Summary

The Indigenous community housing (ICH) collection contains data on dwellings managed by Indigenous community housing organisations (ICHOs) with funding provided by either the state and territory governments or the Australian Government, or both. Housing assistance provided to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is also reported under the state owned and managed Indigenous housing (SOMIH), public rental housing and mainstream community housing collections.

Data quality remained problematic for the 2008–09 ICH collection, with some jurisdictions unable to provide data for all indicators and the use of different data sources affecting comparability. It should also be noted that even where data were provided, in many cases coverage was poor, that is, data were not available for all dwellings or ICHOs in the jurisdiction. For this reason, the results can only be interpreted with considerable caution as they may not reflect the entire number of ICHOs, dwellings or households in the jurisdiction concerned (see ‘General notes’ for more details).

In the Northern Territory, 4,096 dwellings were transferred from ICHO management to public housing during 2008–09. Due to a delay in the transfer of dwelling records, these dwellings have not been included in either the ICH or public housing collection in 2008–09. Victoria showed an increase in its dwelling stock, with the number of dwellings managed by Aboriginal Housing Victoria rising from 348 in 2007–08 to 1,233 in 2008–09. The additional dwellings were transferred from the SOMIH program, continuing the transitions that began in 2007–08.

Reporting on overcrowding across ICH dwellings at a national level was not possible for 2008–09 as not all jurisdictions were able to provide data for this performance indicator. Only Victoria, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory, and two of the three Australian Government jurisdictions were able to provide this data based on the Canadian National Occupancy Standard. The third Australian Government jurisdiction provided an estimate based on the number of known occupants in each household. New South Wales and Queensland provided data based on the Proxy Occupancy Standard. Overcrowding rates of 33% and 32% were reported by Queensland and South Australia, while New South Wales reported 25%. It should be noted that in South Australia the overcrowding performance indicator could only be calculated on data for about half (53%) of the dwellings in that state, while in NSW the data were based on 1,557 dwellings (35% of dwelling stock in the state) and extrapolated for all ICH dwellings. Overcrowding rates were lowest in Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory (1% and 0% respectively). The Australian Government reported 14% overcrowding in its three jurisdictions overall.