Infrastructure shortfalls in Alices Springs town camps

Comparisons are odorous

Much Ado About Nothing, Act three, Scene five

 

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

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

The Guide’s Alice Spring contribution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Guide’s wider policy contribution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

 

Energy insecurity in remote Australia

 

An extraordinarily important recent article published in the online journal Nature Energy (link here) raises serious questions regarding the current policy settings related to access to energy in remote communities.

 

The article titled Energy insecurity during temperature extremes in remote Australia assesses the prevalence of power shutdowns across 28 remote NT communities involving 3300 households during 2018-19.

 

The article is significant because it combines sophisticated statistical analysis, contextualised within a detailed exegesis of the prevalence of climate extremes, as well as by an outline of the underpinnings of energy injustice in remote Australia. It is not my intention to attempt to summarise the argument, but rather I merely aim to cherry pick some (but not all) of the policy issues raised in the paper.

 

The executive summary states, inter alia:

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.

 

The total disconnection event numbers are staggering, totalling 170,226 for the 3300 households. Over 14,000 were multi-day disconnections. These figures underestimate the number of remote community disconnections as there are more households using prepayment metering than are represented in the study.

 

The article notes that over the course of the year, 49,000 disconnection events (or 29%) occurred during hot and cold temperature extremes. In the three hottest climate zones in Australia, between 4.5 and 9.1 percent of all deaths were associated with heat related mortality, much higher than the 2% figure in the rest of Australia.

 

The authors mention, but do not explore in detail, the policy issues which underpin the use of the prepaid metering systems. Nor are the adverse health, social, economic and educational consequences explored in detail, although the article does mention some potential (technical) policy responses available to governments to mitigate the adverse impacts of disconnections, including the installation of rooftop solar systems, and adjustments to ensure refrigeration, and medical equipment continues to operate through a disconnection event.

 

The evidence presented reinforces the depth and extent of systemic disadvantage facing remote communities. Energy disconnection plays into health issues; exacerbates overcrowding (as residents move to houses where power is still available); contributes to the challenges school age children face in maintaining attendance and homework schedules from overcrowded shelters without access to regular power; raises issues regarding food security (and all that involves), and points to a widespread and deep lack of access to sustained financial literacy training for remote communities and their residents. All of these issues are arguably the responsibility of the NT Government.

 

Under the Closing the Gap National Partnership, each jurisdiction prepares an Implementation Plan to guide its activities across the Board. The NT Government Implementation plan is available online (link here), but upon my quick examination, provides virtually no indication that there will be any focus on addressing the tangible systemic issues identified above arising from ongoing energy disconnection issues. This in itself is an indicator that the current Implementation Plans under the National Partnership are not fit for purpose. That however is an issue beyond the scope of this post.

 

While the NTG clearly has a major role in addressing these issues, so too does the Australian Government for two substantive reasons.

 

First, while the article make no mention of it, the potential link between hyper-excessive energy disconnections and the history of hyper excessive social security breaches (let’s call them CDP disconnections) leading to hyper variability in access to social security income is impossible to ignore. ANU academics cited estimates that pre-pandemic, the remote CDP program inflicted over 500,000 penalties on its 30,000 participants over four years (link here). The CDP scheme is currently undergoing a slow, phased, reconfiguration, after the Government announced it is to be co-designed with Indigenous interests following the completion of some pilot programs set to begin in late 2021. The positive changes to income support payments in the first year of the Covid pandemic may well have lessened the rate of energy disconnections in the last two years, but these will likely increase as fiscal normality returns and temperatures rise.

 

The second reason the Australian Government is involved is that it is a significant contributor financially to the NT remote housing sector, given that many of the housing leases are held by the Australian Government and not the NTG (link here).

 

Over and above these substantive policy responsibilities, the Australian Government has a national responsibility to oversight the complex Indigenous policy domain. The fact that the current Government resists this framing does not weaken its logical and political force. Why else did the Australian electorate vote in 1967 to give the Australian Government legislative responsibility for Indigenous affairs under the constitution? Such a national perspective is important because while the NatureEnergy article relates only to the NT, it seems likely that similar systemic energy security issues will apply in other parts of remote Australia, albeit perhaps with differing characteristics depending upon the extent to which remote communities elsewhere utilise prepaid energy systems.

 

One obvious step would be to commission the CSIRO to undertake a more policy oriented status report on the current state of play nationally. Another would be to substantially increase the investment in remote housing, including in ancillary infrastructure such as solar power systems. A third would be to expedite the work on redesigning the remote income support systems.

