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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remote crisis: déjà vu all over again and again and again and again …

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!

Macbeth, Act two, Scene three

I sat down to write a post that considered the recent media stories regarding the ongoing crime wave in the NT, NAPLAN, Closing the Gap, the extraordinary Indigenous unemployment levels in remote Australia and the ongoing and worsening incarceration crisis in the NT including the hyper-punitive response of the current NT Government. Then I realised that in doing so without the necessary contextualisation, I would be entering the perpetual motion machine that controls and shapes our media cycle and ensures that we never stop and ask how did we get here? I haven’t done the detailed research to write such a post, but my intuition told me that it was more important just now to remind readers of the underlying dynamics and forces which are shaping the outcomes that feed into daily life in remote communities, major towns like Katherine and Tennant Creek, and our daily media diet in south eastern Australia.

One way to do this is to list and link to the previous posts I have written on the theme of remote crisis. Below I list most (but perhaps not all) of the posts I have written on this topic since January 2022. I could have gone back further, but there is already more than enough material to digest. For each post, I have selected a short excerpt which illustrates some of the issues in play. The excerpts do not necessarily encompass the major argument of each post, and are not always the key point, but they do make in my view a contribution to providing the context that assists interested readers in forming a judgment of the underlying issues and causes in play when we read about the latest outrage or tragedy. I have left text bolded where I bolded it in the original post. I do recommend readers dip into at least some of these posts.

 

1.    Energy insecurity in remote Australia 13 January 2022 (link here)

The abstract of a recent academic article states:

Indigenous communities in remote Australia face dangerous temperature extremes. These extremes are associated with increased risk of mortality and ill health. For many households, temperature extremes increase both their reliance on those services that energy provides, and the risk of those services being disconnected. Poor quality housing, low incomes, poor health and energy insecurity associated with prepayment all exacerbate the risk of temperature-related harm … We find that nearly all households (91%) experienced a disconnection from electricity during the 2018–2019 financial year. Almost three quarters of households (74%) were disconnected more than ten times. … A broad suite of interrelated policy responses is required to reduce the frequency, duration and negative effects of disconnection from electricity for remote-living Indigenous residents.

 

2.    See How We Roll 24 January 2022 (link here):

It strikes me that this is, more than any other I have come across recently, an important book for policymakers engaged in shaping policy in the Indigenous domain. It shatters preconceptions regarding the distinction between remote and urban contexts, and makes clear the parallels between disadvantaged Indigenous people and other disadvantaged citizens. Most importantly, it should make policymakers question their assumptions and preconceptions regarding Indigenous life choices, and the potential for policy instruments and measures of various kinds to articulate or engage with the altogether different world views and approaches to living of many Indigenous people.

 

3.    The ongoing social and governance catastrophe in remote Australia 8 May 2022 (link here):

In October 2009, Nicolas Rothwell, writing in The Australian, published a scathing analysis under the title ’The failed state’… Rothwell’s opening sentence sums up his argument: ‘The Northern Territory is a lost cause’. He goes on:

There is, though, a failed state in our midst. That state is not Aboriginal north Australia, where the social fabric is in shreds and tatters. No: it is the jurisdiction largely responsible for entrenching this degree of Indigenous disadvantage: the modern-seeming, self-governing Northern Territory.

I quoted these observations in an earlier post in August 2016 (link here)… I would add however that the responsibility for entrenching Indigenous disadvantage is shared with the Commonwealth.

 

4.    Systemic myopia: Public investment challenges in remote Australia.19 December 2022 (link here):

To sum up, over the past two decades at least, public funding in core capital investments related to essential services, social housing, and community infrastructure has been severely deficient. This has undoubtedly reduced the levels of recurrent funding by governments in remote settings, and also limited the opportunities for local employment, and stronger economic development and progress. It is undoubtedly one of the key contributors to limiting the opportunities available to the rapidly growing youth cohort within communities. While reversing the sustained under-investment is not sufficient to address all the challenges facing residents of remote communities, it is a necessary element in any viable transition to a more stable future for remote communities. The onset of climate change is making addressing these challenges even more urgent.

