The lack of adequate services and facilities in rural and remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities has rightly received a great deal of attention in recent years and, while marked improvements have been made, housing and infrastructure developments still fall far short of the standards experienced by other Australians. A major initiative of the implementation of the National Aboriginal Health Strategy (NAHS) was a national Housing and Community Infrastructure Needs Survey undertaken in April- May 1992 to collect information on the housing need and, more particularly, the infrastructure needs of urban, rural and remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities with indigenous populations of 1,000 persons or less. This survey represents Stage 1 of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) Housing and Community Infrastructure Needs Assessment Project, 1992  

However, the majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, almost 70 per cent, live in urban centres and more than one-quarter live in the major urban and metropolitan areas (Gaminiratne 1993). Evidence presented to the recently completed Inquiry into the Needs of Urban Dwelling Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, conducted over two years from mid-1990 to mid-1992, strongly emphasised the disadvantaged in housing of urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people: 'the lack of housing, overcrowding and poor standard of housing were problems raised at virtually every place the Committee visited'. Many of the factors identified as contributing to this disadvantage are those commonly associated with poverty: lower income relative to that of other Australians; higher proportions of private renters, social security recipients and single income households; unemployment levels at least five times higher than the national average; educational disadvantage; a younger population, higher population growth and higher rates of household formation. Compounding these socioeconomic disadvantages has been a failure to reduce the backlog of housing need as funding allocated for Aboriginal housing has resulted in unsuitable housing, often poorly constructed and inadequately maintained (House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs 1992: 123-8). Stage 2 of the ATSIC Housing and Community Infrastructure Needs Assessment Project aimed to provide comprehensive, up-to-date data on the housing need of this urban indigenous population.  

For the Stage 1 survey of rural and remote communities, data were collected through consultations with reference groups formed at each locality. An assessment of the options for Stage 2 concluded that this approach would not be appropriate since: “it is doubtful that reference groups could be established in all major urban and metropolitan centres in a manner that fully represents the target population. Despite some obvious concentrations, a good proportion of Aboriginal and, particularly, Torres Strait Islander households are widely dispersed throughout the suburbs of large cities and there is considerable potential for 'outliers' to be missed. Given that multiple reference groups would be required in the larger centres, there is also potential for overlap in representation and subsequent inaccuracy (Taylor 1992: 13).”

 While a survey of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families in private dwellings was considered an option, the dispersion of indigenous households throughout the urban areas raised considerable difficulties in the selection of a representative sample and increased the costs, in terms of both time and money, that would be expended in obtaining reliable and valid data. Such a survey could yield more information than is available from the Census of Population and Housing, but a survey would be less comprehensive than the census in its coverage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households and, thus, less accurate. The review therefore recommended that the Stage 2 assessment of housing need in major urban areas should be made using census-based normative indicators supported by qualitative input from local organisations (Taylor 1992,1993a)    

This report arises out of that recommendation. The brief for this study specified that analyses be undertaken of the Census of Population and Housing to estimate the level of outstanding need for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander housing in metropolitan and major urban areas in Australia. This analysis should identify the client groups, their characteristics, location and type of housing required, be comparative between indigenous people and the Australian population, and also provide comparisons between the 1986 and the 1991 Censuses.  

Although the study's initial focus was on the identification of housing need in the major provincial towns and metropolitan centres, the analyses in this report are not restricted to those areas. With the agreement of the project Steering Committee, the sole focus on areas not covered by the Stage 1 survey has been dropped in favour of analyses which examine variations between States and Territories, between metropolitan, urban and rural areas within States and Territories, and between the recently defined 36 ATSIC regional councils, most of which include both Stage 1 and Stage 2 areas. Rather than attempting to combine estimates of housing need from the 1992 Housing and Community Infrastructure Needs Survey for smaller urban, rural and remote communities with those for larger urban centres derived from the census, a single, consistent approach is taken across all areas.  

An assessment of housing need indicators derivable from the census, undertaken in association with the Swinburne Centre for Urban and Social Research, Melbourne, is presented in Chapter 1. This identified measures which embrace two components of housing disadvantage; housing adequacy, assessed by the amount of overcrowding in private dwellings and the extent of other forms of inadequate housing; and financial housing stress measures of affordability, based on a ratio of housing costs to household income proposed by the National Housing Strategy (NHS), and after-housing poverty, which compares household disposable income after housing expenditure with a benchmark based on the Henderson Poverty Lines. In the light of recent criticisms of the NHS affordability measure, however, the analyses of financial housing stress in this report use only the after-housing poverty measure.

Chapter 2 examines the results of analyses undertaken using 1991 Census data to assess the level of overcrowding in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households, and the association between overcrowding, household composition and tenure. Variations between and within States and Territories are also examined.

The analyses are extended in Chapter 3 to examine financial housing stress and the association between the financial situation of households and overcrowding.

Chapter 4 provides comparisons, based on the 1991 Census, between the housing situation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the non-indigenous Australian population, again taking tenure, household composition and regional variation into account.

Changes in the assessed levels of overcrowding and after-housing poverty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households between the 1986 and 1991 Censuses are examined in Chapter 5. Results from the 1992 Housing and Community Infrastructure Needs Survey relating to overcrowding and housing need in communities with indigenous populations of 1,000 persons or less are compared to 1991 Census estimates in Chapter 6.