to lay the groundwork for an effective policy reform process:

First, Indigenous interests across remote Australia might ramp up their advocacy for fair and equal essential service provision, including through more robust public advocacy, pushing for parliamentary and other inquiries at both national and jurisdictional levels, and utilising the presentation methods utilised in the Guide more widely.

Second, Indigenous interests might invest more in making the National Agreement on Closing the Gap work for them in relation to essential services provision. The ABS, the AIHW and the Productivity Commission should be pushed to step up and ensure that the data required to assess progress on the target 9b (and others not yet being measured) is both collected, analysed and published.

Third, Indigenous interests could move beyond the failure of the Voice and invest more in keeping the Commonwealth engaged consistent with the constitutional reform agreed in 1967 which gave the power to the Commonwealth to legislate in relation to Indigenous citizens. This is especially important in relation to essential services in remote Australia as in contrast to urban and regional Australia, remote Indigenous communities cannot rely on mainstream interests to ensure essential services are delivered. In remote Australia, where local interests divert scarce financial resources away from Indigenous essential services (as is irrefutably happening in Alice Springs), Indigenous interests must rely on the Commonwealth to step in, or in the event that the Commonwealth continues to remain recalcitrant and complacent, use the legal system to force change.

None of these steps will be easy, but governments respond to pressure. Indigenous interests in remote Australia must devise ways to better advocate for reform if they wish to see progress and not political and social regression.

Of course, it should not fall solely to Indigenous interests to advocate for equality in service provision. All Australians have an interest in this as a principle, and Indigenous interests deserve wider support in advocating for such equality. This must go beyond bland statements of support for reconciliation, or for Closing the Gap; the devil is in the detail and governments will only respond when there is a groundswell of support for detailed change from constituents across the nation.

Conclusion

The authors and publishers of the Guide to Housing and Infrastructure Standards in Town Camps have made an extraordinarily significant contribution to laying the groundwork for better advocacy for remote Indigenous communities on essential services reform both in Alice Springs, but importantly across northern Australia. They deserve wider recognition and indeed acclamation. What is also clear is that without the efforts of Tangentyere and its community leadership over almost 50 years, the progress made to date on the town camps would not have been possible. Their historically significant work is not yet complete; I only hope that it will not be another fifty years before Aboriginal people in town camps in Alice Springs and beyond are included as fully entitled citizens in the provision of essential services.