 

5.    Cataclysm and Crisis 10 December 2022 (link here):

The inability of governments to envisage, understand and put in place effective strategies to address the multiple facets of the economic and social cataclysm facing remote communities amounts to a massive and fundamental failure. This failure is in and of itself a crisis; a crisis of governance capability, a crisis of will power, and ultimately a crisis of government legitimacy.

 

6.    Alice Springs crisis: observations on remote policy. 25 January 2023 (link here):

The Alice Springs hospital has 16 beds in its Intensive Care Unit. Minister Burney mentioned that she was shocked to learn that last night, 14 of those beds were taken by women who had been the victims of violent assaults. This window into the lived experience of too many remote women and their families is more than a warning of the seriousness of the rolling crisis across remote Australia. It is more than a prompt for governments to take action. It is more than an indictment on the quality and legitimacy of our systems of governance across northern Australia. It is damning evidence of the complicity and responsibility for these outcomes of those Australians (myself included) who take an interest in public policy. 

 

7.    The ongoing remote housing debacle 5 March 2023 (link here).  

In conclusion, the policy choices made over the past five years in relation to remote housing are retrograde and will have very real consequences: for taxpayers, for the population of remote Australia, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and most importantly for the residents of these overcrowded and under-maintained houses across remote Australia. Over fifty percent of those individuals are under 25 and the overcrowding will have lifelong consequences for the opportunities that are within their reach.

 

8.    The structural underpinnings of the tragedy in Yuendumu 10 March 2023 (link here):

Yes, at the micro level, individuals on both sides of the cultural divide, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, have and had agency. But they were and are operating within an overarching set of institutional structures which have been in place for decades and were either explicitly designed to constrain and control Aboriginal people’s lives, or reflect longstanding and entrenched structures of underfunding that were oblivious to, and independent of the level of need. If we wish to prevent further micro level tragedies, we as a nation must move beyond allocating blame or responsibility at the micro level and also address the macro level issues. Micro and macro are both part of a single social system, one that is responsible for both extensive social and cultural harm, and ongoing mainstream governance failure.

 

9.    Dodge dip and dive: eight ‘data points’ on remote policy 1 May 2023 (link here):

What is clear however is that given the synergistic interactions of multiple policy domains, the current model of policy design and implementation has not worked. This raises the potentially unsettling prospect that, at a fundamental systemic level, governments and policymakers are not incentivised to take the policy decisions that are required to make a substantive difference to the policy challenges that exist. Instead they are incentivised to manage difficult issues, oil squeaky wheels, and engage in a performative ritual designed merely to persuade an electorally significant non-Indigenous constituency (and a less electorally significant, but more animated, Indigenous constituency) that they are doing what is required to address the policy challenges that surface periodically in the public consciousness.

A recent review of a book on Boris Johnson (link here) described his motto for governing as ‘dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge’. As it turns out, this is an extraordinarily apt description of the systemic approach of Australian governments to remote policy challenges.

 

10. The remote community education scandal in the NT 24 September 2023 (link here):

It is time that the Commonwealth accepted that the NT Government is incapable of delivering remote education in a manner consistent with the public and national interest, and in such a way that it actually delivers outcomes. These poor outcomes are feeding directly into the social dysfunction that is endemic in parts of remote Australia, and which I have previously argued is a slow burn catastrophe (link here).

 

11. Looking ahead: the architecture of Indigenous policy in 2050 1 March 2024 (link here)

My advice to First Nations and progressive mainstream interests, and in particular their peak advocacy groups, would be to invest as much as possible in building their capabilities to advocate for Indigenous interests, to focus squarely on the absolute deficits in remote policy outcomes, including education, employment, housing and essential infrastructure, and to pursue a strategy of simultaneously protecting the institutional frameworks that presently exist, while pursing incremental change across the breadth of the public sector. In particular, Indigenous advocacy interests should explore avenues to gain much greater independence from Government funding as it comes with a hidden cost; the silence it implicitly requires reduces the necessary pressure on governments to fix the extraordinary policy problems that exist across the board, and the social and economic catastrophe that exists in remote Australia.

