Indigenous leader Peter Yu makes a valid point about why government involvement in remote community building misses the mark. Why, he asks, in 50 years of investing in remote area housing don’t we have Aboriginal plumbers and electricians rather than a lot of public servants? This is exactly the sort of conversation that must be had in the wake of the failed voice to parliament referendum. As Janet Albrechtsen observed this week, the referendum can be seen as a high-water mark of a philosophy of grievance and separatism, and its comprehensive rejection gives us the chance to start again with a positive and empowering approach to Indigenous affairs.
Opposition Indigenous Australians spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has been leading the charge in public. But the flowering of a new type of Indigenous community being explored by the leaders of Bidyadanga, a former Catholic mission 2000km northeast of Perth, is a good place to start on the ground.
As Indigenous affairs correspondent Paige Taylor reports on Saturday, the largest remote Indigenous community in Western Australia is set on becoming a town. The first step is a system of land tenure that gives a sense of ownership to residents so they can plan their lives with certainty. As things stand, Aboriginal people in remote Australia are destined to be renters for life because houses are state-owned and on land tied up in complex systems of communal title. This can have perverse outcomes, such as not allowing residents to move to gain skills because they will lose rights to housing that can be difficult to regain.
Home ownership is seen as the first step to attracting private investment into Bidyadanga. This could lead to jobs and skilled workers and higher standards for utilities such as water and sewerage that most Australian towns simply take for granted. Traditional owners in Bidyadanga have negotiated with the state government to change land tenure for the purpose of inviting investors to establish businesses that create jobs, paving the way for future home ownership.
The seeds of disruption were planted by former WA Liberal premier Colin Barnett in 2014 and taken up by prime minister Tony Abbott. Two decades later, federal Northern Australia Minister Madeleine King says the Albanese government is interested in finally tackling the home ownership dilemma. She is keen to build on reforms introduced by Ben Wyatt when he was WA treasurer and Aboriginal affairs minister in response to Malcolm Turnbull pulling federal funding for remote housing. Mr Wyatt says Bidyadanga has the scale and access to mainstream economies that make it ideal to roll out the reform. Ms King is right to say that the goal of home ownership is just as important for First Nations Australians as everybody else. She is considering allowing the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility to invest in remote housing projects for commercial gain. The aim would be to allow residents effectively to become homeowners, making long-term lease payments that deliver a profit to NAIF.
This is a good start. Whether the NAIF is the right vehicle needs to be assessed. And there must be some doubt about whether government-built remote housing could ever be sold at a profit. The genius in the Bidyadanga plan is that it is a community ambition for greater involvement in the real economy. This is what must be encouraged and not smothered by another wave of public servants eager to tell them how it must be done.
Original article here
Creating jobs best way to make remote communities work
by Paige Taylor 5 Jan 2024 THE AUSTRALIAN
It is fundamental to the disadvantage that costs the taxpayer an estimated $6bn a year in Indigenous-specific services. This is policy failure that would swing an election if it were the fault of any one government. It’s not.
And the poor returns have been delivered for so long that our expectations are in the dirt.
The commonwealth cannot and should not try to shift 92,000 people off their very remote traditional lands to regional centres and cities. So it needs to help make these places work for the residents and for all of us.
We know overcrowding in remote communities is blunting the potential of Indigenous children. It’s a factor in rheumatic heart disease that cuts lives short in remote Australia.
The Royal Australian College of GPs says when an Indigenous child lives in a house with far too many people in it, they are at increased risk of chronic ear infections that make it difficult for them to hear and learn at school, eye infections such as trachoma and skin conditions such as crusted scabies. Overcrowding is linked to elevated levels of family violence and mental health issues.
It is easy to spend money for Indigenous communities but ‘hard to make a difference’
The housing shortfall in remote Australia has gone from bad to worse since 2018 when the Turnbull government walked away from a 10-year national partnership agreement to fund remote housing. The states panicked, to put it mildly. West Australian premier Colin Barnett had been told what was coming four years earlier when he infamously announced he would be shutting down remote communities in his state. This triggered protest rallies as far away as Paris. Successor Mark McGowan joined other premiers in trying to pressure the commonwealth to come back to the negotiation table. None of it worked and the result has been a remote housing black hole in state budgets ever since.
