Indigenous Data Sovereignty: risks and challenges

 

All that glisters is not gold.

The Merchant of Venice, Act two, Scene seven

 

Last week I read a recent article authored by Sedran-Price et. al. titled Indigenous governance of data held by organisations: how to operationalise Indigenous data sovereignty principles in Australia (link here). My initial reaction to the article was primarily shaped by my perception that the entire implementation strategy proposed for each organisation was to be the establishment of a series of committees to oversight what is best described as layers of process. My experience of committees as the primary mechanism for decision making is that they invariably deliver either a lowest common denominator ‘solution’ or are dysfunctional. The broader Indigenous policy domain is populated by innumerable committees that appear designed to produce bureaucratic sludge and keep issues simmering in a perpetual stasis. I resolved to write something, and this post is the initial result.

Notwithstanding the extensive impetus within academic and even government circles (link here) advocating or endorsing the merits of Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS), to date I have not written critically about the notion of Indigenous Data Sovereignty on this blog. My reasons are to an extent mixed and difficult to articulate. It might be that I have never taken the time to think hard about the merits and demerits of IDS. It may be that I am not inclined towards the technocratic and quantitative side of social science. Given my focus on policy outcomes over process, I do have a view that data and data management is in some senses a second order issue, though I am very conscious that the way data and information is used disseminated and/or withhold has real policy consequences. Perhaps the real reason for my reticence is that I have an intuitive sense that I disagree with the notion that the management of key statistical metrics within the public realm should be placed under the control of interest groups, or more fundamentally the direct political control of governments (link here).

That said, I acknowledge that the questions we ask and the means we use to measure our answers can be culturally shaped and framed and thus are not necessarily neutral. It follows that there is potentially merit in the underlying aspiration from Indigenous interests and academic supporters of IDS.  Having spent some days thinking about the issue, I remain of the view that the idea of Indigenous data sovereignty is an issue that is problematic from both strategic policy and political perspectives.

To assist my thinking about the issue, I asked Claude Sonnet 5 to respond to four requests:

[First to] write a short one or two paragraph summary of the [Sedran-Price] article and/or IDS, two identify the major strengths in the argument, three identify the major flaws/problems with IDS from a practical point of view, and four write a short couple of paragraphs on how the implementation of IDS would actually work if it was decided to apply it to the national census.

Below are the four responses from Claude:

1. Summary

Sedran-Price et al. argue that Indigenous Data Sovereignty — the principle that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples should govern data about themselves — has stalled at the level of aspiration in Australia despite the 2018 Maiam nayri Wingara (MnW) principles being well established in the academic and policy literature. The paper's contribution is meant to be operational: for each of the five MnW principles (control of the data ecosystem; contextual, disaggregated data; data that empowers self-determination; data structures accountable to Indigenous peoples; data that is protective of individual and collective interests) it proposes a concrete "mechanism" — an Indigenous Data Governance Committee (IDGC) with delegated custodian authority, Indigenous data audits and asset registers, contextual statements attached to published data, culturally informed disaggregation, Indigenous Data Management Plans, metadata/provenance standards (IEEE 2890, Local Contexts TK Labels), and free/prior/informed consent protocols.

It illustrates each with case studies — the Mayi Kuwayu Study, the Yarrabah Counts community survey, the Passamaquoddy digital repatriation in the US — which are real and running, but which operate at the scale of a discrete research cohort or a single community partnership, not a national administrative or statistical system.

2. Major strengths

·         It correctly diagnoses a well-documented problem: aggregated, decontextualised Indigenous data has historically produced "deficit" narratives that read the effects of colonisation and policy as intrinsic characteristics of Indigenous people (Walter's BADDR framework). This is a legitimate and long-standing critique in Indigenous statistics scholarship, not a novel grievance.

·         It moves past slogan-level advocacy into enumerated, adoptable mechanisms — a governance committee, a data audit template, a management plan, a metadata standard — giving institutions something they could actually put in a policy manual, rather than leaving "sovereignty" as an undefined aspiration.

·         It doesn't invent the wheel: it explicitly builds on OCAP (Canada) and the CARE Principles, situating Australian practice within a converging international movement rather than a one-off Australian claim.

·         The case studies are genuine, bounded, and running rather than hypothetical — Mayi Kuwayu in particular shows a functioning Indigenous data governance committee with real veto power over a live national cohort study, which is useful proof of concept at that scale.

·         The Indigenous Data Sovereignty / Indigenous Data Governance distinction (the political principle vs. the governance machinery that enacts it) and the separation of "governance of data" from "data for governance" are useful, clarifying pieces of conceptual scaffolding.

3. Major practical problems

·         Representation and legitimacy at scale: an IDGC needs "representation appropriate to the data source," but the paper never specifies how competing claims to authority are adjudicated — between urban, regional and remote communities, native title bodies, community-controlled organisations, and individual voices — especially for datasets that span all 250+ nations/language groups simultaneously. Nor does it address how these appointed, non-elected bodies are themselves held accountable to the people they claim to represent.

·         Scale mismatch: every worked example is a discrete project (a bespoke health cohort, one community's survey). Scaling that governance model to whole-of-government administrative collections — health records, census, justice, child protection — spanning hundreds of agencies and enormous record volumes is a different order of problem, and the paper doesn't really engage with how authority, consent and coordination would work across that scale.

·         Consent in non-optional systems: free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) works for a voluntary cohort study but sits uneasily with compulsory data collection (census, hospital admissions, welfare and justice records) where people are legally required to be counted. The paper doesn't resolve how FPIC applies when there is no opt-out from the underlying collection.

·         Legal and statutory conflict: statistical secrecy, agency independence (e.g. the ABS Statistician's powers under the Census and Statistics Act) and privacy law are established in legislation. The paper doesn't explain how community-body "custodian" authority would sit relative to those existing statutory protections — complementary, subordinate, or overriding — which is a substantial legislative gap, not just an administrative one.

·         Resourcing without a funding model: the paper acknowledges more resourcing is needed but doesn't quantify it or say where it comes from, against already stretched Indigenous organisational capacity — creating a real risk that Indigenous Data Governance becomes an unfunded compliance burden that lands disproportionately on Indigenous staff, which the paper itself flags as a risk without solving.