 

12. The ongoing attendance crisis in remote schools 10 September 2024 (link here):

In relation to remote attendance, there is a need for the Commonwealth to step up and acknowledge it for the national crisis it is…. The Commonwealth should work with the states cooperatively on these issues, but devise incentive-based payments to the states and territories rather than indulging in the politically driven negotiation that currently predominate. Robust support to Indigenous community leaders aimed at encouraging and assisting them to raise expectations of parental involvement within their communities are essential. But so too are getting financial resource allocations for schools better targeted, and if necessary increased. Rewarding effective teachers much better and ensuring that the curriculum is focussed on the needs of the least capable cohort of students are both — to use a colloquial expression — ‘no brainers’. This suggests that the adoption of curriculum methodologies (such as Direct Learning) that do not allow any student to fall behind must be a priority.

 

13. Infrastructure shortfalls in Alices Springs town camps 24 December 2024 (link here).

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….

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.

 

14. Indigenous hyper-incarceration: a remote problem? 24 January 2025 (link here):

One data point quoted stood out:

As of January, the Northern Territory hit a grim milestone. More than 1% of the territory’s total population is now incarcerated in adult prison.

….

It is the case that the process of colonisation turned the world upside down for Indigenous people across the nation, and the people of remote Australia are generations closer to that social cataclysm.

Mainstream Australia cannot undo those social processes, and the world has moved on for all Australians. However, given the clear evidence of deep dysfunction arising from those social processes that were neither chosen nor desired by Indigenous people, and the impacts those changes inevitably imposed and continues to impose, the nation and its policy elites must be prepared to consider policy options that turn established modes of policy formulation upside down. Not to do so would amount to an extraordinary admission of national policy failure. Indigenous incarceration is just one of the impacts that arise from widespread social and economic dysfunction across remote Australia and woven through pockets of urban and regional Australia.

 

15. Misdirected focus: the case for institutional policy reforms to alcohol supply 18 March 2025 (link here):

The subliminal message from the NIAA then is don’t look to the Commonwealth to drive institutional policy reform, its someone else’s responsibility. See this page on their website too (link here). For what it’s worth, I just don’t buy that argument.

The appendix to the NIAA submission ( #140 at this link) which I strongly recommend readers seek out and read very usefully provides a comprehensive and powerful snapshot of the impacts of alcohol on various sectors. Here are a few data points I have cherry picked from the NIAA submission appendix:

… First Nations people were 4.2 times as likely to die from alcohol-related causes as non-Indigenous Australians. They were also 3.8 times as likely to die from alcoholic liver disease, and 4.7 times as likely to die from mental and behavioural disorders due to alcohol use….

AOD are involved in more than half of all police-reported family and domestic violence incidents in Australia, and are likely to be involved in a substantially greater proportion of all family and domestic violence…. For homicides in the period from 1989–90 to 2016–17, 72% of First Nations offenders were under the influence of alcohol at the time of the incident, as were 71% of First Nations victims…

If Australia was serious about reducing Indigenous incarceration,…  reducing family violence within Indigenous contexts, … improving Indigenous health status, … [and] improving socio-economic status within the Indigenous community, we would implement significant policy reforms in relation to alcohol advertising, taxation and retail availability.

If Australia was serious about closing the gap, the Commonwealth would step up and lead, and one of its first steps would be to implement significant policy reforms in relation to alcohol advertising, taxation and retail availability.

Unfortunately, it is quite clear from a close reading of this report that neither the Government nor the Opposition are serious about any of these issues.

