The Australian prime minister has promised that $4 billion (US$2.6 billion) of taxpayer’s money will be a “historic investment” in housing in remote communities across the Northern Territory.
Investment implies a return. I doubt there will be a return.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared, “The Northern Territory has the highest level of overcrowding in the country, which we are working to halve by building 270 houses each year.”
There was no guide as to which of the scores of discrete Aboriginal communities would be the lucky recipient. At the rate houses deteriorate in the north, and in these communities, the “investment” will be lucky to keep up. But is it even an investment?
Aboriginal Housing NT CEO Skye Thompson said it was.
Ken McNamara of Wollongong had a different view.
In a recent Letter to the Editor of The Australian newspaper, he wrote, “These communities are economically unsustainable. After all, that’s why those areas were left alone for so long. Supporting people to stay ‘on country,’ irrespective of economics, just maintains the gap.”
I’m Indigenous and my family was subject to a natural experiment about whether it was better to stay “on country” or not.
My grandmother was sent off mission as an orphan to be a servant. Her immediate relatives were “allowed” to stay. Two generations later, not only are there a couple of doctors in our family but economically, healthwise, and spiritually, we’re doing just fine.
Those who stayed back on the mission—not so great. Unemployment, shorter average lifespans, and all the concomitant ills.
It’s clear that giving young people in remote communities every chance to get an education and career, is the only way to close the gap. Yearning for the old ways (usually selectively) and a past that will never return won’t close any gap.
The Commonwealth and the Northern Territory have done this before, paying for people to live in houses they do not know how to care for.
People’s capacity to maintain their houses is probably declining. Many evidently cannot and probably do not want to maintain them.
This investment is meant to help close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. It cannot. These places do not have an economy capable of generating capital. They are capital sinks, and they will remain so.
The prime minister announced the housing giveaway while visiting the Binjari community near Katherine in the Northern Territory. By coincidence, I received correspondence from a colleague at Katherine the day after the announcement:
“We have around 30 funded NGOs and agencies here in Katherine, accessing millions of dollars annually, and for a small town like Katherine, that’s a bit of overkill in the number of agencies, especially when we aren’t seeing much in the way of returns for the money being spent.”
“It’s interesting to note that, when the business community was so fed up with the constant level of ram raids, smashing of windows and doors, theft of goods, threatening of staff, and trashing of premises that they had a meeting to put together a petition to Parliament about what was going on, the NGOs wouldn’t sign the petition, even though their premises were similarly affected.”
There is the golden insight.
NGOs rely on Aboriginal funding for their jobs, such as the newly announced Justice Reinvestment, which is $70 million; Safer Futures for Central Australia, which is $200 million; and Jobs for Northern Australia, which is $700 million.
As my correspondent wrote, “Aboriginal money is largely what makes the world go round here, so trying to get anything done is difficult because there are those who don’t want anything to change.”
The “historic” investment would best be made in out-migration and supporting services.
Building houses in the middle of nowhere to replace those ruined by bad behaviour is a fool’s errand.
Keep throwing our good money away, prime minister, but do not expect a better outcome until people’s capacity, place, and culture—not their leaders’ job prospects—are at the centre of policy.
