Federal, NT governments commit $4b to build more homes
The federal and Northern Territory governments have announced a $4 billion funding agreement to build thousands of homes in remote communities over the next decade.
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TVTranscript
00:00 It is fitting that the Prime Minister has chosen to come to Katherine to make this announcement
00:06 today. We talk a lot about the housing crisis that Australia is in and Katherine in many
00:13 ways is the ground zero of that crisis. Homelessness here in Katherine is around 30 times the national
00:19 average. It's difficult to tell exactly how bad it is because there are limits on data
00:24 collection but Katherine has a unique role to play because it is a services hub for a
00:29 whole bunch of really remote places in the Northern Territory. So people come here and
00:34 they stay here while they're getting those services delivered. The area all the way along
00:38 the Katherine River, which is not far from where I'm standing now, you'll find dozens
00:42 and dozens of rough sleepers down there who have come in from some of the outlying Indigenous
00:47 communities and in fact it's one of those outlying Indigenous communities that the Prime
00:51 Minister will be visiting later today to make this announcement. So it's a fitting place
00:56 to make this quite sizeable investment in remote housing.
00:59 Okay James, so what do we know about how this new remote housing deal will work?
01:07 Well the details are reasonably light so far but as you mentioned we know the quantum,
01:11 we know the size of the money. It's going to be $4 billion over 10 years. To put that
01:17 in some perspective, these federal territory partnerships on remote housing in the Northern
01:22 Territory aren't new, we've had those before. The previous one ran for five years and that
01:28 was only about $1 billion. So this is, even though it's double the time frame, it's four
01:34 times the amount of money. So if that all stacks up, and we'll get more details on that
01:40 today, but it does look like it's a more sizeable investment than the previous five year partnership.
01:45 We know that these things are difficult to deliver too. The previous five year partnership
01:50 had a set target of a certain number of bedrooms that it was supposed to deliver. It was late
01:55 in delivering those bedrooms because all sorts of challenges were thrown up by the pandemic.
02:00 It's difficult to build houses in extremely remote places and so we'll have to see how
02:05 they manage those risks going forward. There's been a lot of debate about whether future
02:09 rounds of remote housing construction should include building on what's called Indigenous
02:13 homelands. So these are outstations and homelands, traditional homelands that Indigenous people
02:19 have lived on for tens of thousands of years outside the larger communities and towns.
02:24 That will, if that's going to be part of this next deal, that comes with additional logistical
02:29 challenges.
02:30 [BLANK_AUDIO]