Meanwhile, disadvantage in remote Indigenous communities is getting worse in some cases.
Closing the Gap data, published quarterly, shows that Indigenous employment is increasing in every part of Australia except very remote communities. The latest figures show the employment rate among Indigenous people aged 25 to 64 in very remote areas is 35 per cent, a reduction from 35.6 per cent in 2016.
This is why the plan to open up remote Indigenous communities to investment is high-stakes. Much depends on whether a labour force strategy can help residents into jobs that will allow them to thrive and buy their own homes. It is often said there are no jobs in remote Indigenous communities and that is why they are unsustainable. Have a look at who drives in and out of these places – public servants, tradies and consultants often earning $2/km in mileage. When the outsiders have to fly in, the cost to the taxpayer is even higher.
Remote Indigenous communities want to take on at least some of this work themselves. They want real jobs that already exist, and the chance to create ones that have not been thought of yet.
Original article here
Indigenous home ownership on communal title lands
Final Report No. 139
Date Published: 25 Nov 2009
Authors: Paul Memmott Mark Moran Christina Birdsall-Jones Shaneen Fantin Angela Kreutz Jenine Godwin Anne Burgess Linda Thomson Lee Sheppard
This study investigates the applicability of home ownership to Indigenous people living on communal title lands. The research examines the capacity for Indigenous people to enter this tenure, and whether there is an aspiration to do so.
Report here
Lands where no can feel at home
By HELEN HUGHES , SARA HUDSON and MARK HUGHES
THEAUSTRALIAN JUNE 25, 2011
OVER the past 50 years, 20 per cent of Australia has been returned to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. These indigenous owned and controlled lands are equivalent to the 20th largest country on Earth. But few Australians know that on these lands Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders cannot own their homes. Russia, China, and even Cuba encourage home ownership.
When lands were returned, individual owners were not identified and land councils became the communal owners. Indigenous communities became communist economies with drab communally owned supermarkets but no cafes, motels, caravan parks, retail shops, hairdressers or the other services found in mainstream country towns. There are no suburbs of prosperous homes. Access is guarded by permits.
Traditional owners were deprived of ownership benefits and ownership responsibilities. The result: you need a permit to visit because indigenous lands are private property, but it's the government's job to build houses, roads, and control feral animals.
In the rest of Australia, private property exists side by side with communal ownership. Most of us work in the private sector and own our own homes, but we drive on public roads, send our kids to public schools and picnic in public parks. Public sectors are funded by taxes provided by the much larger private sectors. Utopians dream, but nowhere in the world has a high level of prosperity been achieved without a mix of private and public ownership. Without it, remote Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders are land rich but the poorest people in Australia.
Most royalties go to land councils rather than to individuals. The Northern Territory Aboriginals Benefit Account has $380 million in the bank and income of $200m a year over the past two years. Distributed to individual landowners, this would fund mortgages for every remote indigenous family in the NT. Royalties could be sequestered in individual accounts, say superannuation. Land councils own extensive property in Darwin and Alice Springs while their landowners live in hovels.
Not identifying individual landowners contributes to social breakdown. Townships where most remote Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders live grew from missions and government stations. Land that traditionally belonged to one clan now houses people from several. Traditional clan members look for ways to assert their authority and entitlements over other residents. It is not surprising that disputes and violence are endemic.
Much has been written about cultural determinants of remote indigenous poverty and dysfunction. But poverty and dysfunction are not cultural. They are the product of 40 years of counterproductive government policies. Anywhere in the world, communities deprived of individual property rights and education, showered with welfare and denied civic norms, would become poor and dysfunctional.
Most - 85 per cent - of the 550,000 indigenous Australians live in capital cities and regional towns. While some 140,000 are welfare dependent, the majority - 330,000 - live and work with other Australians. Their children attend public and private schools, TAFE and university, and go on to meaningful jobs. Nearly 70 per cent are home owners. It is the remaining 75,000 on remote indigenous lands - 15 per cent of the total indigenous population - that account for most of the poverty and dysfunction.
By the mid-2000s, the Howard government realised that existing policies had failed. They identified the absence of individual property rights as a major cause of disadvantage. The Home Ownership on Indigenous Land fund and amendments to the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act were intended to facilitate home ownership.
