Understanding housing outcomes for Indigenous Australians: what can the 2002 NATSISS add?

Table 7.1 presents tenure profiles of dwellings containing Indigenous households in remote and non-remote areas in 2002. In the non-remote areas, three tenures—buying, government and private rental—each account for approximately a quarter of households, with ownership and other less significant tenures making up the last quarter of households. In the remote areas, by contrast, buying, private rental and ownership all fall away to single figure percentages, while government rental also falls away, but not quite so dramatically, to 17.1 per cent. What rises in remote areas in their place is one of the very minor tenures in non-remote areas—community rental. This tenure accounts for 49.7 per cent of dwellings containing Indigenous households in remote areas, but only 6.8 per cent in non-remote areas. Community rental is hence the dominant tenure in remote areas, while being fairly insignificant in non-remote areas. This contrast suggests just how different the housing tenure system is for Indigenous people in remote areas compared to elsewhere.

Source: Customised cross-tabulations from the 2002 NATSISS RADL

Some explanation of community rental may be of assistance at this point for those not familiar with Indigenous housing policy. Community rental is the product of a thirty-year government effort to improve Indigenous housing conditions at government capital expense by providing between 500 and 1000 dwellings per year through grant funding to Indigenous community organisations. While these dwellings have been government-funded at the point of construction or capital expenditure, the ongoing ownership and management of them has been vested in Indigenous community organisations. These organisations have then been encouraged to charge income-related rents to cover recurrent housing costs, such as repairs and maintenance, and this has led to the label ‘community rental’. The closest cousin of community rental housing within the housing tenure system is government rental, which is also provided at government capital expense, and which also charges income-related rents in the hope of covering recurrent housing costs. However, government rental in most instances is restricted to cities and smaller urban areas. It does not often extend into remote, non-urban places, where significant numbers of Indigenous people live. In these areas, community rental generally takes over the role from government rental of meeting the housing needs of those who do not seem able to do so through market processes. Sometimes government rental and community rental are together referred to as social housing.

Table 7.2, which reports housing tenure by Indigenous people aged 15 years or over (hereafter referred to as adults), accentuates the tenure difference between remote and non-remote areas shown in Table 7.1. While the figures for non-remote areas differ by only one or two per cent for any tenure category from Table 7.1, for community rental in remote areas the figure increases by almost 14 per cent so that 63.6 per cent of Indigenous adults in these areas live in community rental dwellings. The dominance of community rental among Indigenous people in remote areas thus becomes all the more stark when reported by numbers of people, rather than households. The key to this shift is different household sizes in remote and non-remote areas.

Source: Customised cross-tabulations from the 2002 NATSISS RADL

Table 7.3 gives percentage distributions of household size by dwellings containing Indigenous households in remote and non-remote areas. It shows that whereas 21.2 per cent of these dwellings in remote areas have seven or more members of the household, only 5.4 per cent do in non-remote areas. Table 7.4 accentuates this difference by showing that 39.3 per cent of Indigenous adults in remote areas live in households of seven or more people, compared to 8.7 per cent in non-remote areas. Conversely, the proportions of Indigenous households containing four or fewer people, and of Indigenous people living in such households, are much higher in non-remote areas. This means tenure differences between remote and non-remote areas are accentuated when reported by Indigenous people, rather than households, due to larger Indigenous households in remote areas.

Source: Customised cross-tabulations from the 2002 NATSISS RADL

Source: Customised cross-tabulations from the 2002 NATSISS RADL

Table 7.5 presents one final set of figures relating to housing tenure profiles and remoteness. These figures are for Torres Strait Islanders living in Torres Strait, the rest of Queensland and Australia (excluding Torres Strait). The figures in this table are drawn from ABS (2004c) rather than the RADL, and are based on the number of people responding to the 2002 NATSISS (not the number of households). To ensure that the estimates are reasonably reliable, the table is restricted to just two tenure categories: owned (including buying) and rental. Islanders in the Strait show the usual heavy reliance on rental of Indigenous people in remote areas and the concomitant low levels of home buying or ownership, at just 6.2 per cent,  though  ABS  considers  this  statistically unreliable. ^[1] Islanders in the rest of Queensland show higher levels of buying and ownership and those in the rest of Australia, even higher still. We should note in passing here that were this third geographic category to be defined exclusively, as Australia excluding Queensland, (rather than overlapping with the second category and hence including Islanders in the rest of Queensland again), then clearly the level of home buying and ownership among this group of Islanders would be significantly higher again.

Source: ABS (2004c: Table 23)