Improving housing responses to Indigenous patterns of mobility

• Daphne Habibis, and others
• Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute

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14 January 2010This study examines housing service responses to Indigenous patterns of temporary mobility and how these can be improved. These questions are examined in the context of policy developments in remote and regional Australia that have potential to increase Indigenous urbanisation.  

This paper provides an overview of research on the relationship between housing services and Indigenous patterns of mobility, identifies the policy context within which this takes place, and examines current housing service responses to this. It addresses issues central to the planning and delivery of housing to Indigenous populations. Although the focus of the study is on remote and regional Australia, its findings also have implications for social housing in urban areas.

Many Indigenous individuals and families are highly reliant on the social housing sector because of barriers to private housing markets. Yet Indigenous populations also face difficulties in accessing and sustaining tenancies in housing programs provided by mainstream Commonwealth and State and Territory Housing Authorities. One reason for this is that mainstream social housing occurs within a paradigm based on the needs of a sedentary population, involving permanent residence in a single, fixed location. This fails to accommodate the forms of mobility that many Indigenous individuals and families engage in, which reflect attachment to customary practices. This failure contributes to the poor housing outcomes experienced by Indigenous peoples in Australia. 

The question of how social housing providers should respond to the mobility of Indigenous populations is a vexed one, involving issues of whether alternative and better models of service delivery can, or should, be found. How governments address this question carries implications for the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia because of its impact on Indigenous aspirations for cultural integrity and cultural survival. Policies that constrain customary ‘between places’ living (Memmott et al 2006) are implicated in the sustainment of Indigenous self-identity. Morgan describes how ‘many Aboriginals who have lived in cities for most  or all of their lives make sense of their existence through reference to traditional social arrangements and to the nurturing and guiding properties of traditional lands and kinship links’ (2006:145).  There is some urgency about these issues as developments in Indigenous policy are transforming Indigenous housing service provision, especially in remote and regional Australia.

Authors: Daphne Habibis, Chris Birdsall-Jones, Terry Dunbar, Michelle Gabriel, Margaret Scrimgeour and Elizabeth Taylor.

Image: 'a glimpse of cherbourg', hradcanska / flickr

hradcanska / flickr