Door open for Indigenous housing compensation

Governments across Australia could be forced to pay compensation over substandard houses in hundreds of remote Indigenous communities following a High Court ruling.

The High Court in Canberra. Picture: NCA Newswire / Gary Ramage

Governments across Australia could be forced to pay compensation over substandard houses in hundreds of remote Indigenous communities following a High Court ruling in favour of an elderly woman who had no back door for five years.

The woman, who died on June 30 before the case was resolved, was 71 in 2011 when she began renting the house at Ltyentye Apurte, also known as Santa Teresa, a community about 85km from Alice Springs.

She is referred to as Ms Young in the judgment published on Wednesday, which describes in detail her fight with the Northern Territory government over the state of her house. She led the claim with more than 70 other households in Ltyentye Apurte. Problems with the homes included leaking sewage, unstable electricity and no airconditioning.

The case is a milestone for the Australian Lawyers for Remote Aboriginal Rights, which argued successfully that renters in Ltyentye Apurte were entitled to be compensated for “distress and disappointment”. Previously this usually applied only in holiday contracts.

“We haven’t had that before in a residential tenancy context,” said lawyer Daniel Kelly, who co-founded ALRAR. “I think it could apply potentially in all states and territories because all states and territories have a residential tenancy act.

“Generally they all require landlords to provide safe and habitable housing.”

Overcrowding and the poor state of housing have been the subject of policy disagreement in Australia for almost a decade.

In 2014, the federal government flagged its intention to walk away from funding housing in remote communities. It made its final housing payments to the states in 2018. However, it has continued to fund remote Aboriginal housing in the NT by making payments to the Territory government.

By the time Ms Young’s case about the missing back door reached the High Court, the NT government already had been ordered to reimburse her $4735.80 rent for 540 days during which the premises she rented was uninhabitable due to the lack of an airconditioner; pay $4000 in damages for distress arising from the associated physical inconvenience from the lack of an airconditioner; and pay $200 in damages for the breach of its duty to repair her stove for a period of 170 days.

The judgment states that while Ms Young installed her own steel mesh barrier at the back of the house, it was still possible for snakes to get in.