·         Authority without alternative infrastructure: if governance bodies gain the power to restrict release or use of data but no parallel investment builds an alternative reporting or infrastructure, the likely near-term effect is less data available for both government accountability and community planning — an unintended consequence the paper only gestures at in its final paragraph.

·         Disaggregation vs. comparability: locally defined indicators (as in Yarrabah Counts) improve local relevance but can undermine the standardised measures used for national monitoring (Closing the Gap), funding formulas, and international treaty reporting. That trade-off is real and isn't resolved in the paper.

4. How would this actually work applied to the national census?

Applying the MnW principles to the Census would mean an Indigenous Data Governance Committee holding genuine decision authority — not advisory input — over how Indigenous-related concepts and questions are designed (identification, language, kinship and cultural variables), how remote and community enumeration is conducted, how results are disaggregated and released, and under what conditions community-level data can be accessed or repatriated. Some of this already exists in weaker form through the ABS's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory processes, but the MnW principle requires shifting that from consultation to actual control — a materially larger institutional change.

Several of the practical problems above become sharp here. Disaggregation to "individual, community and First Nations levels" runs directly into statistical confidentiality: many remote communities have populations small enough that any fine-grained breakdown risks re-identifying individuals, which is exactly why current practice uses cell suppression and perturbation — a real ceiling on how far disaggregation can go regardless of governance arrangements. A single national IDGC could not plausibly exercise custodianship over data spanning 250+ distinct peoples in the way a 12-member committee does for one voluntary health cohort; a federated model of a national body plus many regional or local ones would need a decision-rights mechanism for when they disagree, which the paper doesn't specify anywhere. And because the ABS Statistician's independence and secrecy powers are set in the Census and Statistics Act, meaningful custodian authority for a community body would likely require legislative change, not just an internal policy shift — a considerably higher bar than adopting an internal data management plan. Finally, because the census is a compulsory, universal collection, free-prior-informed consent could only really apply to secondary use and release of Indigenous data, not to the primary act of being counted — meaning full application of the FPIC principle, as stated, isn't actually achievable within a compulsory census design; at best it would be a partial, reinterpreted version of the principle.

After giving this response some consideration, I requested Claude Sonnet 5 to:

draft another section focused on IDS generally (ie beyond this article) and how it interacts /relates to mainstream institutional frameworks more generally. You may (or may not) wish to express a view on IDS as a coherent general philosophy, and I would be happy if you framed this as issues to be determined or requiring attention or buy in from broader interests and or the nation’s governing institutions....

Claude responded as follows:

Addendum

Set aside this article's specific institutional mechanisms and the harder question is whether IDS amounts to a single, coherent philosophy at all, or whether it spans two quite different claims that get run together under one banner. At one end sits a negotiated, political-process account: Indigenous peoples, as citizens with distinct collective interests and historical claims, seek enhanced authority over decisions that affect them, won and adjusted through ordinary political and legislative means — the kind of shared governance built incrementally through agreement, much as other forms of devolved or co-managed authority have been. At the other end sits a stronger, "unceded sovereignty" account, closer to the language UNDRIP itself uses (self-determination, authority, control) — in which Indigenous authority over Indigenous data is treated as inherent and prior, something that doesn't need to be granted by settler political institutions because it was never ceded to them in the first place. These aren't cosmetic differences. The first account can be built through statute, agreement, and administrative reform, remains answerable to and revisable by ordinary democratic processes, and requires broad public and institutional buy-in as a matter of legitimacy. The second implies a standing entitlement that exists independently of, and potentially prior to, the authority of the very institutions being asked to implement it — which is a fundamentally different, and far more contested, constitutional proposition. The literature, including this paper, tends to move between the two registers without quite specifying which is doing the work, which leaves a genuine and unresolved question about what buy-in is actually being asked for.

That ambiguity matters because it collides directly with the architecture IDS proposes to operate inside. Australia's data-holding institutions — the ABS, universities, state agencies — sit within a system built on parliamentary sovereignty and the equal application of law, where administrative and statistical independence is itself a legislated, revisable arrangement rather than a standing entitlement belonging to any group. Embedding "Indigenous authority" as something delegated through negotiated agreement is compatible with that architecture; embedding it as something that precedes and constrains that architecture is not, at least not without a much larger constitutional conversation than a data governance framework can settle on its own. This is, in miniature, the same fault line that ran through the recognition and Voice debates — and IDS advocates would be entitled to say the data question shouldn't need to wait on that larger settlement. But the paper's silence on which model of authority it's assuming means the practical ask (what does an agency actually need to cede, and to whom) is left underspecified in exactly the place where institutional buy-in would have to be secured.

Conclusions

The core issues that I would emphasise (beyond Claude’s analysis that I largely agree with) are as follows:

There are fundamental problems with the under- conceptualisation of the near ubiquitous aspiration for implementation of Indigenous Data Sovereignty in academic and bureaucratic circles. As Claude notes, the arguments for the wider implementation of processes based on Indigenous Data Sovereignty — based on normative/aspirational principles that are legitimate on their own terms — are potentially fundamentally at odds with the currently accepted precepts of democratic governance in modern Australia. Moreover, much data relevant to the Indigenous policy domain is in effect also relevant to the mainstream policy domains, a function both of the increasing demographic hybridity of Indigenous populations, economic activities, and interests and also of the nature of information itself: it is not entirely ‘public’, but is best conceptualised as akin to what economists refer to as a public good characterised as non-rivalrous (my use does not affect your use) and non-excludable (once released it is difficult to control its use by others). While private information rights do exist (eg copyright), in policy domains the importance of public access to information for democratic accountability and good policymaking suggest that attempts to maintain what is essentially private control over information requires clear and cogent justification. While there are categories of Indigenous related information that are clearly able to be justified as inherently requiring to be confidential or private, the advocacy in favour of moving towards Indigenous data sovereignty (link here) is generally framed in much broader terms. 

Even were we to surmount these issues, there are at least two serious challenges: first, I doubt that governments are actually committed to implementing these principles in full, and thus they adopt strategies of adding layers of process that in effect divert Indigenous interests into dead ends, while ministers and bureaucrats in effect are virtue signalling rather than locking in institutional reforms. This has the effect of raising expectations within First Nations interests that are never intended to be met. Telling communities they have a right to "control the data ecosystem" are a recipe for perpetual disillusionment. As the census example shows, attempts to implement such an agenda would inevitably collide with mainstream privacy laws and would potentially undermine the statutory neutrality of the ABS, changes that could be leveraged into a political maelstrom and are thus never likely to be seriously pursued by any government.