 

If the Australian Government is not prepared to step up and initiate this work unilaterally, then the Coalition of Peaks would be wise to utilise its access via the Joint Council established under the National Partnership to pressure all jurisdictions to do more. The case for immediate action is unassailable.

 

 

The formal citation for the article which prompted this post is:

Longden, T., Quilty, S., Riley, B. et al. Energy insecurity during temperature extremes in remote Australia. Nat Energy (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-021-00942-2

 

 

Swirling bulldust: recent developments in the remote housing fiasco

Or, if there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it, Making it momentary as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream; Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say ‘Behold!’ The jaws of darkness do devour it up: So quick bright things come to confusion.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act One

On 19 June 2018, The Brisbane Times reported (link here) that

Mayors from across Australia have taken the Turnbull government to task for failing to stump up cash for housing in remote Indigenous communities.

…"Refusal to provide funding will have catastrophic impacts on the social, educational and health outcomes including increased mental health and family violence in these communities."

Mr Lacey said about 10 per cent of Palm Island residents were on the waitlist for a home. "There's overcrowding, you don't need to be Einstein to work it all out," he said.

Mr Lacey said funding provided by the Queensland and federal governments over the past decade fell short of the demands of a growing population.

On 9 August 2018 the ABC News ran a report by Felicity James: ‘Arnhem Land community awaits housing rebuild three years after Cyclone Lam destruction,’ (link here ).

On 25 August, the ABC News in WA ran a story “WA remote families left in limbo as Ministers trade insults over housing cash’ (link here). That report quoted Federal Indigenous Affairs Minster Scullion as stating:

The only thing affecting progress on reaching a deal in Western Australia is Peter Tinley’s racist approach to Aboriginal people and his willingness to play petty politics with their homes and their lives.

On 29 August in Perth Bill Shorten and Mark McGowan fronted the media in Perth (link here). The following exchange took place:

JOURNALIST: Thank you. If I could just ask do you think that Tony Abbott is the right man for the Indigenous envoy role?

SHORTEN: I think I will rely on Western Australia's Senator Pat Dodson and quote him, or requote him. He said First Australians have asked for a voice and they got Tony Abbott; a clear disappointment. 

Listen, he is clearly interested in Indigenous affairs but while he and Mr Turnbull were in power there were a lot of cuts to services. I think if he is going to be a fair dinkum envoy for Indigenous Australia go and convince Mr Morrison, who was the Treasurer who wouldn't properly fund remote housing, I think Mr Morrison and Mr Abbott, if they want a reset on treating First Australians with some degree of decency, Mr Abbott and Mr Morrison need to reverse their cuts to remote housing (emphasis added).

On 30 August, Perth Now ran a story headed ‘Remote housing feud descends to insults’ (link here).  

It is worth reading both the ABC and Perth News reports in full.

So what are the facts?

The Commonwealth spent $540m over each of the past ten years in supporting the construction and upgrades of remote housing, primarily in WA, NT, SA and Queensland. This was delivered through the ten year National Partnership on Remote Indigenous Housing established in 2008, and which ended in June 2018. The Government delayed announcing its intentions in relation to the renewal of the National Partnership until December 2017, when departmental officials informed the states that the National Partnership would not be renewed, and instead, transitional bilateral funding agreements would be negotiated which would require matching state contributions.

My February 2018 Inside Story article “Tactics versus strategy in Indigenous housing (link here) lays out the extent of housing need in remote Australia, the rationale for continuing Commonwealth involvement and investment, and explores the scope for new innovative approaches to addressing the quite huge needs which exist and are getting larger.

Minister Scullion denied that the Commonwealth was walking away from remote housing, but the figures speak for themselves. In the NT, where the incoming Labor Government has already committed to a ten year billion dollar investment in remote housing before its election in 2017, the Commonwealth agreed to provide $110m over five years. In WA, the Commonwealth is offering $60m over three years. In SA and Qld, consistent with the deliberate lack of transparency from the Commonwealth, we do not know what is being offered, and if it has been finalised. But is seems highly unlikely that it exceeds the funding made available to the NT which comprises around half the remote hosing need. On this basis, the Commonwealth appears to have made cuts in excess of $250m per annum to its longstanding contribution to remote housing, savings which will rise in quantum over time. If we look forward ten years, thus comparing a renewal of NPARIH with actual funding commitments made for 2019-2018, the Governments decision appears to involve cuts of around $4bn over the ten year forward estimates.

