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