Second, there are strategic risks for Indigenous interests in at least two ways: the opportunity costs involved in dedicating scarce intellectual resources amongst Indigenous advocates towards devising ways to measure Indigenous strengths and participating in myriad process-based committees at the cost of ignoring the hard work of policy reform aimed at driving achievable substantive reform in areas such as education, health, employment and housing would be considerable. More importantly, the continued articulation and advocacy for processes built around implicit claims of sovereignty that are not widely supported in the wider Australian community create the preconditions for a backlash against Indigenous interests that, should it emerge, would extend well beyond erasing the mere control of the ‘data ecosystem’ relating to First Nations citizens.

Finally, there are two observations worth making. First, while I am deeply sceptical about the feasibility of implementing and making operational an Indigenous data sovereignty agenda across the span of the Indigenous policy domain in any meaningful way, and similarly sceptical about promises by governments and bureaucracies to implement such an agenda, I am not suggesting that the aspiration itself for control over data and information related to Indigenous communities is in any way illegitimate. I too wish to control and exercise individual sovereignty over data related to my life. It is a legitimate aspiration. But I don’t expect or trust governments to assist me in that aspiration. First Nations interests should seriously consider what is realistically possible in relation to the preparedness of governments to deliver on First Nations aspirations in this area, what they would gain from succeeding against the potential costs involved, and respond accordingly. 

Second, my sense is that there has been a gradual and inexorable shift in our policy and academic institutions and their academic publications towards under-valuing substantive independence on issues related to Indigenous concerns and aspirations. I raise this because (to return to where I began this post) it strikes me that part of my reluctance to write about these issues has been the knowledge that my views would rub up against a near universal consensus that categorises any criticism (real or imagined) of Indigenous Australians or their policy and political agendas as being either racist, right wing, or somehow politically incorrect. The fact that the Indigenous data sovereignty agenda can develop and gain the traction it has without (to my admittedly limited knowledge) a broader debate about its conceptual underpinnings (the literature I am familiar with never cites dissenting perspectives) strikes me as both intellectually flawed and politically counterproductive. The challenges facing Indigenous Australians and the nation as a whole in relation to Indigenous policy are too important to be left hostage to the intellectual hubris of groupthink.

Given my neglect to date in writing about this issue, I will endeavour to think and read more about the wider issues of Indigenous data sovereignty and if I find there is more that I can usefully say, I will share my thoughts in due course.

 

9 September 2026

 

This post has been written with the research assistance of Claude Sonnet 5. The core intellectual contribution is mine alone.

The Productivity Commission and Closing the Gap: a footnote in history?

                                                 Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

Troilus and Cressida, Act three, Scene three

 

Summary

This post covers a lot of ground, so I have decided to include an upfront summary which provides a high-level roadmap of the key arguments. Last week the Treasurer issued terms of reference for the Productivity Commission's second triennial review of Closing the Gap. On closer reading, those directions steer the Commission back towards refining the existing framework rather than considering why the Closing the Gap framework isn't working. Federal, state and territory governments have a poor record of translating their formal agreement to previous review recommendations into action. After almost a quarter century, the Closing the Gap Framework is looking tired and vulnerable, and community support is fading. In my estimation, the forthcoming Review is likely the last opportunity to revitalise and refocus the institutional architecture that governs Closing the Gap before community sentiment turns against it. If the opportunity is not taken, the National Agreement will be increasingly vulnerable to abolition. This will require the Commission to broaden its focus and undertake a hard-headed strategic and structural reconsideration that current circumstances require.

 

Background

This post focusses primarily on the role of the Productivity Commission (the Commission) in relation to the oversight and administration of the Closing the Gap process. The Productivity Commission has responsibility for producing the Closing the Gap Information Repository, which tracks progress against the 19 socio-economic targets and four Priority Reforms agreed in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap (link here). Under the National Agreement (link here), the Commission is also responsible for undertaking a triennial review of progress (see clauses 121–124). An important reason for ensuring strong analytical clarity in the Commission’s review derives from the reality that there is at least an appearance of conflict between the Commissions role as administrator of the target metrics and its role as an independent reviewer.

 

The terms of reference

The Commonwealth Government has announced the terms of reference for the Productivity Commission's second triennial review. The review is scheduled to be finalised by the end of 2027. According to Treasurer Chalmers and Minister McCarthy's joint media release (link here), the Commission will assess the outcomes, effectiveness and impact of measures by all governments and the Coalition of Peaks against the targets, and has been asked to complete a more explicit examination of funding, investment practices and community-controlled sector resourcing — including whether government expenditure is aligned with, and supporting, the Priority Reforms.

 

The review web page (link here) frames it this way:

Every three years, the Productivity Commission is required to independently review how parties to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap are progressing towards their commitments. This is the PC's second review. We will focus on what's working and why, and what can be done differently to achieve meaningful change.

 

The Terms of Reference issued by the Treasurer state, inter alia:

Background

… The review will provide an analysis of progress on Closing the Gap against the priority reforms, targets, indicators and trajectories, and examine the factors contributing to progress, including by drawing on evaluation and other evidence. Parties have committed to undertaking actions if the review indicates that achievement of any of the targets that are set out in the Agreement is not on track.

 

Scope of the review

The review will assess how effectively the Agreement is supporting improved life outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In undertaking the review, the Productivity Commission should:

·         Have regard to all aspects of the Agreement and consider the progress, implementation efforts and annual reports of all parties, including jurisdictional progress by the Commonwealth and states and territories

·         Assess progress against the four Priority Reform areas and 17 socioeconomic outcomes [sic — the Agreement specifies 19 targets], including identifying successful approaches, partnerships and delivery models that have demonstrated positive impact

·         Draw on available evidence and evaluation findings, to assess impact, deliverables and outcomes, and progress towards developing measures for the Priority Reforms targets and indicators and outstanding data under socioeconomic targets

·         Assess whether commitments under the Agreement that relate to prioritising and reporting on funding and resourcing to First Nations community-controlled sectors are being met, and whether they are driving changes in the way investments are made and improved outcomes against the Priority Reforms

·         Assess whether new and existing funding – both dedicated and mainstream – is being effectively mobilised to achieve the objectives of the Agreement. 

