Remote Indigenous infrastructure priorities

Infrastructure Australia (IA) has recently released its most recent Infrastructure Priority List (link here). I have posted on the topic of remote infrastructure previously (link here and here), and my comments and assessment have not changed substantially.

Infrastructure Australia is an advisory body which assesses proposals from state and territory governments, local government, private sector interests, and in theory the Commonwealth to compile a list of priority infrastructure projects across Australia.

The Board of IA is drawn predominantly from the business sector, and in particular from individuals with a backgrounds in communications, transport, gas infrastructure, and the like. While this is unsurprising, it is fair to say that there does seem to be a dearth of ‘community sector’ representation, which in my view is problematic.

My major concern with the model of policy development adopted by IA and its Board is that it is too focussed on a narrow conception of infrastructure, one which prioritises economic benefits over social benefits, and single larger projects over aggregations of smaller projects.

The definition of infrastructure may seem largely uncontroversial, however it is clear that housing per se is not deemed to be infrastructure for the purposes of policy assessment. While this may be justified in urban and regional Australia, in remote Australia, virtually all housing is social housing, and privately owned housing is virtually non-existent. The reasons for this are complex, and include historical dispossession, capital deficiencies within remote communities, high costs, land tenure challenges, and the absence of appropriate planning regimes. But whatever the reasons, it is clear that Governments must take some responsibility for the shortfalls.

It follows that there are good policy reasons for including remote housing as a core component of our economic and social infrastructure in remote Australia. In my view, IA and its Board (and by implication governments at all levels) have a serious blind spot in relation to this issue. For example, the IA 2015 Northern Australia Audit (link here) explicitly focusses on the needs of towns of 3000 or more, and notes that this excludes the needs of remote indigenous communities (refer page 43) and thus fails to include remote housing infrastructure needs in its assessment.

One implication of this narrow geographic and functional approach to defining infrastructure is that it ignores the massive undersupply of housing infrastructure in remote Australia, which I recently estimated would require an investment of $9bn to address (link here). In turn, this means that there is a concomitant underestimation of the true levels of related infrastructure needs in remote communities such as water, sewerage, power and even roads.

The most recent Priority List includes three priority projects in remote Australia, the upgrade of the Tanami road in the NT, improved roads access to remote communities in WA (both of which will benefit miners and other remote interests as much as Indigenous interests), and the provision of enabling infrastructure in three remote locations in the NT (Wadeye, Tiwi, and Jabiru). The summary for this latter project describes it as:

A portfolio of upgrades to road infrastructure, as well as a range of essential services and community infrastructure upgrades to support economic and social development in three remote regions of the Northern Territory.

One salient point to note is that the ten year National Partnership on Remote Indigenous Housing which ends in June this year invested substantial funding in upgrading the ‘enabling infrastructure’ in both Wadeye and the Tiwi Islands so as to facilitate the construction of significant subdivisions of housing ion both locations. In other words, Governments have been quite happy to use remote housing programs to construct infrastructure, but are unable to see that aggregations of housing should be seen as infrastructure.

While inclusion of remote social housing on the IA priority list will of itself not add to the supply of remote housing, it will raise the profile of an issue which the current Federal Government is intent on setting aside. It is time IA and its Board adopted a broader and more far-sighted approach to assessing the infrastructure needs of remote Australia.

For Governments, the policy challenge is not merely to allocate the necessary funding to ensure that remote infrastructure needs are met, and not degraded (which will be the inevitable outcome of the current Commonwealth disinvestment policy in remote housing in particular), but to also devise and progress appropriate policy reform particularly in relation to land use, planning and land administration regulation. This work needs to be led by the Commonwealth, and will necessarily involve the states and territories. In recent years, this challenge has proved to be too hard for governments, and the use of ‘smoke and mirrors’ as a substitute for real policy development too tempting. And there are no signs of change on the horizon.

One of the reasons Indigenous policy reform appears to be so difficult is that we appear to lack the political leadership at all levels to drive necessary reform. Remote infrastructure is a salient case in point.