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:
- within discrete
Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander communities receive essential
services that meet or exceed the relevant jurisdictional standard;
- 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