The review is to have regard to and complement – not duplicate – the previous findings of the first Productivity Commission review of progress on the National Agreement, published on 7 January 2024, and the Independent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led Review, published on 21 June 2025.

 The Productivity Commission should provide recommendations on how to improve, hasten and strengthen implementation of existing commitments in the Agreement. Where necessary to support implementation of existing commitments, the Productivity Commission should provide recommendations on potential changes to the Agreement and its targets, indicators and trajectories, and on data improvements (emphasis added).

 

The terms of reference are, on the surface, reasonably comprehensive. There are some positive elements: the specific mention of the contribution of mainstream funding to shaping outcomes, and the narrow possibility left open for the Commission to recommend changes to the National Agreement — albeit given the repeated focus on ‘progress’, the subtext appears to be to nudge the Commission towards a narrow focus on incremental adjustment to targets, indicators, trajectories and data improvements. These are all potentially important, but I would argue that more structural reform is necessary.

 

Reading between the lines

Close reading of the terms of reference raises a number of issues that are worth contemplating and may prefigure the approach the Government expects the Commission to pursue:

·         The Treasurer is at pains to avoid mentioning failure, and the repetitive use of the word "progress" continuously reinforces the ‘strength-based’ approach that infused the initial selection and framing of the targets by governments (and it must be said the Coalition of Peaks).

·         The focus is primarily on doubling down on the current framework and, ostensibly, on how best to refine it and make it work better.

·         The Treasurer sidesteps the elephant in the room: the failure to make progress against virtually all targets (especially in relation to remote regions where outcomes are much more dire than the national outcomes), and — more importantly — the adequacy (in terms of timely and tangible outcomes) of governments' own responses to the two previous reviews, most of all the first Commission Review.

·         The focus on funding has been left vague, and thus open to misinterpretation. The Ministers’ media release appears to make clear in relation to the ‘explicit examination of funding, investment practices and community-controlled sector resourcing’ (by referencing alignment with the Priority Reforms) that the intention is to nudge the Commission towards recommending funding shift from non-Indigenous private sector and NGO providers to community-controlled organisations — a strong nod to the Coalition of Peaks' primary agenda. However, it can equally be read as a call for more rigorous assessment of funding efficacy more generally. The Australian headlined its report of the announcement of the Terms of Reference on 29 August 2026 as ‘Review of Indigenous Funding: Is pouring cash into the Gap effective?’ (paywalled).

 

The tax expenditure blind spot

One important but invariably overlooked mainstream funding issue relates to the inequitable distribution of mainstream ‘tax expenditures’.  The Terms of Reference refer to ‘funding’, but tax expenditures are just as relevant to whether government support for Closing the Gap is effective. Take one obvious example: the benefits available to homeowners in our tax system are systemically biased towards non-Indigenous homeowners (link here). The Capital Gains Tax exemption on the sale of a primary residence alone is estimated by Treasury to cost the Commonwealth $66 billion in 2026–27, rising to $78.5 billion in 2028–29 (see exemptions E7 and E8, 2025–26 Tax Expenditures and Insights Statement, p.166: (link here). According to 2021 Census data, 42% of Indigenous households own their own home, compared to 67% of all Australians (link here). It follows that these benefits flow disproportionately to non-Indigenous homeowners.

 

While I accept that the language in the Terms of Reference's speaks of ‘funding’ and ‘investment’ rather than the tax system, the tax system is exactly the kind of ‘mainstream’ lever the Terms of Reference professes an interest in ("whether new and existing funding – both dedicated and mainstream – is being effectively mobilised"), and it bears directly on housing and economic outcomes that sit squarely within the socioeconomic targets. A serious assessment of whether mainstream expenditure is ‘effectively mobilised’ toward Closing the Gap objectives can't extend merely to direct program spending and ignore the significant sums the tax system silently redirects away from the people the Agreement is meant to benefit.

 

The missing 2031 endpoint

There is no term of reference raising directly the rapidly approaching endpoint for most of the targets in 2031. This is likely to be the last review before a post-2031 policy framework for the National Agreement, its targets and its priority reforms would need to be in place if there is not to be a temporal gap in the frameworks implementation. This makes the absence of a specific mention in the Terms of Reference potentially problematic.

 

Governments' record on implementing previous reviews

Perhaps the most egregious absence in the terms of reference is any reference to assessing the adequacy of governments' implementation of their own unanimously positive responses to the previous reviews under the National Agreement, both formal and informal.

 

In relation to the first Commission review, Joint Council met in July 2024 and noted (link here):

Joint Council welcomed the Productivity Commission's first Three-Yearly Review of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap … Halfway through the National Agreement key structures and processes have been established. But Joint Council agreed more needs to be done to deliver on the ground and in communities. Joint Council agreed to the four key recommendations of the Review and to 15 of the 16 recommended actions…

 

Given that governments agreed to the recommendations, and yet the rate of progress is in reverse virtually across the board, the obvious questions are: were the recommendations not implemented? Were they inadequately framed by the Commission review team in the first place? Or both? Hopefully the forthcoming Review will enlighten us.

 

The subsequent record is a case study in process overwhelming substance. At the June 2025 meeting, Joint Council noted the findings of the Independent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led Review and undertook to ‘formally respond to the Report at their meeting in November 2025.’ At the November 2025 meeting, it agreed instead to ‘prioritise finalisation of its response by the end of February 2026.’ By the following meeting in May 2026, it had settled on implementing ‘11 Partnership Actions,’ (which are in fact agreements to cooperate, hardly actions) with members ‘committed to working through remaining Partnership Actions to find an agreed approach … as soon as possible.’ The Joint Council's formal response to the January 2024 Commission review was eventually published in June 2025 (link here), and its response to the subsequent Independent Review in May 2026 (link here).

 

I haven't had time or inclination to analyse these documents in detail, but it's worth noting that while governments agreed unanimously to all but one of the Commission's recommendations, the proposed implementation of each in these formal responses is invariably framed in terms of process rather than tangible action. The Commission might have made more action-oriented, action-limited recommendations; but the responsibility for what transpired ultimately lies with governments.

