National Challenges, Parochial Politics: recent developments in remote Indigenous housing policy

There have been a number of recent developments in relation to the Federal Government’s Remote Housing Strategy (RHS) which raise important policy issues.

The Minister’s press release of 8 May 2016 (jointly with the then NT Chief Minister) confirmed that the new ‘Strategy’ is in effect of a rebranding of the last two years of the previous National Partnership on Remote Indigenous Housing (NPARIH). As he stated:

The Remote Housing Strategy is a new national agreement that will deliver $774 million over the next two years to improve the outcomes from Commonwealth investment in remote Indigenous housing and ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have access to better housing.

The funding has been redirected from the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing, which was a 10-year agreement from 2008 to 2018 that the new Strategy is replacing.

The Minister proposes a focus on outcomes:

The two jurisdictions have agreed a new approach is needed to address overcrowding and poor housing in remote communities, one based on delivering outcomes for residents in these communities rather than just getting the money out the door.

He also claims that the new ‘outcomes’ approach will lead to better housing sustainability and longer asset lifespans, but without explaining just how this will work. This claim is particularly problematic as the Minister has admitted to redirecting $95m from allocations for Property and Tenancy Management (PTM) under NPARIH to fund the Community Development Program which replaced the former Government’s Remote Jobs and Communities’ Program. PTM is a crucial element in maintaining asset lifespans. Interestingly, the Ministers’ media release goes on to document the ‘outcomes’ delivered under NPARIH by the Giles Government.

Unsurprisingly given that there has never been a formal document released describing the RHS, the new National Agreement does not appear to be loaded onto the COAG web site which has been the repository of all National Partnership Agreements to date, and it appears that the revisions to the National Partnership Agreement have not been formally endorsed by COAG. The unavailability of any RHS documentation and the new Agreement makes it difficult to clarify just how it differs from the previous National Partnership Agreement, and in particular, just what the increased ‘outcomes’ focus involves. There was a somewhat rambling discussion of what the Government is seeking in an Estimates Hearing in February 2016.

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC) website currently indicates that only the NT, Queensland and South Australia have signed up to the new Remote Housing Strategy (see link above). This leaves Western Australia yet to sign up (assuming the web site is up to date). The web page identifies national targets of 785 new builds, 285 refurbishments, and 58 ‘employment and education housing’ under the new agreement, but provides no reconciliation with the progress of the first eight years of NPARIH. In these circumstances, the claim that NPARIH failed to deliver outcomes lacks an evidentiary basis.

A second development of note is the election of the Gunner Labor Government in the NT. Labor went into that election promising to invest $1bn over ten years, and have since recommitted publicly to that promise.  See this previous post comparing the election promises of both the then Giles Government and the then Gunner Opposition.

The NT Labor Government’s commitment reflects a much greater NT Government contribution to remote housing provision than under NPARIH and RHS, but amounts to around 50 percent of the NPARIH ten year allocation for the NT. The NT Government is clearly assuming the Commonwealth will make a significant contribution to supplement their commitment. In the meantime, there is little information on the public record regarding the expected levels of remote housing investment over the next four years of the NT Labor Government’s term. While ten year commitments are commendable, there is also a need from a transparency and accountability perspective for Governments to develop and publish an annual investment funding profile. The NT Government will need to find on average $100m each year for remote housing.

A third development in the remote housing space is the recent announcement by the Federal Minister of an ‘Indigenous-led review into remote housing’.

The Minister’s media release and a linked web page are a masterful exposition in opacity. There are the usual nostrums: Labor’s NPARIH was too focussed on paying bureaucrats and consultants, ‘and did not deliver the improved outcomes for First Australians that it should’.  The ironic fact that these statements pre-empt the review being commissioned, and are made without resort to evidence of any kind, only weeks after the Government blamed a lack of robust evaluation for the persistence of Indigenous disadvantage, appears to be lost on the Minister and his media advisers.

The statement that overcrowding is ‘unacceptability high’ despite ‘significant investment from successive governments’ ignores the fact that the present Government has made no discernible new investments in remote housing since coming to office, and indeed has cut funding.

