Wilya Janta’s remote housing reform agenda

Our doubts are traitors,

And make us lose the good we oft might win,

By fearing to attempt."

Measure for Measure, Act one, Scene four

 

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

Hamlet, Act four, Scene five.

 

Last Sunday, ABC Radio National aired an interview (link here) with Norman Frank Jupurrurla and Dr Simon Quilty, two of the founders of Wilya Janta, a Tennant Creek based Aboriginal owned cultural consultancy focussed on the importance of housing in contributing to community wellbeing in remote communities (link here). Dr Quilty was also interviewed on ABC Breakfast on Monday 25 May (link here) discussing a range of issues related to Indigenous health and its relationship with housing. I recommend readers listen to one or both interviews; I guarantee you will learn something new.

Although I already knew of the contributions made by the interviewees to remote housing and energy infrastructure policy and had read some of their academic research (link here), I found the account to their joint history in establishing Wilya Janta particularly engaging and persuasive.

The interview in turn led me to their web site (link here) which I strongly recommend to readers for both perusal and potentially for a deeper dive.

My own deeper dive on the Wilya Janta web site led me to the commissioned research report from economic consultants SGS Economics and Planning titled Culturally Safe and Healthy Aboriginal Housing: Business Case. This paper seeks to lay out in a rigorous manner the broad principles that lie at the core of Wilya Janta’s approach to remote housing for Aboriginal communities. In very large measure, the SGS Paper succeeds in making the case for a new and much more innovative approach to designing and constructing remote community houses.

Here are some selected quotes I have cherry picked from the paper:

For generations, Indigenous people in Australia have been living in government housing that fails to acknowledge their historic and ongoing colonial displacement. Despite policy shifts through assimilation, integration and reconciliation, remote housing in the NT continues to be delivered through a centralised, top-down approach that lacks meaningful engagement with community, resulting in Eurocentric housing that fails to reflect cultural values or climatic and environmental realities.

This generates a suite of interconnected problems across design, delivery and maintenance of remote housing. These problems are summarised as: 1. Inappropriately designed housing fails to meet residents’ environmental, physical, cultural and social needs, leading to poor health and wellbeing outcomes. 2. Poor engagement with local decision makers reduces community participation and ownership, resulting in higher delivery and maintenance costs.

Addressing these problems has the potential to deliver substantial benefits, not only improving the wellbeing of residents but also contributing to broader social and economic outcomes for remote communities and Territorians. These benefits include: 1. Improved resident health and wellbeing in Aboriginal communities 2. Improved housing asset performance and sustainability in Aboriginal communities 3. Improved local participation, capability and economic opportunity in Aboriginal communities….

… Despite commitments under the national Closing the Gap Strategy (2020) and recent efforts by the NT Government to facilitate greater local control of government-funded service delivery, existing approaches to housing design and construction continue to offer limited flexibility. This approach limits the ability to deliver housing that reflects Aboriginal aspirations and lived realities, leading to a range of negative outcomes for households, communities and ultimately, all Territorians.

The SGS paper represents an attempt to translate into accessible terminology the importance of culture in the lived lives of remote communities, the unique ‘social order’ that holds these communities together and makes them who they are.  It describes the strategic approach of Wilya Janta which is based on developing tangible examples of appropriate housing and seeking to use these as the platform to persuade governments, and especially the NT Government, which has responsibility for the construction and ongoing maintenance of social housing in remote communities, to fundamentally change its approach to design and construction going forward. While the argument is based primarily on the benefits of cultural alignment, there is also a strong theme built upon the urgent need for changes to housing infrastructure to facilitate better access to solar power, and to better insulate the housing from the impending climate changes that are likely to substantially change the underlying conditions of life in these locations.

I strongly support the policy directions being advocated by Wilya Janta and many others engaged with improving the quality of infrastructure in remote communities. What given me hope that the Wilya Janta agenda will succeed is that it is built from the bottom up, it has a community focus, appears committed to a transparent engagement on the issues, and is not solely reliant on government for the progress made to date.

Nevertheless, the apparent inability of governments over decades to even acknowledge let alone solve these issues suggests that there are wider forces at play. It strikes me that I should at least mention these not, to undermine the Wilya Janta agenda, but to provide a sense of realism as to just how steep the climb ahead will be.

Challenges

The major challenges to the wider spread and acceptance of the Wilya Janta reform agenda include:

Demographic pressures, especially Aboriginal mobility into towns from communities and out of towns back to communities. Aboriginal people in remote communities and town camps are highly mobile, and this can mean that in situations where housing infrastructure is finite and kinship relationships extend well beyond the nuclear family, there are extremely high levels of demand for accommodation over extended periods. Even the best designed houses will be subjected to high levels of stress.

The design of governments. Government agencies are staffed by public servants with multiple roles and responsibilities, across significant geographical ranges. Talented public servants whether they work for the Commonwealth or a state/territory government, are incentivised to build their careers at the centre and not in the regions. Governmetn agencies are invariably subject to high staff turnover and often carry an ongoing cultural and geographic knowledge deficit. In other words, there are systemic constraints which work against the likelihood that many public servants will build local knowledge and still retain influence in the central office.

