When it comes to First Nations affairs in contemporary so-called Australia, few narratives have been as pervasive and potent as the ‘close the gap’ agenda.
It is undeniable that harmful policies relating to First Nations housing, health, justice and more have, for generations, exacerbated and in some cases facilitated the violence toward First Nations peoples in Australia, whose basic human rights have been continually violated. The 2020 National Agreement on Closing the Gap aims to remedy this by establishing four priority reforms and 19 socio-economic targets to ‘overcome the inequality experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’. One major area of reform is First Nations housing, the often dire state of which is the most visible and enduring evidence of the failure of governments, over decades, to address the root causes of First Nations disadvantage and close the gap.
Why, and how, could a country that prides itself on values of fairness and democracy allow such blatant inequities to persist? Why does the state of so much of the housing in remote First Nations communities remain so deplorable, despite governments at all levels committing to improve it? And what is the relationship – if any – between the often dismal state of First Nations housing and the failure of governments to meet Closing the Gap targets more broadly?
The most compelling answer to these questions is implicit racial prejudice.
Though most individuals would contest the idea that they are (albeit unknowingly) advocates of racism, data shows there exists a widespread implicit racial bias within Australian culture. A study conducted between 2009 and 2019 showed that of 11,000 people surveyed, roughly 75 percent of non-Indigenous Australian participants held an implicit bias against First Nations people; surprisingly, this was regardless of age, religious views, education, profession, and gender. Moreover, the study concluded that this implicit bias has ultimately arisen not through the fault of First Nations people, but rather through the skewed lens that the rest of Australia continues to view them through.
This bias not only predisposes the average non-Indigenous Australian participant to consider First Nations people through a negative lens, it can in part explain why First Nations people in Australia are subjected to some of the most disgraceful housing conditions across the country despite persistent efforts to close the gap. It also reveals the dire repercussions of decision making by a non-Indigenous majority who are largely unaware of their implicit biases, preferring instead to believe in the veneer of egalitarianism that has them convinced they are part of a nation that champions unity, human rights and a ‘fair go’.
The fundamental attribution error (FAE) is a type of ‘cognitive bias’ – a kind of irrational decision making mechanism – which explains the tendency of individuals to take into account the external constraints within which they themselves might be operating, but to not do the same for somebody else. In other words, we tend to think the disadvantages in our own lives are due to factors outside our own control, all the while believing that another person’s life circumstances are due to their character, personality and choices.
FAE leads many non-Indigenous Australians to believe that the ‘gap’ facing First Nations communities – including the abhorrent housing conditions forced upon many First Nations people – are a mess of their own making. FAE explains why many First Nations people are blamed for the misuse and abuse of housing, while any sort of criticism of external factors (in this case, malpractice within both architecture and construction industries, and the Australian government) is completely disregarded. This is the same (lack of) logic underlying povertyism, which describes the “negative attitudes and behaviours towards people living in poverty” that stem from the belief that people facing poverty are to blame for their condition.
Taking a look at the targets and indicators of the National Closing the Gap Agreement, when it comes to areas of housing, health, education, justice and more, First Nations people face more structural disadvantages than any group in Australia. Meanwhile, many non-Indigenous Australians – ignited by their implicit bias and a tendency to fall prey to the FAE, paired with a growing inability to identify and combat misinformation – find themselves attributing the reasons for the ever-widening ‘gap’ to the poor choices of First Nations people, rather than to the systemic issues of violence inflicted upon them by settler colonialism, which in the area of housing continues to manifest itself through professional malpractice and government policy failures.
So what is the housing situation that many First Nations people in Australia endure, particularly those in remote communities?
For generations First Nations housing has suffered from a consistent lack of maintenance as well as failures in policy. As Rockhole resident Evelyn Andrews pointed out, all houses in the town she resides in are the same houses that were built when the elders lived there. First Nations housing policies designed to guide the construction and maintenance of remote housing have been found to be “sub-standard for many years”, a result of a lack of routine maintenance as well as faulty construction and design.
In a study conducted between 1999 and 2006, only 11 percent of the 4,343 houses surveyed across 132 First Nations communities passed national safety standards. During yet another study of housing in First Nations communities, it was not possible to wash a child in half of the houses surveyed, while adequate cooking and food storage facilities were present in only 6 percent of the residences. Research on household infrastructure in First Nations housing in the NT found that components for food storage and preparation were 62 percent not functional, while the facilities typically required to maintain personal hygiene and allow for the removal of human waste in a safe manner were not functional in 45 percent of houses.
Pholeros and Lea coined the term ‘non-houses’ to describe the shelters offered to First Nations people by the state government. Though the structures look prima facie to be houses, they in fact are cruel facades “buttressed by scripted policy announcements about dollars spent and program achievements” so as to direct attention away from the true nature of the structure. The houses are inexpensive, partially complete copies of “a house of bare utility, which looks like, but is not, a house. It is a non-house.” Recently, in the remote NT township of Elliott, a family with a one-month old baby was forced to spend weeks living in a government-run public house that was overrun with sewage due to issues with the septic tank and corresponding pipes.
Moreover, the materials used in remote First Nations housing tend to be geographically inappropriate, with builders often employing materials and solutions that work in coastal areas without specific regard for what constitutes liveable, sustainable housing in remote Australia. This lack of place-based knowledge stems in part from a lack of empathy for, and understanding of, who will inhabit these spaces. It is no wonder then that many First Nations tenants feel their housing is not built for them or for the climate they live in.
Of all professions, technicians and trades workers display the highest positive bias in favour of caucasians. Perhaps, then, the construction industry has to an extent conditioned people to invalidate and hold prejudice against First Nations people. Not only has implicit bias been exacerbated through faulty construction and professional malpractice; such issues have perpetuated the cycles of poverty many First Nations people find themselves in. This has resulted in the skewed belief that First Nations communities are unworthy of the same standards of living that non-Indigenous Australians are themselves afforded.
It should be clear by now that there exists a correlation between the dire housing circumstances of many First Nations people in Australia, racial bias, and the professional malpractice that is widespread in the built environment. Implicit racial bias among non-Indigenous Australians has the potential to lead to explicit actions. Yet very seldom does national discussion in Australia seriously consider the ways in which systemic racism and racial discrimination acts as a serious predictor of poor outcomes for First Nations communities in Australia, including in the continual failure to close the gap.
Despite the disheartening housing situation, there is at last some acknowledgement of the harm that First Nations communities have experienced at the hand of government bodies and contractors. On October 4, 2023, after residents of the remote community Laramba expressed serious concerns about uranium levels in their drinking water, the Northern Territory Supreme Court ruled that the “territory’s housing department is responsible for supplying safe drinking water to its tenants.” Another decision made on October 31, 2023 saw the High Court of Australia rule that Northern Territory Housing is liable for the impact that lack of repairs has had on First Nations public housing tenants.
Ultimately, these recent rulings made by Australia’s colonial legal system are just beginning to scratch the surface of what needs to be done to not only close the gap, but to see non-Indigenous Australians (and I will use the inclusive term ‘our’ because I am a European Australian) acknowledge the role our implicit racial biases play in perpetuating it. The depoliticisation of architecture has rendered it violent in and of itself, and it is high time that those within the industry use their voice in lieu of those voices being silenced. No longer can rubrics on public safety alleviate policy makers, designers, and builders of the responsibility they hold for the dire subsistence of what today is called ‘housing’ for First Nations people in Australia.
We have been conditioned to accept the existence of a First Nations ‘gap’ in life outcomes for far too long. What is irrefutable is that when it comes to the persistent inability to ‘close the gap’, non-Indigenous Australia has no-one to blame but itself.