 

The process problem

 

My overarching assessment is that the whole business of responding to, and then acting upon, the various statutory reviews required by the Closing the Gap Framework is both extraordinarily slow and overburdened with process. Governments can manage complex processes, albeit often at a snail's pace, but most external interests and the public at large have limited capacity to follow what is being decided (or not) when it extends over years. The effect is to prioritise torpidity and lethargy as guiding principles for how business is done. I should note at this point that my earlier submissions related to the first review (see below for links) made this argument at much greater length. The more important question — whether recommendations will make a substantive difference, and whether they will actually be implemented — gets lost in the mists of that process. Hopefully the current review will both get to the bottom of this snail-like process and recommend radical simplification, but as noted above, the current Terms of Reference do not acknowledge this issue and do not encourage such an analysis.  

 

While this process of incessant review — two multi-year reviews every three years, followed by a multi-year process of responding to their recommendations — grinds on, governments remain relatively immune to any criticism that they aren't acting, because they can always point to an ongoing review. This mire of pervasive process, underpinned by a rolling negotiation between nine jurisdictions and the Indigenous Peaks, seemingly designed to produce lowest common denominator outcomes, virtually ensures substantive and visionary reform will never emerge.

 

Again, hopefully the Commission's forthcoming review will cut through and make clear-cut recommendations that create the preconditions for future reform — because without that, the prospects for the future viability of the Closing the Gap framework are dire.

 

What the Commission's own members have said

It's worth reflecting on the perspective the Commission itself brings to these two roles — and the place to start is how its members describe them publicly.

 

In an August 2023 speech to the National Press Club titled Reflections on Productivity, Public Policy, and Challenges Associated with Closing the Gap (link here), outgoing Chair Michael Brennan spoke at length about the Commission's role. Two lines stand out:

Only 4 of the 17 targets set out in the Agreement are on track to be met at this early stage. Others are going in the wrong direction, like the rate of incarceration … It was never clear what governments felt they were putting in place that would reverse this trend.

and, on the labyrinthian impact of the 2,000-plus implementation actions in play at any one time across the nine jurisdictions:

Granted, governments are busy … But this busy-ness is, in many ways, just business as usual.

 

In her May 2024 Stretton Oration (link here), new Chair Danielle Wood gave a masterful summary of income and wealth inequality in Australia (not that Indigenous disadvantage is entirely encompassed by these metrics), pointing to health and education, welfare supports, minimum wage settings and full employment policy as levers for entrenched disadvantage, while correctly noting that particular levers must be context-specific. Indigenous Australians were not, as far as I can tell, explicitly mentioned.

 

In August 2024, then-Commissioner Natalie Siegel-Brown put the data more starkly (link here):

Another five of the targets are improving but not on track to be met, one has not progressed at all, and four targets are actually going backwards … government performance on reducing rates of removal of children from their families, adult imprisonment, children in detention and suicide is even worse than when we started measuring … this coincides with some states knowingly contravening their commitments under the Agreement.

 

In a November 2024 speech (link here), Commissioner Wood described the first Review's consultation with Indigenous communities as central to its ‘success’. Given the dismal outcomes to date, and the slow progress in implementing the Commission’s recommendations, the assertion of ‘success’ appears misguided and Panglossian.

 

The two Commissioners now responsible for the current Review, Selwyn Button and Angela Jackson, struck a similarly optimistic note in an article earlier this year (link here). In August 2025, Commissioner Button wrote an op-ed in the AFR (link here) extolling community control as the key to closing the gap. His argument downplayed the impact of FASD by pointing to successful community-led initiatives such as had taken place in Fitzroy Crossing, and, on alcohol, cited national data against what he termed "lazy stereotypes." Yet the outcomes on the ground continue to take a terrible toll (link here: my own analysis, not official data), and "strength-based" arguments risk taking pressure off governments to strengthen controls on access to alcohol and other harmful substances for vulnerable remote residents. Community control is arguably a necessary contributor to achieving many of the Closing the Gap targets, but (especially at the macro-level) it is not sufficient on its own; that control must translate into effective and sustainable policy which increasingly encompasses engagement with other interest groups, negotiation and trade-offs with multiple levels of government, effective advocacy and sustained cohesion so as to resist the countervailing efforts of governments and third parties to undermine Indigenous voices.

 

There is clearly a place for rigorous monitoring and data contextualisation, but it's far from clear the Commission has been applying that rigour in the Indigenous policy space. Economist and former Commission employee Cathal Leslie has published a number of op-eds on Closing the Gap in the AFR (link here: paywall) one of which apparently prompting Commissioner Button's article above, another on 10 August 2026 pointing to methodological issues in the Commission's target metrics and to a critical ANAO report and a commissioned ANU report. Leslie's central point is the Commission's downplaying of demographic change in the national Indigenous population — the statistically significant rise in people self-identifying as Indigenous — and he concludes that the Commission has chosen to present statistics it knows cannot be believed, giving ‘cover to failing policies by telling the country that life for Indigenous children is better than it is.’ While I am not privy to the Commission’s internal processes, and so don’t presume to take one side or the other, the methodological and data issues raised by Cathal in a credible national newspaper deserve to be taken seriously by the Commission in its substantive analysis to be published in the forthcoming review.  

 

Déjà vu all over again

The fundamental problem with the terms of reference, and with the Commission's recent signalling of its likely approach, is that it is, to borrow from Yogi Berra, ‘a case of déjà vu all over again.’

 

In December 2022, following a call for submissions to the first three-year review, I submitted a nine-page submission to the Commission (link here). In August 2023, I published a blog post critiquing the Commission's draft report (link here). In September 2023, I submitted a further response (link here), attaching an outline of a potential alternative framework for Closing the Gap. All three failed to gain obvious traction. Rereading them today, I think they made a very strong case then and still do. The concluding paragraphs of the 2023 post included:

 

There is no recognition that the current design architecture for the agreement, while incomplete and thus subject to ongoing remedial work, is simultaneously over-designed and in need of radical simplification. As presently configured, it guarantees that the Coalition of Peaks will be wading through bureaucratic sludge for the next ten years … and ensures that the probability of the national agreement imploding under the weight of its accumulated complexity is high and bound to grow. Proactive reform is preferable to stasis followed by abolition.

 

The bottom line … is that the six recommendations of the draft review … would not make any substantive difference to the nation's progress on closing the gap within five or even ten years. They are an amalgam of doubling down on the current hyper-complexity of the policy architecture along with a hefty dose of blind faith in the bureaucratic leadership of the nation. Did the robodebt royal commission not make any impression at all on the PC?