In the light of funding cuts of this magnitude directed at the most disadvantaged citizens in the nation, the tactics of Minister Scullion in resorting to personal abuse and allegations of racism directed at his political opponents should be seen for what it is: a hypocritical attempt to divert attention from the Commonwealth’s unilateral funding cuts and to reframe the issue as just another fight between the federal government and the states over funding. The reality is that the Commonwealth took the decision to cut remote funding because they wished to minimise the apparent size of the deficit over the coming decade in their perpetual quest to portray themselves as competent economic managers. The remote housing funding was an easy target, because it is channelled through the states, there is no national peak body for indigenous housing, and Indigenous voices which do speak out are rarely taken seriously in the broader electorate. In short, the Government did it because it could.

The costs will be borne primarily by remote Indigenous citizens. Women and children will be particularly vulnerable. The impacts will include poor health, domestic violence, poor educational outcomes, mental health issues, suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, to name but a few.

In all these circumstances the preparedness of Minister Scullion to allege racism on the part of Western Australian Ministers Wyatt (links here and here) and Tinley are irredeemable.

The comments by Bill Shorten are the clearest signal yet that an incoming Federal Labor Government will reverse the LNP cuts to remote housing if they are returned to office. The arguments in favour of doing so are incontrovertible, both in terms of addressing deep disadvantage in the Australian community, but also in terms of minimising future social costs on remote citizens and economic costs on taxpayers.

Of course, there is a significant difference between calling on the Government to reverse a cut, and committing to reverse the cut if and when you are returned to the government benches.

Let’s hope that Labor understands that addressing remote housing is not just an opportunity to criticize the Government in the lead up to the next election, but will be an imperative if they are returned to Government and wish to make any inroads in reducing the increasing levels of social and economic dysfunction across remote Australia over the coming decade. The surest way to signal that they do understand this would be to make an unequivocal commitment to reversing the current Government’s cuts to remote housing in full.

Too little too late: Commonwealth funding announced for NT remote housing

The Treasurer and Minister for Indigenous Affairs have announced that the Commonwealth will provide $110m per annum for five years to the NT partially matching the NT Government’s commitment to spend $1.1bn over the next 10 years. The Government’s media release is here. Here is the ABC news report (link here).

The Government also announced a package of other measures, including unspecified additional funding to funding of public hospitals, just under $100m over five years to extend the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement for five years, and a one off top up of GST revenues to the NT of $259.6m. While the Commonwealth has indicated that the purpose of the one off grant is

To help the Northern Territory Government deliver essential services, including to remote communities, the Turnbull Government will provide financial assistance of $259.6 million

it is not yet clear whether the funding agreement will specify where these funds will be spent, and what proportion will go to remote communities. Of course, because they are topping up the NT share of GST revenues which are entirely fungible, there is no effective mechanism by which the Commonwealth can quarantine these funds to particular purposes.

In relation to the remote housing funding the Commonwealth Ministers stated:

The Turnbull Government and Gunner Government have also reached agreement on remote housing and public hospital funding, providing certainty for essential services in the Territory.

To help address the housing needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in remote communities, the Turnbull Government has committed $550 million for five years to support remote housing in the Territory. This funding will commence in 2018-19 and will be matched by Northern Territory Government contributions, with the Northern Territory Government retaining responsibility for sub-leasing arrangements in these remote communities for the five-year period.

Minister for Indigenous Affairs Nigel Scullion said this new investment will help address severe overcrowding in remote communities.

"This $550 million funding commitment comes on top of the $1.7 billion investment into remote housing in the Territory since 2008.''

"Our focus will be ensuring Aboriginal community control is at the heart of our investment, from decision-making to employment and business procurement to ensure we deliver long term sustainable change in remote communities.''

So what does this mean for remote communities in the NT?

On the positive side of the ledger, the decision will maintain substantial spending on remote housing construction and management, which is unequivocally a good outcome. The Commonwealth investment effectively locks in the NT Government commitment of $110m per year, at least for five years. While it represents a net reduction of $50m per year in Commonwealth funding for remote housing in the NT (which has averaged $170m per year for the last ten years), the combined spend represents a net increase of around $50m in combined NT/Commonwealth expenditure.

On the negative side of the ledger, the arrangements announced today reduce the period of guaranteed funding commitments by half, down for the ten years agreed by COAG in 2008 to five years now. This is short-sighted.

Second, the funding committed by the Commonwealth may not reflect ‘new monies’ because it effectively allows the Commonwealth to avoid having to take over a large (but unspecified) number of housing assets which are on leases which would otherwise revert to the Commonwealth over coming years, and thus represent Commonwealth liabilities. This potential legal liability appears to be a primary driver of this selective investment by the Commonwealth.