Mal Brough, then minister for indigenous affairs, was offended by the state of remote communities. Brough understood that the failure to enforce civic norms contributed to the collapse of remote communities. Hence the NT intervention. Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia took complementary measures. Jenny Macklin, the Labor Minister for Indigenous Affairs, continued the intervention and extended welfare quarantining to mainstream Australia.
Because the intervention only targeted "community norms", it could not lead to mainstream prosperity. For that, communities also need individual property rights, education, and employment. The Remote Service Delivery program, intended to turn remote townships into mainstream country towns, will also fail without individual property rights.
Vast expenditures on remote communities - $7.5 billion or $100,000 per person per year - are wasted on programs that do not work. Money is available for a procession of initiatives, engagements, agreements, pathways, overarching architectures and consultations, but not for all-weather roads. Governments build expectations that everyone will receive public housing. People who once took responsibility for their lives now sit under trees, drink and smoke, play cards, and wait for the government to provide. Only on Cape York, with Noel Pearson's leadership, has a Family Responsibility Commission mustered elders to restore community norms.
Although the right to own your home is fundamental to other Australians, on indigenous lands public housing is the only option. It has failed. By 2007, public housing had provided only 13,000 dwellings for more than 22,000 remote households. Most houses are sub-standard, dilapidated and crowded. The Remote Indigenous Housing Program is spending $5.5bn over 10 years on remote public housing. The average cost - refurbishments and new construction - is more than $600,000 per house. Private houses of similar quality are delivered in remote locations for $300,000. When this program is complete there will be 17,000 houses for 23,000 households; 12,000 indigenous families will still be sharing houses.
Denied home ownership, remote Aborigines are unable to build assets like other Australians. They are deprived of home-owner grants and tax-free capital gains on the family home. The Territory government has recently announced a "grant of $10,000 for homebuyers who build or purchase a new home". As they say in the bush; "when a white man dies his family gets the house, when a black man dies, the government gets it".
To ensure that indigenous land ownership is retained, long-term housing leases are a practical option. Bob Katter, when Queensland minister for Aboriginal and Islander affairs, introduced long-term leases. Only a few hundred were issued before a change of government brought "Katter leases" to a halt.
In the NT, the commonwealth's head leases over Aboriginal lands are flawed. Only the Tiwi and Anindilyakwa (Groote Eylandt and Bickerton Island) Land Councils have given head leases over their communities to the commonwealth's Office of Township Leasing. Although these permit housing sub-leases, just 16 housing leases have been issued on the Tiwi Islands since 2007. This was the high point of private housing. Jenny Macklin reduced head lease terms from 99 to 40 + 40 years.
If a Groote Eylandt landowner takes a loan today, builds a house and pays off his mortgage over 30 years, seven years later the commonwealth government could take ownership of his house on payment of $1.
In contrast, the Australian Capital Territory's private housing on renewable 99-year leases provides secure individual titles.
Three current discussion papers (the Commonwealth's Indigenous Economic Development and Indigenous Home Ownership and Queensland's Indigenous Home Ownership) fail to identify pathways to private housing and private business. The commonwealth and Queensland governments show no urgency. The commonwealth's Indigenous Home Ownership paper was issued in May 2010. Responses closed last December. They have yet to be posted online.
Housing lease terms should be at least equal to ACT leases. To ensure communities retain control over their land, "accepted by the community in which they live" should be the criterion for applicants for housing leases and conditions of sale and inheritance.
In small communities, individual traditional landowners are known. They can create landowner lists and apply for leases, subject to community approval. In townships, conflicts between the traditional landowning clan and other residents must be resolved.
Housing on indigenous lands is dire. There is no land shortage. Existing income flows are sufficient for mortgage funding. Introducing individual property rights side by side with communal ownership is essential for prosperity in remote communities. Other policies - mainstream education, civil society norms, reduction of excessive welfare - are also necessary. But individual property rights receive the least attention.
(The late) Helen Hughes was a senior fellow and Sara Hudson is a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. Mark Hughes is an independent researcher. Their Private Housing on Indigenous Lands is available at http://www.cis.org.au
Original article here