 

My recommendation for the Commonwealth Government remains the same: issue the Commission with revised terms of reference, and ask it to (a) estimate the cost of addressing entrenched Indigenous inequality; (b) map out a realistic timeframe and strategy for achieving that objective; (c) undertake a more fundamental analysis of the current status of the Closing the Gap architecture; and (d) provide options for radically simplifying the structure and design of that architecture while retaining the four priority reforms. And, for good measure, keep it to fifty pages. Such a report could create a pathway for the Commonwealth Government, which in reality and despite its dissembling, retains primary responsibility for the effectiveness and long term viability of the National Agreement, to engage meaningfully with Indigenous interests and the states and territories.

 

The bottom line

The Productivity Commission has an admirable and long record of real and forthright independence, most recently on the GST and fiscal equalisation. What's needed now is hard-headed policy analysis focused on making a tangible difference to the lives of the most disadvantaged Australians within a finite period. The Commission is not primarily responsible for the poor outcomes to date, but its inability so far to identify a feasible, constructive strategic pathway forward for the National Agreement and its constituent parties has been a major contributor to letting governments evade real accountability to the public and to First Nations.

 

If it were up to me, I would favour narrowing the focus of the National Agreement to the five issues identified by Coalition of Peaks Lead Convenor Ms Donnella Mills who in her comments in response to the Terms of Reference (link here) argued inter alia:

Positive outcomes are achieved when governments have genuinely partnered with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community‑controlled organisations, it is now up to all governments to demonstrate and lead the change our people have said is needed to shift the dial in areas of health, housing, education, employment and justice (emphasis added).

I would add to those proposed priorities the adoption of a robust needs-based funding criterion to ensure that geographic areas or program sectors without access to appropriate mainstream program equivalents are prioritised.

 

It's now almost a quarter of a century since the Rudd Government adopted the Closing the Gap agenda. The patchy progress that has been achieved owes more to wider economic and demographic shifts than to specific policy reform, and in many key areas — especially remote Australia — progress in many respects has been negative. Without a new approach, which in my view will only emerge if the Commission bites the bullet, the National Agreement, which I still see as pathbreaking reform of historic significance, will be vulnerable to abolition. Without a sense across the breadth of mainstream Australia that Closing the Gap is working, the framework will lose the broad-based political support necessary for its ongoing survival.

 

The work of the forthcoming Review, and its ability to persuade governments to pursue substantive reform, may well be the last real opportunity to ensure the National Agreement and Closing the Gap does not go the way of the NAC, the NACC, ATSIC and the Voice to Parliament, and becomes a mere footnote in the history of the ongoing struggle for inclusion within the nation’s institutional architecture by First Nations citizens. That would be a tragedy for First Nations, and for the nation.

 

1 September 2026

 

This post has benefited from editorial assistance from Claude Sonnet 5. The text and arguments are entirely my own.

 

Blame shifting for remote housing provision in the NT

 

 

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you

From seasons such as these?

King Lear Act three, Scene four

 

This post focusses on three broad issues related to remote housing policy in the NT.

 

The first issue relates to Closing the Gap. Under the Closing the Gap Agreement, there are two housing related targets:

9A:  By 2031, increase the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in appropriately sized (not overcrowded) housing to 88%

According to the Productivity Commission Closing the Gap dashboard (link here) nationally in 2021, 81.4% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were living in appropriately sized (not overcrowded) housing (figure CtG9.1). This is an increase from 78.9% in 2016 (the baseline year). For mainstream citizens the comparative national rate is 93.5% in 2021.

In the NT, 90.7% of non-Indigenous people resided in appropriately sized housing. For Indigenous Territorians, the figure was 43.4% in 2021, up from 38.4% in 2016. In remote areas of the NT, Indigenous people residing in appropriate housing was around 50%, and in very remote areas was only around 25% in 2021.

In other words, nationally only around 6.5% of non-Indigenous people live in overcrowded housing. In the NT 56.6% of Indigenous people live in overcrowded housing, and in very remote areas, that figure rises to 74.5%. Overcrowded housing is a contributing factor in driving and maintaining social and economic disadvantage. It impacts health, family violence, education, employment, substance abuse, crime, and lifespans. While it involves numerous complexities, a significant constraint on addressing these issues is funding.

While this data analysis relates to the NT only, the same extreme issues of structural exclusion in relation to access to appropriate housing exist in remote areas of Western Australia, Queensland, South Australia, and even NSW.

The second housing related Closing the Gap target relates to community infrastructure:

9B: By 2031, all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households:

1. within discrete Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander communities receive essential services that meet or exceed the relevant jurisdictional standard;
2. in or near to a town receive essential services that meet or exceed the same standard as applies generally within the town….

This target refers to the infrastructure conceptually adjacent to housing: the sewerage, power, water connections, green spaces and formed streets and lot boundaries that make housing a viable and cost-effective options in locations that involve increasing temperatures, and variable climatic conditions. These are normally NT Government and /or local government responsibilities, but the costs of provision are generally much higher than in urban areas, and the available funding much lower due to the absence of a rate base (due to tenure issues I won’t go into here); a systemic bias in mainstream national local government funding towards settled Australia; and the dominance of urban over rural and remote electorates in NT politics. These issues are known to but rarely acknowledged or discussed by either the NT Government or the Commonwealth. The result is that essential services (broadly defined) across remote NT (and indeed remote Australia) are of a substantially lower standard than in urban areas of the north (or indeed of southeastern Australia).

The second housing related issue relates to the NT Remote Federation Funding Housing Agreement (NTRHA). Between them, the Commonwealth and Northern Territory governments have committed just under $4.8 billion to remote Indigenous housing and services over the past two years, across two separate agreements. As of this month, on the Commonwealth Government's own figures, almost none of its contribution has been released.

The $3.98 billion NTRHA was announced in March 2024 (link here and link here), promising 2,700 new homes across 73 remote communities and 27 town camps over ten years.