The Minister’s statement provides minimal information on the Expert Panel (apart from providing their names) and fails to identify the basis of their expertise. While it is clear that the Minister intends there to be significant consultation with Indigenous stakeholders, there is no information on the process nor the timeframe for the review.

The establishment of a ‘consultative committee’ of state and territory officials ‘bells the cat’ on what this review is really about: the development of a replacement program for the current NPARIH/RHS program as funding appropriated under NPARIH will expire in 2018. The policy risk facing remote Indigenous communities is that state and territory governments will be railroaded into accepting a much diminished replacement program both in financial quantum and timeframe. The rationale will be that national budget policy imperatives require ‘sacrifice’ and strong fiscal discipline, and that states and territories need to shoulder more of the fiscal load. Rather than engaging directly with state and territory governments, the Federal Government appears set to push this agenda under the guise of the proposed ‘review’ aimed at enhancing Indigenous participation in remote housing programs.

A fundamental risk for Indigenous interests in managing the political dynamics of the proposed review is that fact that there are no national or even state and territory peak bodies for Indigenous housing, and this leaves the sector exposed to the random interplay of a substantial number of other sectional interests, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who have tangential interests but not a core focus on the housing sector. It leaves residents of remote communities vulnerable to side deals to which they have no visibility, and in which they have no voice.

Given the lack of an Indigenous peak housing body, there is much to be said for a much more transparent policy process directed to developing the next iteration NPARIH / RHS. This should, in my view, involve the development and publication by the Government (not an outsourced ‘’expert panel’) of its proposed policy model and policy changes (akin to a Green Paper) followed by a structured and open consultation process, followed by the final promulgation of the replacement policy framework.

The Government’s current proposed approach combines both an ex-post (looking back) and ex-ante (looking forward) review of remote housing policy. The use of the ‘review’ terminology appears to indicate that this will not be a full-fledged evaluation. Without a proper evaluation, the likelihood of accurately and comprehensively assessing the effectiveness of previous policy arrangements, and accurately identifying the level of residual demand for remote Indigenous social housing will be substantially diminished. Nevertheless, the bottom line is that we already know that the ten year NPARIH funding envelope was not adequate to meet all outstanding need, and with the high rates of population growth in remote Indigenous communities, and their extremely youthful demographic profile, the pressure on existing housing stock in remote communities will inexorably increase without new and additional investment.

This is the major Indigenous policy priority in remote Australia, and we don’t need another review to tell us that. Each of the state and territory social housing agencies, as well as the Prime Minister’s Department, already has the policy expertise and access to relevant data to make a reasonably accurate estimate of the size and location of residual housing need across remote Australia.

The fourth development in recent times relevant to remote housing has been the release of a new report by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) titled ‘Reviewing changes to housing management on remote Indigenous communities’. This study builds on work begun in 2013, and was initiated in 2014. While focussed largely on the effectiveness of tenancy management practices in the states and territories under the NAPRIH program, this study is in all but name an evaluation of the roll out of the NPARIH program by a team of independent researchers based at three universities. The project Reports have gone through AHURI’s rigorous research management process.

Based on weeks of intensive on the ground field research and surveys in five regions and multiple locations, and encompassing over 160 pages of analysis in the report and a prior positioning paper, plus analysis of pre-existing reports and reviews into the program, the AHURI report provides the most comprehensive assessment of NPARIH one might envisage, and a much more detailed assessment than the proposed Review is likely to undertake. In fact, I would be extremely surprised if the proposed Review does not mine these AHURI Reports for the bulk of its analysis and assessment.

The AHURI Report finds that tenancy management standards have improved considerably over remote housing over the course of the NPARIH program. There were differences in the ways they were implemented by the states, and Western Australia’s ‘hybrid model’ involving the contracting of Indigenous organisations was the most successful. The Report argues for an increasing alignment with mainstream social housing policy, and greater use of the community housing sector. The Report’s authors note that “while a hybrid system appears to work best, it is also essential that housing authorities remain responsible for remote Indigenous housing and provide a regulatory framework to assure the maintenance of standards…”

Perhaps the key paragraphs, which essentially sums up the challenge facing not just the current Federal Government, but all current and future Governments, are set out below ( I have added paragraph spacing and emphasis to improve clarity):

The gains that have been achieved by NPARIH require sustained and continued investment by the Commonwealth, in partnership with the states and the Northern Territory. It is essential for Commonwealth funding to address continuing high levels of crowding, deliver adequate tenancy management and repairs and maintenance.