 

16. The Domestic and Family Violence crisis in the NT: a symptom of wider chaos 29 April 2025 (link here):

The Northern Territory is in a state of perpetual governance crisis, where underfunded schools are no longer fit for purpose, jobs are not within reach of young Aboriginal kids, alcohol and drug abuse is rife, as is domestic and family violence, and where violence and mayhem are increasingly spilling into the major towns and cities….

The problems in the NT have been decades in the making and have their roots in the failures of governments at all levels to adequately support the maintenance of a viable social and economic institutional infrastructure in remote communities. Reversing this longstanding policy neglect is not susceptible to some quick fix. In recent years however the systemic dysfunction in remote communities that governments have been prepared to tolerate for decades because they were metaphorically ‘out of sight’ has begun to colonise mainstream Territory cities and towns….

One way or another, remote Australia requires more serious policy attention (as opposed to political froth) from national policymakers. A good first step would be to progressively and incrementally strengthen controls across the board (ie mainstream and Indigenous) over the availability and price of alcohol. But much more than this will be needed to reverse the progressive decline in governance and its silent handmaiden, economic security, that is currently underway and gathering momentum. The alternative to serious reform is progressive decline into systemic chaos not just in remote communities, but across the NT and potentially elsewhere in remote Australia. Unfortunately, it seems things will have to get much worse before the political willpower to reform will emerge either in Canberra or Darwin.

 

1 August 2025

 

The Domestic and Family Violence crisis in the NT: a symptom of wider chaos

 

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!

Macbeth, Act two, Scene three

Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS), a research organisation established by Australian governments, recently published an evaluation report (link here) commissioned (and presumably funded) by the Northern Territory Department of Children and Families into the Territory’s Men’s Behaviour Change Programs (MBCPs). These programs (which to be clear seek to address important issues of individual responsibility) are aimed at reducing the levels of Domestic and Family Violence in some, but not all, regions in the NT. The evaluation focussed on the two MBPCs operating in the NT (link here), one in Darwin and Wadeye run by Catholic Care NT, and the other operating in the Alice Springs Town Camps run by Tangentyere Council. The evaluation was process focussed rather than outcome focussed, and while its recommendations are sensible and, in many respects, predictable, the evaluation was clearly limited in its focus. In setting the scene, the report identifies the broader significance of domestic and family violence (DVF) in the NT (page 18):

The NT arguably faces the greatest challenge of all Australian jurisdictions in addressing domestic and family violence. The rates of DFV in the NT are far higher than any other jurisdiction in the country, with particularly severe consequences for victims and survivors. In 2023, rates of DFV-related assault were almost 6 times that of all other jurisdictions where data is recorded, and 3.5 times the national average. The rate of DFV-related homicide was 4 times that of all other jurisdictions, and 3 times the national average. 2 in 3 (67%) assaults recorded in the NT were related to DFV and over half (55%) of homicides recorded in the NT were DFV related in 2023 [footnotes removed].

The report goes on to state:

While DFV affects people across population groups in the NT, Aboriginal women are disproportionately affected, being over 8 times more likely to be assaulted than nonIndigenous women or men. Aboriginal women in the NT are killed by intimate partners at almost 13 times the rate of non-Indigenous women and men. Over the 20-year period between 2000 and 2021, 70 per cent of intimate partner perpetrated assault deaths in the NT were perpetrated against Aboriginal women…  It is important to emphasise that while DFV is experienced mostly by Aboriginal women in the NT, DFV is perpetrated by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous men [footnotes removed].

The report proceeds to cite research identifying the ongoing impacts of colonialism, the impact of the 2007 NT Emergency Response, and the pervasive impacts of racism as significant contributors to the existence of DFV. While these are undoubtedly ongoing factors in shaping Aboriginal people’s life opportunities, I consider that their significance in driving DFV rates in the NT is both overstated and without rigorous empirical proof. More significant are the wider systemic issues identified in the report on page 19 under the heading Contextual realities of the NT. Unfortunately, the report frames these factors as downstream factors which compound the impact of DFV rather than as drivers or causes of DFV:

The experiences and use of DFV in the NT are compounded by contextual realities that make addressing this violence particularly complex. … alongside structural and system racism, Aboriginal communities in the NT are also disproportionately affected by factors such as poverty, homelessness, inadequate housing, housing insecurity and overcrowding, physical and mental health issues, alcohol and drug use, high rates of unemployment, and socio-economic disadvantage [footnotes removed].