Persuading governments to change course and ensuring that future ministers or changes of bureaucratic personnel will not reverse course when budget pressures or unforeseen political pressures arise is almost impossible. It requires at the very least the development of sustained advocacy capability amongst those who support the original reform. The unfortunate reality is that many so-called reforms are adopted by government because they have short time horizons and they know that if circumstances change, they can change or reverse course. Moreover, the persuasion of government to adopt reforms is more difficult when the up-front costs are high and the long-term benefits accrue beyond the politically relevant time horizon. This is especially so where the substantive reforms under consideration are inherently innovative. The design and quality flaws in the existing stock of remote housing units across the north is a direct reflection of this dynamic; governments have limited budgets and prefer to spread available resources very thin even while they know that they will evaporate within a short period. The decision to abolish the National Partnership on Remote Indigenous Housing (NPARIH) when its initial ten-year span expired in 2018 is perhaps the most egregious example of this dynamic in play (link here).

Scaling up. Even where governments can be convinced that a reform or change is worth adopting, they have strong incentives to pursue pilots and other less than comprehensive changes. One of the specific challenges the Wilya Janta reforms would face in being scaled up is that the model requires close and careful design consultations in each region. These consultations cannot be done by public servants who do not have specialist backgrounds, so will be expensive and slow to develop. How to maintain ministerial interest and political commitment over a sustained period is a real constraint.

The centrality of repairs and maintenance.  The reality is that remote housing is subject to extraordinary external and internal pressures: from climate, from overcrowding, from volatile domestic relationships which can easily descend into violence, and from lack of clarity on what is expected of tenants. While data is virtually non-existent, the asset life span of most remote housing is much shorter than housing in non-remote Australia. Better design will ameliorate some of these issues, but not all. In addition, governments themselves, who retain responsibility for managing repairs and maintenance of social housing, already struggle to (a) allocate adequate resources to maintaining the housing asset base, and (b) struggle to implement their maintenance programs effectively and at scale across vast distances.

In relation to the issue of housing asset lifespans, I requested AI Claude (Sonnet 4.6) to tell me if there was any data on asset life spans across remote Australia. Here is its conclusion:

Bottom line for your purposes

The honest answer is that the sector has not produced the comparative lifespan data you're asking about in a usable form — partly because lifecycle costing has been systematically absent from remote Indigenous housing policy, and partly because the political incentive has been to report on new dwellings built rather than on asset condition over time. The ANAO's 2022 audit of remote NT housing confirmed that data collection and asset management systems remain inadequate. This lack of data undermines the effectiveness of any future asset management strategy by either government or community housing providers. It is also an impediment to any transition of housing to Aboriginal community control.

If you're building a policy argument around this, the most defensible framing is probably that the gap between accounting life (what governments assume for depreciation purposes) and functional life (what the physical evidence shows) represents a hidden subsidy failure — governments are writing down assets over 40–50 years while providing maintenance funding consistent with structures that are effectively exhausted in a fraction of that time.

In other words, state and territory governments are systemically under-investing in making sustainable provision for the ongoing maintenance of remote housing, and the costs are falling on the Aboriginal tenants through accelerated loss of amenity. Governments (and historically particularly the NT) then turn around and request the Commonwealth to periodically step in and rescue them. The Commonwealth has itself been short-sighted over an extensive period, preferring to deal with current problems rather than systemic ones. The poor record of independent and rigorous evaluation by the Commonwealth of remote housing, an issue which is hugely significant in adversely impacting Indigenous health outcomes, suggests that the Commonwealth is also complicit in this systemic and largely invisible discrimination against remote housing occupants.

Conclusion

I list these challenges not to argue against the Wilya Janta reform agenda, but to provide a sense of reality as the scale of the challenge involved, and to identify the need for more thinking and research on how best to implement the Wilya Janta reform agenda at scale.

My own provisional view, based more on intuition than science, is that reliance on government to pursue these reforms is a potential dead end. Instead, Indigenous interests would, in my humble opinion, be better advised to explore the development of specialist sui generis organisational approaches that are committed to scaling up the reform agenda yet are not reliant on, and indeed are insulated from, the overt influence of government. The place to start might be the development of community housing models that access Rent Assistance (a needs-tested mainstream program available to low-income renters) as a primary source of operational funding. There may be other alternatives which have not occurred to me.

Given the extraordinarily strong links between housing and the social determinants of health, and the substantial and ongoing shortage of remote community housing across the North, it would be a major policy mistake were the nation to avert its gaze from these issues. The Wilya Janta model has much to recommend it: it is innovative, it involves community from the ground up, and it meets the increasing pressure of rapid climate change. I wonder however whether Governments are up to the task of pursuing the public interest. It seems to me that the solution to that problem is for Wilya Janta and its allies in the public at large to set out independently of government and to pursue their own interest utilising innovative institutional design as well as innovative housing design.

[Apology: the original post included a number of typographical errors, and some inaccurate syntax. I have attempted to correct all these errors in the current version. No change to the substantive meaning of the text has been made.]

 

25 May 2026