Laramba

• And what needs to be done to ensure houses in remote communities do not just meet the legal standard, but exceed it?
• Read more:
  No back door for 5 years: remote community's High Court win is good news for renters everywhere

Big result, but ongoing problems

• By the time the High Court decision was handed down in 2023, both lead applicants had died.
• Just as remote housing tenants must wait prolonged periods for repairs, the lengthy delay for housing justice outlasted them.
• However, a right to seek compensation for distress and disappointment is not a silver bullet for housing justice.

When your landlord is the government

• The NT government has not always been responsible for remote community housing.
• Most remote communities are located on Aboriginal land owned under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.
• Through the NT Intervention, the Commonwealth government compulsorily acquired five-year leases over entire communities.

Current programs falling short

• It aims to prioritise cyclical and preventive maintenance to improve the quality of houses as well as health outcomes for tenants.
• If implemented effectively, Healthy Homes can improve housing hardware and increase the lifespan of existing housing.
• An evaluation of Healthy Homes found the average maintenance spend per house to be about $6,000 per year.

NT government datasets cannot distinguish between preventive and responsive maintenance
reporting requirements mean maintenance data is unreliable for determining how quickly repairs were undertaken
a significant proportion of maintenance work is coded miscellaneous, meaning it is not possible to determine the proportion of works by trade type.
The combination of these factors makes it very hard to assess whether and how approaches to remote community maintenance might be improving.

Bringing remote housing up to scratch

• So a High Court case has reaffirmed the rights of Santa Teresa tenants and the current remote housing maintenance program is inadequate.
• The National Partnership for Remote Housing Northern Territory expired in July 2023.
• Read more:
  Aboriginal housing policies must be based on community needs — not what non-Indigenous people think they need

  Federal funding of remote housing is required into the long term.

• Liam Grealy receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, and the NT Department of Territory Families, Housing and Communities.
• Kyllie Cripps receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Government and State Governments to conduct research and evaluations.