The effect of this framing in the evaluation is to shift attention away from focussing on causation, and towards a focus on remediation. Of course, this ultimately flows through into the framing of the internal and external policy debate. The result is that while the ANROWS report mentions systemic issues, it simultaneously downgrades those that are susceptible to policy action to a category of ancillary or downstream issues that are just unfortunate ‘contextual realities’. The systemic issues that are identified (colonisation; the NT intervention; ongoing racism) are not susceptible to reversal through policy reform. The result in my view is that notwithstanding the reports undoubted merits as a process evaluation, it is simultaneously a contributor (perhaps unintentionally) to the systemic blindness which facilitates the ability of policymakers to avoid dealing with the real issues of causation in relation to domestic and family violence in the NT.

The NT Government’s Families Department website has some very useful information and data on the levels of DFV across the NT (link here) and I particularly recommend interested readers look at the DFV mapping report (link here) which provides a comprehensive analysis of the prevalence rates in the Northern Territory, and purports to identify gaps, opportunities and proposals for reform. Pages 145-147 list a series of potential initiatives under the heading ‘Systemic Reform and enablers opportunities’. Unfortunately, like the ANROWS evaluation, there is no mention of alcohol as a driver of Domestic and Family Violence. Readers are effectively misdirected away from the structural reform and into a labyrinth of myriad potential and desirable administrative changes.

In November last year, I published a post with the title Justice Reinvestment: divert and distract (link here) where I stated:

Importantly, while the costs of Indigenous hyper-incarceration are overwhelmingly borne by First Nations individuals, families and communities, there are wider societal costs that provide a potential platform for future advocacy. I am not referring to the financial costs of our prisons, substantial as they are, but to the less tangible costs that degrade the moral and ethical foundations of our society. How can informed citizens live in a society where the preconditions for social dysfunction have been allowed to develop, largely through neglect rather than deliberate intent, to the point where in some parts of the nation, domestic violence is endemic, employment opportunities are minimal, (government owned) housing is in extraordinary states of overcrowding and disrepair, and where young people are less literate and numerate than their parents. As the NT Coroner Elizabeth Armitage noted in her concluding comments to the recently released Inquest into the deaths of four Indigenous women (link here), ‘94% of the very youngest children in detention (10-13 year olds) have been exposed to family violence’.

In March this year, in a post titled Misdirected focus: the case for institutional policy reforms to alcohol supply (link here) I quoted an NIAA submission to a Parliamentary Committee Inquiry which stated inter alia:

AOD [alcohol and other drugs] are involved in more than half of all police-reported family and domestic violence incidents in Australia, and are likely to be involved in a substantially greater proportion of all family and domestic violence…. For homicides in the period from 1989–90 to 2016–17, 72% of First Nations offenders were under the influence of alcohol at the time of the incident, as were 71% of First Nations victims…

In the conclusion to that post, I wrote inter alia:

If Australia was serious about reducing family violence within Indigenous contexts, we would implement significant policy reforms in relation to alcohol advertising, taxation and retail availability.

A commentator wrote in response:

… your conclusion says it all, really. The work has all been done by WHO [World Health Organisation], which over time has refined and distilled its best practice advice based on solid research gathered by its expert committees over decades. And if you had to choose the three items with the best evidence attaching to them, it is those three you mention: dealing with alcohol advertising; taxation; and seriously attacking the easy and cheap retail availability of alcohol. 

Concluding comment

The tragedy of our nation’s continued propensity to avoid facing up to the issues that are causing immense harm and damage to the life opportunities of tens of thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across remote Australia (and beyond) is approaching the point where it will spiral out of control and adversely impact mainstream institutions.