Third, the funding announced is for the NT only, which represents roughly half the outstanding remote housing need across the nation. While addressing half is better than none, the situation of remote residents in SA, WA and Qld will only worsen without ongoing investment in remote community housing assets.

Fourth, there are clear indications (link here) that the outstanding need in the NT is both large and growing, and while the new investment will probably prevent the remote housing situation substantively worsening in the NT over the next few years, it will not guarantee any substantive improvements in overcrowding levels and the ongoing state of the housing asset base. This investment thill thus not do much to ‘close the gap’ in overall disadvantage between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Finally the five year time frame, and as yet largely unspecified management and decision making arrangements for the Commonwealth funding are potentially problematic. In particular, while the Government asserts its objective is to ‘deliver long term sustainable change in remote communities’, the delay in delivering certainty regarding ongoing funding, the limited five year investment horizon, and the uncertainty over the management arrangements will significantly increase the risk of program failure and/or sub-optimal outcomes going forward.  For example, if future housing allocations are essentially ad hoc and one-off, there will be limited incentives for relevant businesses and community organisations to invest in training apprentices over a sustained period. The Government’s rhetoric is fine, but implementation capability will be crucial to maximising benefits for Indigenous communities and people, and at present there is little information to hand on how the program will be managed to minimise these risks.

If we get up in the grandstand, this funding announcement needs to be welcomed as it provides tangible assurance for NT remote residents that housing conditions will not substantially worsen overall. But it is inadequate to significantly reduce housing disadvantage in the NT, and implicitly provides political cover for the Commonwealth to walk away from remote housing funding in the three states which have substantial remote Indigenous populations.

In my view, the management of the potential renewal of the remote housing strategy has been both disastrous and appalling.  The Government has effectively dismantled a program which was making a huge difference to people’s lives in remote Australia. The announcements today go some small way to backtracking on those mistakes, but will not address the structural challenges which if left unaddressed will lead to major negative consequences for both governments and remote indigenous residents over the coming decade.

I have previously estimated (link here) the funding requirement in this area as approaching $9bn over ten years. Today’s announcement, dealing with a jurisdiction which represents around half the outstanding need, commits just over $1bn in combined NT and Commonwealth funding over five years, or less than 15 percent of this estimated outstanding need over the coming decade.

In these circumstances, the Senate should look to establish a Parliamentary Inquiry into the housing needs of remote Australia over the coming decade.

The Productivity Commission’s Human Services Reform agenda in remote communities

The Productivity Commission recently released its report ‘introducing Competition and Informed User Choice into Human services: Reforms to Human Services (link here). The Final Report was presented to the Treasurer in October 2017, and was published on 26 March 2018.

The report includes two areas of particular relevance to Indigenous policy. The first relates to social housing, where the Commission recommends, inter alia, extending Commonwealth  Rent Assistance to social housing tenants, a move which if implemented would go a long way to eliminating the structural inequities between remote social housing and the treatment of non-remote housing assistance to low income citizens.

This post focusses on the second issue on the provision of human services in remote Indigenous communities, dealt with in chapter nine of the report. In December 2016 I commented briefly on an earlier study paper released by the Commission as part of its review (link here). The study paper appears to have been more adventurous and incisive than the Final report.

In the Final Report, the Commission argues at page 265, inter alia, that

·         Despite goodwill and significant resources, current approaches to commissioning human services in remote Indigenous communities are not delivering the benefits of contestability and are exacerbating its potential weaknesses.

·         Policy instability has created uncertainty and confusion for communities and service providers, and has undermined the effectiveness of service provision.

In relation to an earlier disposition to recommend more vigorous use of place based approaches:

·         there is merit to place-based approaches, but that a large-scale systematic rollout of place-based approaches across remote Indigenous communities is not feasible.

·         Government and community capacity for place-based reforms does not exist everywhere and would take time and effort to build. Expanding too far, too fast is a significant risk.

Moreover,

·         Governments should shift the balance away from centralised decision making in government toward greater regional capacity and authority to improve responsiveness to local needs.

These are all sensible and considered judgments which deserve serious consideration, but which governments, based on their record over the past few decades, are unlikely to address enthusiastically.

