Simplifying the system or deepening poverty? The new Remote Rent Framework in the Northern Territory

Abstract

In early 2022, the Northern Territory published a new Remote Rent Framework, to come into effect from 5 September 2022. This radical new policy abolishes income-based rent setting in public housing in remote Aboriginal communities and Town Camps in Alice Springs and Tennant Creek. Urban public housing remains subject to a rental rebate. The new rent setting framework seeks to simplify the rent setting system while increasing the rental revenue received from remote public housing tenants. If the new rent setting framework is successful in increasing rent revenues accruing to the public housing authority, it will do so at the cost of further impoverishing remote public housing tenants. Redistributing funds from impoverished remote community residents to the housing authority is an unjustifiable austerity measure that transfers the cost of supplying housing away from the fiscally-constrained Northern Territory Government and onto impoverished Aboriginal citizens. Coming at a time when the Commonwealth Government is removing a swathe of programs that discriminate against Indigenous residents of remote communities, the removal of rental rebates from remote public housing alone is arguably a form of indirect racial discrimination. We urge the Northern Territory government to halt its implementation of the new remote rent framework until it can be properly scrutinised and understood by remote public housing tenants and Aboriginal representative bodies. Show more