This sounds like a good advertisement for healthabitat. The survey and fix approach is an extremely costly approach - $7000 per house. Is this amount of money to be expected to be spent on a yearly basis? Under previous funding agreements (IHANT) each house was allocated $2000 per house per year, but this money was managed and maintenance (not in many instances) managed by local housing organisations and community councils. The record of corruption and bankruptcy of these organisations was not ideal, hence the recent takeover of these types of organisations by the NT local government (mind you not the most functioning of NT government departments). There is no way these houses can be maintained when based on an educated guess more than 50% of the adult residents are alcohol dependent in the town camps. A large amount of the problem does come back to basic hygiene and maintenance. Overcrowding is a massive problem and as a result one year of living is more like 5 years because of the extra wear and tear on the house. I was living in AS in 2007 and drove through a number of the town camps (for want of a better name) and the houses were in terrible condition. All these feel good programs have been happening for many years and we have seen little or no improvement in most social, environmental and health indicators and deterioration in others. Nothing will change until people are held accountable for the government subsidised housing that they receive courtesy of tax payer funded money. As was said in this interview, it was again tax payer money paying for the $7000 per house fix. If I were a homeowner, I would like to think that I would not need to spend that kind of money even every 3 years on my house. Haven't we been talking (and the feel good brigade) about capacity building for years and for some reason, little if any capacity has been built and again it has most likely declined because of the victim mentality and the white helpers going in and doing things for Aboriginal people. How hard is it for someone to change a tap washer? The current generations’ parents could no doubt do this type of work and also speak their traditional languages to a high level and read and write English to a satisfactory to high level. Now the leases have been signed in these places and the $40 million is available to build new houses and fix broken ones in the town camps so we will be starting from scratch. Let's see how long the new houses remain functional before advocating unpublished findings from the healthabitat housing program. And another thing, people all over the world live in crowded poor housing, but do not live in dirty broken houses. There is a culture of cleaning, washing, cooking etc. that is still developing within Aboriginal cultures in more remote settlements in Australia. To ignore this obvious fact is a critical sticking point I have with such discussion and programs.