Hold on. Why is the government building houses in the first place? Since when was the federal government in the house building business? Why don't the Aborigines take their business elsewhere, like any other Australians who want to build a house?

It's about "belief".
Large swathes of Labor are captured by neoliberalism, thru opportunism born of ignorance on their part and their reliance on neolib media, civil servants and academics.
They seem to actually relish the dismantling of the seeemingly unrelated various aspects and components of the justice system, which to them and their backers is just another impediment to corporatism and "growth"; including involving "jobs" ( like running bag-people with brown paper bags? ).
What's sad is not so much the ALP Right- you would have expected no better of them, or even the feeble capitulation of the centre-left- people like Macklin, Wong and so forth- so much as the Damascus epiphany type
embrace of the ideology by the latter.
You almost see Winston Smith and his lost girl friend at the conclusion of "1984", tears in their eyes, as they return to renewed adoration of Big Brother, all previous dissent and memory expunged by the techniques of the corporate state.

John,
Who is saying that the bureaucrats are building the houses as distinct from providing the finance for local contractors to repair the old houses and build the new houses?

"Since when was the federal government in the house building business?"

Since they built the first bit of public housing, whenever that was.

Part of the first centenary celebrations of the arrival of the First Fleet was the distribution of food and clothing assistance parcels to poor and improvements to public housing, which was falling apart and full of disease at the time.

John appears to be saying that public housing is bad, private housing is good.

Lyn,
there is probably no public housing in the NT --it only started with the intervention of the Commonwealth under the SIHIP. However, it seems that NT's statutory housing body, Territory Housing, is the chief body here. They employ the old tactic of bureaucratic delay.

Rolf Gerritsen, a former social and economic policy director in Clare Martin's Northern Territory Labor government, has said that the NT public service didn't have the "bureaucratic or fiscal" capacity to implement Aboriginal housing policy, and this was exacerbating the Top End's political crisis.

Bob Durnan in The Australian says:

The intervention's shortcomings are thus predominantly in the areas of poor bureaucratic performance on strategy and program design (particularly Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs housing proposals and Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations blueprints for employment and training reform). These shortcomings first manifested themselves in the political and bureaucratic clumsiness evidenced by the intervention's initial implementation phase. They were especially apparent in the ideologically driven plan to absorb the remote Aboriginal jobless quickly into the tourism and mining industries, despite all the obvious impediments. They are starkly illustrated by the cumbersome alliance housing model.

Durnan is opposed to the Alice Springs-based Intervention Rollback Action Group and Sydney-based Stop the Intervention Collective encourage these divas by providing supportive publicity and a framework of rolling propaganda campaigns that thrive on inaccurate claims.

A large percentage of aborigines in the NT don't value houses the way we white middle class people do. Putting them in neat little rectangle boxes isn't really the way they want to live and making them is just more of the same old making them wear pants and a dress shit. This is the main reason that when the houses are built they quickly fall into disrepair or are completely wreaked.
Regional Communal camp facilities with access to health and education is the way to go. So the ones that want to (and it is their right to) wander about the bush or live in Woopwoop can. And the ones that want to come to populated regions for housing can.
Building house after house in the middle of nowhere is effective only in the short term and mainly only serves the purpose of giving the government of the day a reason to pat themselves on the back and back out of the room.

Hear, hear, Les. If you look at the floor plans of kit homes it tells you a lot about the way we organise our social priorities. The biggest rooms in modern houses are the media rooms, where we don't have to talk to each other. Kids' rooms have to be down the hall somewhere, where they won't bother anybody, and the traditional hubs of the kitchen, dining and living areas are shrinking.

How is that supposed to fit with the complicated kin and social networks of Aboriginal cultures and the importance of keeping those going in daily life? Before one cent of the money goes to pouring the first slab, I'd want to know it's going to be useful for the people it's intended for. Otherwise a house is just an insult. It would be the equivalent of public housing built in the igloo style for white Australians.

Nan

Unlike The Luvvies, I am somebody who has actually lived for many years in public housing. And bloody oath public housing is vile compared to private housing. But I have not made that point here, Gary has. That is what his whole post is about.

Except, we are not talking about public housing here. We are talking about corporate housing that is bizarrely being provided by the government.

Why don't these Aboriginal corporations just don't take their business elsewhere, or - perish the thought - build the houses themselves.

Oh god Lyn, your noble savage shtick is nauseating. Just what the Aborigines need, Ms. Puberty Blues from the shire, extemporating among her lily white comrades just what The Aborigines "really need"; with all their ancient culture and sophisticated kin networks. Blah, blah, Luvvie blah!

"Ms. Puberty Blues from the shire"

Not the first time you've confused me with someone else JG.

Purpose built public housing can be crap. It sounds like your experience of it was similar to mine. They don't do Daceyville any more.

There's nothing noble savage about it. The tiny, falling apart, nasty little boxes that pass for public housing are not built with big families and socialising in mind. Which you would know, having lived in public housing.

JG
--you d say that the point of the post was about public housing--not really it was about the conflict over leases the and compulsory acquisition of the land around Alice Springs in exchange for public housing.

"Ms Puberty Blues from the shire", eh?
Nah, Gary's last post brings us back to proportion and context.
I grew up in public housing, also. It's not basic housing that's the problem, it's other stuff.
Privacy, security, neighbourhood ties and influences; social infrastructure.
You won't as easily find these in makeshift fringe camps on the outskirts of white townships where indigenes will be driven, exacerbating already serious problems and where, without even basic social security more will be driven deeper into exploitation by publicans, to further cultural breakdown, despair and crime.
Leave the outstations and "dry" communities alone, except to improve health, social, local employment and educational facilities.
And if white middle class or ignorant Hansonist "taxpayers" don't like it, or have to postpone gym memberships or restrain credit card debt, tough tits!

Why the fuck are our taxes STILL condoning this disgraceful bullshit!? This bourgeois baby boomer white's delusion has been indulged for far too long.

They got all that land. Leave them to their own devices I say. But not with our money.

http://teacherswithintegrity.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=93&Itemid=105

John
How do the photos in the link relate to lease agreements and housing in Alice Springs?

Jack Greenfield:
"They got all that land. Leave them to their own devices... but not with our money."
"Our" money ( most of it corporate these days, ever since colonisation in grants from the English crown to its gentry, then rampant privatisation often benefitting their ancestors, or greedy developer sharks ) is largely an expression of the wealth of the resources we stole from them, altho we can pat ourselves on the back for our efforts also.
ALL that land ?
They have a few scattered pockets of mainly substandard land to genuinely call their own- Palm Island reservation for compulsorarily assigned people from other homelands comes to mind.
No coloured folk up along the North Shore or along the banks of South Yarra or Gold Coast marinas, that once provided an original natural environment for livelihoods for the real and displaced (if not massacred) owners..