The Commonwealth has made only one payment towards the NTRHA of $61.3 million, on the day it was signed. Nothing since. Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe forced these figures into the open through Orders for the Production of Documents (link here), after asking for progress reports that, the government's own response confirms, do not exist. In a speech to Parliament (link here), Senator Thorpe alleged that around $330m in Commonwealth funding under the Agreement had not been released

In response, Commonwealth Minister Malarndirri McCarthy argued the NT Government "wants to renegotiate an agreement", arguing it is "supposed to have 2,700 homes built" over the 10-year cycle, “270 a year. The Northern Territory Government wants to reduce that down to 1800 or maybe 1100 homes, if the Northern Territory is lucky," she said (link here). The NT Minister did not respond, but according to the ABC had previously argued for additional funding to cover ancillary infrastructure required to build the housing required under the Agreement (link here).

The third housing related issue relates to the lack of progress in relation to the six year, $842 million, Northern Territory Remote Aboriginal Investment Agreement (NTRAI), announced by the Prime Minister and NT Chief Minister in February 2025 (link here and link here and link here). According to the NT Government website (link here)

The new agreement will provide up to $842.6 million in total over six years until June 2031. The Partnership Agreement establishes overarching governance arrangements to facilitate shared-decision-making as well as joint accountability and oversight for the various funding agreements that will deliver the next six-years of NTRAI investment.

The agreement is aligned to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap and has a focus on continued investment for the remote parts of the Territory and making sure that the investment priorities continue critical services like remote policing, women’s safe houses, the Aboriginal Interpreter Service, early childhood programs and important preventative health programs.

A Joint Steering Committee has been established to provide governance and oversite of the investment, ensuring the funds are spent where they are most needed, and investment that is guided by tangible outcomes. The Joint Steering Committee appears to have only met once in March 2025 (link here).

I have included this agreement in a group I have listed as Housing related, because these services in remote communities provide adjacent services to remote community residents which make their communities safe and liveable.

In May 2026, the National Indigenous Times (NIT) published a story (link here) revealing extraordinary delays in the release of Commonwealth funds under the Agreement:

The documents, requested by Senator Lidia Thorpe, show none of the money allocated under the Northern Territory Remote Aboriginal Investment (NTRAI) agreement — due to begin in December last year — has been distributed.

The delay comes as service delivery challenges continue across remote NT communities, many of which already experience disadvantage, poverty and lower socio-economic outcomes. The Territory also records the worst Closing the Gap outcomes in the country…

…As part of the Senate order, Senator Thorpe sought publication of "the sum of all payments made by the Commonwealth under each schedule to the Northern Territory Remote Aboriginal Investment Agreement (NTRAI) 2025-31" as well as a "breakdown of each payment made against each associated performance milestone". In response, Senator McCarthy stated that "no payments have been made by the Commonwealth"…

…The parties have also been unable to finalise a Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL) framework, which both governments had previously said would help align the NTRAI with Closing the Gap reforms.

The NIT article is worth reading in full.

The systemic failures

In relation to the Closing the Gap housing targets, the Commonwealth Closing the Gap 2025 Annual Report and 2026 Implementation Plan was released in February 2026. It fails to mention the issues with the two Federation Funding Agreements identified above, and in Appendix E (link here), a document summarising the state of play on each of the many partnership agreements related to closing the gap the relevant summaries of the two housing related issues discussed above (see pages 47/48) provide no indication of any issues whatsoever. Nor is there any discussion of the more substantive problem with target 9B related to community infrastructure, which the Productivity Commission notes on the dashboard itself, is unable to be measured due to lack of a relevant data source. The dashboard indicates that the target 9B was added in 2022, but there is no update on when an appropriate data source will be identified. While the aspirations implicit in the ‘target’ are obviously commendable, the whole point of the Closing the Gap process is to provide a series of measurable metrics to assess progress against the high-level objectives. We don’t play test cricket without a set of stumps, or a World Cup football match without goal posts; why is it acceptable to engage in ‘Closing the Gap’ without a measurable target?

What is absent from the thousands of words produced each year dedicated to describing what the government is doing on Closing the Gap is any concise and clear analysis which links the size and nature of the problem to the quantum and focus of the policies and programs ostensibly designed to address the identified gaps.

In relation to the Remote Housing Agreement, the documents released to Senator Thorpe show that the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework — the document that was supposed to define what "progress" even means, and trigger reporting against it — was still being drafted through the first half of 2025, nearly a year after the agreement took effect. Its own timeline shows the working group only circulating a draft to the Joint Steering Committee in June 2025, with formal approval not scheduled until September. A program meant to deliver up to 270 houses a year had, for its first twelve months, no agreed mechanism for anyone to check whether it was doing so.

The NIAA was, according to the documents, still building the ruler while the thing it was meant to measure was already supposed to be under way. Accountability infrastructure arrived roughly a year late to a program with a strict annual delivery target.

In Senate Question Time on 12 August, Minister Malarndirri McCarthy, told Parliament the Northern Territory government was pushing to cut it the original 2700 home target to somewhere between 1,100 and 1,800. Separately, in comments to the ABC (link here) Steve Edgington, the NT Housing Minister, has pointed to escalating headworks costs — power, water, sewage connections running $300,000 to $600,000 a block — as the pressure driving that renegotiation.

What neither government is prepared to provide are regular progress reports on housing completions. The absence of regularly updated and current data merely serves to feed frustration for communities on the ground, to hide under-performance by governments, and to facilitate the emergence of a blame game between the NT and the Commonwealth. The losers are the remote community members in the NT who reside in appallingly overcrowded conditions compared to most Australians. The fact that governments, and especially the Commonwealth, claim that they are committed to transparency when their behaviour and actions demonstrate that they are not, is not only hypocritical but insidiously leaches the trust necessary to sustain democratic norms, and ‘bells the cat’ on their other commitments included in the numerous partnership agreements with First Nations interests that they comply with in name and not substance.

Finally, the tabled statement of the Aboriginal members of the NTRHA provides an exemplar of a different systemic failure related to the appearance of engagement and joint decision making through inclusion in a process rather than in shaping outcomes. T The Remote Housing Agreement gives the four NT land councils and Aboriginal Housing NT formal seats on a Joint Steering Committee alongside both governments. A joint statement from the Aboriginal members of the JSC, tabled alongside the funding figures, records "diminishing confidence" in the Territory government's willingness to change how it operates, cites a lack of data-sharing, and asks the federal minister to intervene.

Read against the M&E timeline, the complaint reads less like deliberate obstruction and more like the predictable result of being seated at a table before the table has anything on it. The committee members are, on this evidence, being asked to oversee a program that was established and set in action before there was agreement on the data that would be collected and assessed. The JSC were given their pilot’s uniforms, and took their seats in the cabin, but suddenly realised they were in a drone operated from Canberra or Darwin.

