Federal, Northern Territory government commit to $4 billion housing agreement
The Federal and Northern Territory governments have announced a $4-billion package to build thousands of new homes in remote indigenous communities. The initiative aims to build 270 homes a year for the next 10 years.
Transcript
00:00 Well, this is a significant announcement and it's quite a lot of money.
00:04 This is a $4 billion investment, as you say, over quite a long term.
00:09 So over 10 years that money is going to be invested jointly with the NT government to
00:13 construct homes in remote communities.
00:15 To put that in some perspective, the previous five-year joint funding deal between the Commonwealth
00:21 and the Territory Government, that had a target of building 1950 bedrooms over those five
00:27 years.
00:28 And that target was met late.
00:30 It was about a year late and they cited all sorts of difficulties that flowed from the
00:34 pandemic and just with the logistical difficulty of constructing homes in extremely remote
00:39 places.
00:40 This target is a little bit different.
00:43 The announcement today is that there will be up to 270 homes built each year on this
00:50 10-year program.
00:52 One of the things that's going to be particularly difficult is both the NT government and the
00:56 Federal Government are turning their attention to what are known as Indigenous Homelands.
01:00 These are the traditional lands on which Aboriginal people have lived for tens of thousands of
01:04 years.
01:05 Up until now, a lot of the construction activity has been focused on former mission towns and
01:11 bigger Aboriginal communities.
01:13 Going out and building remote housing in some of these really remote homelands is going
01:17 to add a whole lot of extra difficulty to the task.
01:20 So we'll have to see how they go.
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