One in eight Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households across Australia are facing unmet housing needs, and there is an urgent need for community designed and controlled and controlled programs to bridge the gap between First Nations housing and the rest of the country.
Australia will need an additional 3,600 new dwellings per year to meet the housing needs of low-income Indigenous households, according to a new AHURI research report, Indigenous housing support in Australia: the lay of the land. The study claims to be the first comprehensive review of First Nations housing governance, resources and regulation in Australia.
The research revealed 45,700 low-income Indigenous households had unmet housing needs in 2021, representing 13% of all Indigenous households – almost double the rate for all Australian households, which sits just below 7%.
Most of the unmet need stems from First Nations households living in unaffordable rental housing (81%), while 14% results from severe overcrowding, mostly in social housing, and 4% from inadequate housing conditions. Unmet need is measured for households earning in the lowest 40% of income levels.
“It’s something we’ve long had anecdotal evidence for and long suspected, which is that Indigenous households have significantly worse housing conditions than non-Indigenous households in Australia, and a disturbingly high number of First Nations people have unmet housing needs, living in inadequate or insufficient housing,” AHURI managing director Michael Fotheringham told Australian Property Journal.
If no action is taken, AHURI projects there will be an additional 26,400 Indigenous households with unmet housing need by 2041 due to household growth.
“We need dedicated programmes that are community controlled and community designed so that, you know, we can have thoughtfully appropriate responses,” Fortheringham said.
The report said regions with large numbers of Indigenous households, such as regional Queensland, Sydney, Brisbane and regional NSW, will continue to have the highest unmet need numbers. However, other regions with high rates of projected household growth are also likely to face growing need from Indigenous households, including Brisbane, as well as the capital cities with lower current numbers of Indigenous households, specifically Melbourne, Perth and Darwin.
In 2001, half of Indigenous households lived in the private sector. In 2021 that had grown to over two-thirds.
“Relying on private rental creates rental stress. The private rental sector is too expensive for Indigenous households earning very low incomes. Nearly 80% of Indigenous very low income renters experience rental stress,” the report said.
Currently, Indigenous members make up over 30% of new government-managed housing tenancies across Australia.
The report said the government’s Closing the Gap initiative gives governments clear directions for shared decision-making and increased Indigenous control, however, its current targets for tackling housing disadvantage are “narrow in scope and lack ambition”.
Fotheringam said more partnerships were required between First Nations organisations and the private housing industry, educational institutions and non-Indigenous, non-government organisations.
“We’ve typically got the Aboriginal sector and the private industries working quite separately. Perhaps there are assumptions that we know what the other group needs, but that sense of ongoing partnership is really the missing piece.
Fotheringham noted that a major challenge has been that the Aboriginal community controlled housing sector “effectively operates as a subset” of the community housing system, while the National Community Housing Regulatory System doesn’t actually operate in Victoria or Western Australia.
“So we do have a regulatory system, but some of the settings of that system have not been particularly well aligned with the needs of Aboriginal-controlled housing organisations or the regulatory environment that they operate in – through the land agreements and so on that make them possible.
“So that tension between the Aboriginal controlled approach and the community housing regulatory approach has made it quite hard without specific intervention.”
According to the report, the Indigenous housing sector on its own has limited capacity to fund additional housing because of its small scale, low rental revenue and a lack of assets that would enable organisations to secure finance.
