Persistent inaction and pathetic explanations on remote housing data non-provision

Call it not patience…it is despair

Richard II, Act 1, Scene 2

Last week the Productivity Commission released the Housing chapter from the annual Review of Government Services (ROGS) (link here).

The provision of reliable and up-to –date data is particularly an issue in relation to Indigenous services as one of the only drivers of better government performance is transparency on how effectively and efficiently services are being delivered. The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has emphasised on a number of occasions that data is crucial to assessing and driving performance (link here and here). While I am sceptical of the ‘data is gold’ approach as a substitute for effective policy, there is no doubt that transparency is a crucial element in allowing the community at large and the Indigenous community in particular, to assess the effectiveness of government investments and policy efforts, and thus a key element in our democratic framework.

The introductory chapter to the Review of Government Services provides some template information on the purposes of the exercise, and makes the point that one of the intentions is to allow greater comparability across jurisdictions. This aim is thwarted when key data is not provided by particular jurisdictions.

I wrote a post on the 2017 Review of Government Services Housing Chapters in February 2017 (link here) which canvassed the data presented and also foreshadowed various issues related to the delivery of remote housing including the review which was then underway. Key paragraphs from that post are reproduced in full here:

So how effective is the provision of social housing in remote regions?

The answer is that is seems there are substantial shortcomings in the effectiveness of social housing provision, but there are also inexplicable data absences which make comprehensive assessment more difficult.

So at page 18.5, in Box 18.3, the report indicates that some 5000 social housing units in the Northern Territory were removed from the Indigenous Housing data set following their transfer to mainstream social housing in 2008-10, but seven years later relevant data is still not being provided and is expected to be included in the Report in 2018. This is entirely unsatisfactory and difficult to understand in a context where government rhetoric is focussed on the priority of closing the gap. (emphasis added)

Notwithstanding the change of Government in the Northern Territory, the key tables on service delivery performance for the NT are still not available. Figures 18.2, 18.3, 18.4, 18.5, 18.6, 18.7, 18.9 and 18.10 all fail to provide comprehensive (or in most cases, any) data for State owned and managed Indigenous housing (SOMIH) in the NT.

Footnote 3 to the Housing Chapter states:

‘The NT commenced data reporting for its SOMIH program in 2016-17. Limited aggregate data are available and include the number of dwellings (5032), but not the number of households. These dwellings were not included in administrative data collections used in this Report for 2015-16 and previous years following their transfer from ICH management in the period 2008–2010.’

This strikes me as a pathetically inadequate explanation for the non-availability of crucial information which has been an issue for approaching seven years.

While there are indications that some data may now be being collected, there is still no comprehensive reporting for remote Indigenous housing in the NT, apart from figure 18.4 which shows overcrowding levels in social housing hovering around 5% across all jurisdictions except in the NT where SOMIH overcrowding is shown at 56%. This is an extraordinary figure, reported in the ROGS for the first time.

To put this in plain English, 56 percent of all remote social housing in the NT is overcrowded. There is no data on the average level of overcrowding. Virtually all of this housing is allocated to Indigenous tenants in remote communities.

Given the levels of disadvantage in the remote Indigenous housing sector, it is disappointing that the NT has not seen fit to collect the relevant data relating to remote housing since the changes made in 2010.

It is disappointing that the Federal Government has not seen fit to encourage the NT to get its act together, particularly given the renewed focus on data and evaluation in Commonwealth Indigenous policy.

And it is disappointing that the Productivity Commission merely reports these issues without comment, apparently taking no responsibility for the lackadaisical approaches of governments to providing data about basic services to the most disadvantaged citizens.

It might be time for the Productivity Commission to adopt a more robust and independent approach particularly to reports which deal with Indigenous disadvantage.