Infrastructure shortfalls in Alices Springs town camps

Comparisons are odorous

Much Ado About Nothing, Act three, Scene five

 

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

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

The Guide’s Alice Spring contribution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Guide’s wider policy contribution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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