Community control
Aboriginal housing in Aboriginal hands
The core of our work and the very vision of our founders is ‘Aboriginal housing in Aboriginal hands’. ‘Building the community-controlled sector’ is also one of four priority reforms in the whole-of-government plan for Closing the Gap.
Aboriginal people have made their own homes for millenia and they continued to do so after colonisation. It is only very recently that Aboriginal housing has been conceived and constructed for Aboriginal people.It is, refreshingly, only now that we can find innovative examples of Aboriginal people designing and building their own houses.
Community organisations are building up their capability and their capacity. AHNT believes that community housing providers are strengthened when they register and comply with the National Regulatory System for Community Housing (NRSCH).
For their part, government agencies need to relinquish control – and funding – to enable the community sector to grow strong – a challenge for organisations whose purpose is to govern.
We continue to work towards a new Indigenous housing authority to govern the system. For now, we are contributing to research and modelling to gain an understanding of the possibilities.
Image credit: Newspaper clipping from 1968, showing Phillip Roberts, President of the NT Council for Aboriginal Rights and NT Secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, and providing his comments on then Minister for the Interior’s position that Aboriginal people have no land rights. National Archives of Australia A1734, NT1968/25, p114