The $842 million NTRAI tells a blunter version of the same story. Zero dollars disbursed as of May 2026, more than a year after the agreement's intended start. A Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning framework still unfinished. According to the National Indigenous Times, workforce data included in the released documents show an 84 per cent vacancy rate for oral health therapist positions in public clinics. Arguably more revealing than any funding spreadsheet, this tangible example demonstrates what "services not yet delivered" means for people waiting on the ground (link here).

Each of these three issues provides evidence of deep-seated capability deficits within the Commonwealth for which ministers should be held responsible and accountable. They also provide evidence of a sustained antipathy toward substantive transparency, accompanied by proactive efforts to both claim and demonstrate the opposite. In April, the NIT published an article on the NTRAI which reported claims by the Commonwealth that transparency was ‘at the foundation’ of the program (link here). Yet five months later the NIT (link here)  reported:

When Senator Thorpe initially requested the documents, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher described the request as a "waste of the Senate's time" that was "not needed".

In the light of the documents subsequently released, the Finance Minister’s reported comments appear both tendentious and disingenuous.

The third systemic failure embedded within the publicly available (but rarely read) documentation describing their architecture is an endemic propensity on the part of governments with responsibilities to act in the public interest to privilege appearance and process over substantive outcomes.

Finally, the overarching institutional architecture responsible for addressing remote housing shortfalls is fractured across multiple jurisdictions (commonwealth and Territory; differing local government; varying land tenures) and operating in locations where the residents have fundamentally different worldviews about how society (at all levels) operates and should operate. In terms of effective program delivery, perhaps the most salient characteristic of the current architecture is that nobody — not the NT Government, not the Commonwealth, not the Productivity Commission, not the land councils, and not AHNT — has both the capacity to raise and allocate the funds required and the obligation to report against outcomes in the same place. Authority for finance, responsibility for implementation, and accountability for outcomes sit in different institutional locations, each of which has an incentive to shift blame when asked why nothing has been built. The institutional architecture is clearly ineffective and its design sub-optimal.

What then is the way forward?

There are clearly multiple options available to policymakers and First Nations interests to consider. I have decided that I should revisit a number of my previous suggestions and conclusions. Re-reading them, what strikes me is how little appetite our current policymakers have for innovative and visionary thinking.

An obvious starting point would be to commission an independent review. The last major review was undertaken in 2017, and while claimed to have been independent it was clearly compromised. I wrote a post explaining how and why (link here). In a follow up post (link here) I laid out four specific options for a pathway forward (bearing in mind that my comments were premised on a national program whereas today in 2026, the Commonwealth has narrowed its Indigenous specific engagement to the NT only). These included the importance of focussing on expanding access to private capital available for investment in remote communities, supporting the introduction of three or four new community housing providers across remote Australia; an expanded Commonwealth focus on oversighting or monitoring the provision of Property and Tenancy Management services (which extends asset lifespans); and injecting more overt financial incentives into the provision of Commonwealth resources to states and territories. Rereading that post today, the proposals therein strike me as still worth considering, albeit within the narrower institutional framework of the NT.

In a February 2018 post (link here) that somewhat eerily paralleled the structure of this post, I concluded in the following terms:

The bottom line on this issue is that despite the ongoing failure to Close the Gap due to lack of an effective strategy tying resources to objectives, and the evidence of the Commonwealth’s own statistics that the most intensive disadvantage is in remote regions, the Commonwealth continues to dance around the crucial issue of funding social housing in remote communities…

… We appear to be heading back to where we came from, with every prospect that housing conditions in remote Australia will worsen, overcrowding will worsen, and as a result so too will the associated consequences for health and economic participation. The already deep levels of disadvantage amongst our most disadvantaged citizens will only get worse...

In 2022, I wrote a critical post on the ANAO Performance Audit of the NT Remote Housing programs (link here), where issues of funding delays, and poorly designed program architecture were explicitly documented but either downplayed or not fully analysed. The Performance Audit and my post provide a clear line of sight to ongoing policy and program underperformance that aligns remarkably closely with the systemic issues identified above.

Finally in March 2023, I published a post titled The Ongoing Remote Housing Debacle (link here). That post lists four concrete proposals for moving forward in the remote housing space (both nationally and in the NT). They retain their validity, so I will summarise them here (I recommend interested readers read the post in full). First, I proposed the establishment of a new Government owned corporation that could invest in expanding the quantum of remote housing based on commercial sources of finance. This is an option that AINT (which was still being established when I wrote that) might conceivably consider. Second, I suggested that the Commonwealth explicitly link mainstream and Indigenous specific sources of housing and target them towards remote regions where the levels of need are the highest in the Nation. Third, I raised the need for a comprehensive independent review; and fourth I pointed to issues with the infrastructure targets some of which are discussed above.

Finally, in February 2025, I published a post (link here) commenting on a draft AHURI report focussed on national Indigenous housing system reform. In that post, I outlined my own vision for the sector:

... A needs-based mainstream policy framework for allocating resources for social housing. A stronger Commonwealth role in shaping the national social housing policy system. A mainstream policy focus addressing rental stress as part of a wider strategy to address economic exclusion and inequality in society generally. Prioritising addressing overcrowding and inadequate housing over rental stress. Prioritising the needs of disabled citizens in both social housing design and management. A push to considerably expand the use of community housing organisations (whether Indigenous controlled or not) which both own and manage housing stock across both remote and non-remote Australia at a scale that makes them commercially viable. A recognition that there is market failure present in the provision of private housing in remote communities and this requires the use of innovative leasing solutions and/or community trusts which sit between the private and public systems….  A renewed focus on infrastructure provision in remote contexts, including by expanding the remit of the NAIF in financing social infrastructure (link here). A much stronger focus on equitable access to renewable sourced power in remote communities (link here). A stronger role for strengthened Indigenous advocacy within high level mainstream policy forums for the housing system (noting that part of the process of strengthening capability is to strengthen internal transparency and governance).

The risk for policymakers and analysts such as myself, focussed on data, program design, process, and strategic opportunities, is that we lose sight of the fact that issues such as housing have tangible and real-world consequences on the quality and duration of people’s lives. That too is worth keeping in mind as we consider these issues.

 

17 August 2026