Nevertheless, the Commission’s chapter on remote communities deserves to be read by anyone interested in remote policymaking, not least because it represents the ‘standard view’ on what is the appropriate policy approach to addressing indigenous disadvantage, and improving Indigenous engagement. Moreover, the specific recommendations on human service are well argued and deserve serious consideration. The Commission recommends that contract lengths for commissioned service delivery be set at ten years by default, that governments publish a rolling schedule of upcoming tenders, that tenders include a focus on skill transfer and capacity building, that provider attributes (for example culturally appropriate service provision) be taken into account, that outcome measures and establishing evaluation and feedback systems be implemented, and that agencies adopt less centralised decision making systems which involve greater local engagement.

So what’s missing from the Commission’s analysis? I would point to three key issues.

First, the Commission appears to have dropped all references to greater transparency in program delivery from its analysis and recommendations. The Commission’s focus on policy instability and churn (which is largely driven by ministers and political factors) is absolutely correct, but it appears to have failed to make the link between greater transparency and reduced incentives on governments to countenance policy churn. Similarly, a focus on program and policy evaluation will be facilitated and indeed strengthened by a greater focus on transparency in relation to government policymaking. The Commission’s earlier study paper, mentioned above, was quite explicit in calling for greater transparency, so the decision to drop any mention of the value of greater transparency is difficult to understand.

Second, the Commission’s revised and more modulated support for place based approaches would be significantly strengthened if governments were to simultaneously establish an overarching policy framework so that while the scope for regional and place based differences was maintained, there was also a greater degree of certainty around expectations on both sides of the ledger: from providers, and form communities. Such an overarching policy framework would assist governments to articulate exactly what they are trying to achieve, deliver greater stability in coordination and cooperation between jurisdictions, and assist in managing community expectations. Furthermore, while Indigenous communities are diverse and heterogeneous, there is a risk that without an overarching policy framework to underpin place based approaches, communities who are outside the ambit of the place-based arrangements will be neglected and services will be under-supplied.

Third, and perhaps my most fundamental critique of this chapter of the report, the Commission’s approach ignores the reality, and indeed the centrality, of politics both within Indigenous domains, and within the public sector. This is clearly a deliberate decision of the Commission to make the report appear ‘policy focussed’ and to maximise the likelihood that its recommendations will be accepted, if not by this government, then by the next. However it has the effect of making the analysis extremely artificial and anodyne and somehow lifeless.  I am not advocating that the Commission takes sides in political debates, but to effectively ignore the existence of politics both as a driver of policy problems and challenges, and as a driver of potential solutions, seems somewhat otherworldly. The reality is that politics are ubiquitous in relation to these issues, and to blithely recommend policy ‘reforms’ as if politics don’t exist appears short-sighted at best, and potentially destructive at worst. One of the reasons that governments are so averse to transparency on any kind is that it increases the likelihood that blatantly political tactics will be seen for what they are.

Thus at present, we have a Federal Government with a substantial policy and program footprint in remote Australia, but without an overarching remote policy framework, and with both of the two largest Commonwealth programs in remote Australia, the Community Development Program and the Remote Housing Strategy subject to deep-seated uncertainty. In place of any policy framework, the Commonwealth appears to have decided that addressing remote challenges is just too hard, and instead, that it is easier to adopt a political strategy of blaming the states and territory for any issues which have emerged, ignoring the Commonwealth’s overarching stewardship responsibilities in Indigenous affairs and the fact that as the major funder in remote Australia, the Commonwealth has a responsibility to work with jurisdictions to develop coordinated and coherent policy frameworks.

Notwithstanding my criticisms of the Commission’s approach, there is much in the Commission’s report worth considering and pursuing. The report is an excellent example of open and transparent processes delivering better outcomes, and as a result, there is a clear ‘audit trail’ of the development of the Commissions thinking in relation to the conceptually challenging issues involved such as place based program delivery.

If this report goes un-noticed and un-addressed, remote Indigenous communities will be worse off. Unfortunately, because the Commonwealth does not have a comprehensive remote policy framework in place, it seems unlikely that we will see a serious and sophisticated response to these findings and recommendations. Nor does the present Minister see that he has a responsibility to respond formally to reviews and inquiries such as this; he has been quite open in stating that he does not intend to respond to the recommendations of the review into remote housing which he commissioned and which was delivered to him in 2017. Hopefully the Opposition and the Greens will take up the issue of a formal response to this Inquiry Report and ensure that the Government at least responds to the Commission’s recommendations and findings in a timely manner.

The Prime Minister announced over a year ago that the Productivity Commission would be supplemented with an Indigenous Commissioner. Legislation is currently before the Parliament. The omens will not look particularly positive in terms of the capacity for such an appointment to make a real difference to policy outcomes if the Government is not serious about dealing with the recommendations of worthwhile inquiries such as this.