Healthy Homes Monitoring and Evaluation Project: Final Report
Healthy Homes Monitoring and Evaluation Project: Final Report Report
- Author(s): Grealy, Liam, Su, Jiunn-Yih, Thomas, David
- Published: 2023
- Publisher: Menzies School of Health Research
Abstract: This report summarises the Healthy Homes Monitoring and Evaluation Project undertaken by Menzies School of Health Research from July 2021 until June 2023. Menzies was contracted by the Department of Territory Families, Housing and Communities (TFHC) to monitor and evaluate ‘Healthy Homes’, the Department’s remote housing repairs and maintenance program. Repairs and maintenance is central to householder wellbeing and housing dysfunction in remote communities in the Northern Territory. In recent years, this has been most evident in litigation brought by householders at the communities of Ltyentye Apurte (Santa Teresa) and Laramba against the NT Government for its failure to provide necessary housing repairs. Submissions by applicants identified a significant backlog of fix work required for houses to meet the habitability standard specified by the Residential Tenancies Act 1999 (Northern Territory). In government housing programs, repairs and maintenance are often deprioritised relative to new construction and major capital works. Repairs and maintenance work is less visible and less able to be celebrated through forms of public announcement or ceremony. However, housing’s materiality is dynamic and entropic, breakdown is inevitable, and ongoing repairs and maintenance is necessary to hold things together. In remote Indigenous communities in Australia, reactive approaches to property maintenance dominate over preventive attention, leaving housing in various states of disrepair. Adequate housing sustained by regular repairs and maintenance is not only necessary to ensure householder health: it is also a right. When governments fail to provide adequate housing they fail to meet their obligations under local laws and international legal frameworks, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Such failure is especially significant in remote communities in Australia, where First Nations people never ceded sovereignty and settler colonialism is an ongoing process. For remote community residents, the right to housing has not been met by successive Commonwealth and NT Governments and the housing crisis is endemic rather than episodic. The Healthy Homes program has sought to arrest the poor standard of remote community housing by initiating a preventive and cyclical maintenance approach to complement existing responsive repairs. This policy effort responded to consistent identification in reports, reviews, and evaluations of preventive maintenance as a strategy for improving householder wellbeing and satisfaction, house function, and asset value over time. The intent of Healthy Homes to prioritise preventive maintenance in remote community housing is appropriate and should remain central to subsequent program iterations. This report examines the implementation of this program against these aims. The Northern Territory Government’s remote housing program ‘Our Community. Our Future. Our Homes’ has four main components: Homebuild, or new construction; Room to Breathe, housing refurbishment and extensions; Government Employee Housing; and repairs and maintenance. The NT Government is responsible for about 5,498 houses across 73 remote communities, Alice Springs town camps, and Tennant Creek community living areas. At December 2022, the proportion of those houses that was overcrowded was 52.9 per cent, a minor reduction from 55 per cent at December 2017. This should be compared with the aspiration of Closing the Gap target 9a which aims to ‘increase the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in appropriately sized (not overcrowded) housing to 88 per cent’ by 2031. In the month of March 2023, there were 3,329 active applicants on the wait list for remote community housing, with 34 households assisted into new housing (and 17 households transferred from an existing tenancy into alternate remote public housing). The average wait time for those 34 households allocated new housing in March 2023 was 40 months.
- Urls: https://www.menzies.edu.au/content/Document/Healthy%20Homes%20Monitoring%20and%20Evaluation%20Project%20-%20Final%20Report.pdf
- Publisher Location: Darwin