Indigenous housing tenure in remote areas: directions and constraints

This paper, adapted from the ANU- Toyota Public Lecture ‘Closing the Gaps in Indigenous Mortality and Housing: Perspectives from the Social Sciences’ presented at the ANU on Friday 4 April 2008. In it the author argues: "On April 6, 2005 John Howard, on a visit to Wadeye in the Northern Territory, opened up the ‘issue of Aboriginal land title’ and its relationship to the possibility of home ownership in remote Aboriginal communities. My reaction, then as now, was that land title was not the key impediment to, or constraint on, home ownership in remote Aboriginal communities, but that rather the key constraint was the economic status of the residents of such communities. In this brief lecture I want to think about directions and constraints in remote area housing tenure, first by looking at census statistics and second by looking at a regional case study.