Remote Indigenous communities will always require housing subsidies. Tax subsidies provided annually per household to owner occupier households in Australia amount to $8,000 or more (2005–2006 figures) (Yates 2009) which our analysis estimates to be considerably more than the equivalent annual expenditure on housing services to remote communities under NPARIH.

Without adequate investment, the gains that have been achieved under NPARIH will be swiftly lost, and within a decade or two we risk once again facing a national crisis in Indigenous housing. Funding for remote Indigenous housing should also be quarantined from other programs to avoid pressures on the remote budget from other programs.

The involvement of both the Commonwealth and states is essential to a broad, long-term approach to increasing housing options in remote communities, including forms of home ownership. This requires working with communities to reconcile community aspirations for community land tenure and economic development. (page 4)

The Report’s Executive Summary is worth reading in full, and there is much detailed and valuable analysis in the body of the report.

The sentences in bold above are challenges to both the Federal Government, but also to Indigenous interests. They directly contradict the Minister’s narrative that NPARIH failed, and consequently undermine the rationale for his rebranding changes of the program.

More importantly, the Report confirms that a failure to consolidate the gains delivered by NPARIH over the past eight years, and to commit to an ongoing investment program of a similar magnitude, will be a slowly unfolding disaster with ongoing lifelong adverse impacts for (what I estimate to be) some 250,000 Indigenous remote citizens (many who are yet to be born) over the next two decades. The current Federal Government has so far provided no indication that it understand or cares about the consequences of failing to address this issue. Indigenous leaders and peak bodies such as the National Congress and NACCHO similarly need to ensure that these issues remain on the national policy agenda; the unfortunate reality is that Governments respond best to sustained and well-argued pressure.

A fifth development which may well offer one path forward to addressing the fiscal challenges inherent in the national remote housing crisis (for that is what it is) can be found in AHURI’s 2017 National Housing Research Program Research Agenda. AHURI are seeking research proposals directed to reconceptualising social housing as infrastructure. Given that there is a broader community acceptance of the need for ongoing policy support for both public and private investment in infrastructure, there is scope for remote housing to be framed in this way, and given the same support as roads, dams, railways, aerodromes, ports and mining infrastructure. I previously made the argument for reframing remote housing in this way in this earlier post. I plan a further post on infrastructure issues shortly.

In conclusion, in this era of increasing budget deficits, it seems likely that there is a very real risk that the current Government will attempt to defer renewing the ten year National Partnership which invested $5.5bn over ten years for housing in remote communities. The initiation of the recently announced Review is potentially a pre-emptive attempt to change the narrative away from sustaining the capital investment required towards one of encouraging much greater Indigenous involvement in a much smaller and shorter program. Such an outcome if it occurs would be an abdication of political responsibility for the most disadvantaged citizens in Australia. If the Government in fact believes that overcrowding in remote communities is “unacceptably high” as stated in the Minister’s media release, it would not have cut $95m from the program and would be adding new investment now to current allocations for remote housing. What else does ‘unacceptable’ mean? The Government’s record to date appears to be the reverse of this, namely overcrowding in remote communities is acceptably high.

While budget pressures are real, the argument for addressing the ongoing and deep seated deficit in remote housing provision boils down to the fact that the opportunity costs of not sustaining current funding levels (at a minimum) will be unacceptably high, both in terms of Indigenous lives adversely affected, the associated social costs of continuing Indigenous disadvantage, and in the future costs of asset replacement which we, the current generation of taxpayers, will be imposing on future taxpayers.

[Declaration: I am a former head of the NT Housing Department; a former NT representative on the Board of AHURI, and a former policy adviser to the Labor Minister for Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin who oversighted the roll out of NPARIH in its first five years].