The Northern Territory is in a state of perpetual governance crisis, where underfunded schools are no longer fit for purpose, jobs are not within reach of young Aboriginal kids, alcohol and drug abuse is rife, as is domestic and family violence, and where violence and mayhem are increasingly spilling into the major towns and cities. Recently, the organisation representing the traditional owners of the Darwin region called on the four land councils to take some responsibility for the mayhem arising from the misbehaviour of out of town visitors (link here).

The reaction and knee-jerk responses of politicians and the wider Territory community is to blame the victim and seek ever increasing punitive laws and actions by governments. Last week, the Chief Minister announced she would recall Parliament (scheduled to sit tomorrow) specifically to rush through stronger bail laws following the murder of a storekeeper by a young Aboriginal man with a lengthy criminal justice record. On Saturday, the Weekend Australian (26-27 April 2025) published an article by Liam Mendes headlined ‘Same old story in red-flag Territory’ ($ link here $) which recounted numerous instances of shocking and appalling violence perpetrated against innocent citizens by young offenders. The article noted that ‘Territorians have been here before’ recounting how the CLP Government had come to office promising to get ‘tough on crime’, but that the community were increasingly sceptical: ‘The Chief Minister’s declaration …that “nothing is off the table” meant very little to exasperated residents’. Mendes concluded by noting ‘It is clear that the Territory’s justice system is broken. The answer isn’t to lock every defendant into overcrowded, overrun, disgusting watch houses.’ The author is right of course, although his concluding comment that the Government should have acted sooner is arguably misguided insofar as it implies that there are (unspecified) short term solutions.

The problems in the NT have been decades in the making and have their roots in the failures of governments at all levels to adequately support the maintenance of a viable social and economic institutional infrastructure in remote communities. Reversing this longstanding policy neglect is not susceptible to some quick fix. In recent years however the systemic dysfunction in remote communities that governments have been prepared to tolerate for decades because they were metaphorically ‘out of sight’ has begun to colonise mainstream Territory cities and towns.

Simultaneously, quite apart from the justice system challenges, and the associated issues related to Indigenous disadvantage, the quality of governance and public administration within the NT Government more generally has reached a tipping point and is now in a state of rolling crisis. Over the past year major governance failures have emerged in the Police, in the Anti-Corruption Commission, in the Chief Minister’s Department, and in the high-profile Waterfront Corporation. The senior levels of the NT bureaucracy appear to have been seriously compromised without apparent accountability. The concept of ministerial responsibility appears to have been consigned to the deeper depths of Darwin Harbour. The NT Independent recently published an editorial headlined CLP Government’s cover-up of misconduct at Waterfront part of wider dysfunction in the Territory (link here).

The prospect of any government in the NT pursuing the public interest on any significant issue in the near term is, in my view, a chimera. To take the crucial issue of alcohol, both Labor and CLP Government in the NT have consistently been prepared to prioritise the interests of the alcohol industry over the public interest (link here and link here). The risk is that the Territory’s diseased culture of governance has also infected the Commonwealth’s administration of Indigenous affairs. Three of the last five Ministers or Assistant Ministers have been from the NT, and the current Shadow Minister is also from the NT. In these circumstances, it is difficult to see the Commonwealth holding the NT to account on Indigenous policy issues going forward (not least because it has failed to do so to date).

One way or another, remote Australia requires more serious policy attention (as opposed to political froth) from national policymakers. A good first step would be to progressively and incrementally strengthen controls across the board (ie mainstream and Indigenous) over the availability and price of alcohol. But much more than this will be needed to reverse the progressive decline in governance and its silent handmaiden, economic security, that is currently underway and gathering momentum. The alternative to serious reform is progressive decline into systemic chaos not just in remote communities, but across the NT and potentially elsewhere in remote Australia. Unfortunately, it seems things will have to get much worse before the political willpower to reform will emerge either in Canberra or Darwin.

 

29 April 2025