The Victorian government will transfer ownership of 511 homes to Aboriginal Housing Victoria on Monday as part of a plan to provide almost 1,500 homes to Indigenous peoples reliant on public housing.
The housing minister, Martin Foley, said the homes were the first of 1,448 properties to be transferred to AHV over the next three years, adding to its current property portfolio of just 76 homes.
All of the properties are currently leased and managed by the AHV but Foley said transferring the ownership would allow the organisation to better manage its housing stock.
Aunty Pat Ockwell, a senior elder with the Wurundjeri people and former chairwoman of AHV, said the move would ensure more homes were available for Indigenous people on the housing list and would also allow the authority to better tailor properties to the needs of the community.
“We need these houses,” Ockwell told Guardian Australia. “Our people haven’t got decent property, we’ve got nothing.
“A lot of our elders, they put them in these big flash houses, you know. They’re two stories, which is no good for our elders because they can’t climb the stairs to the top. They need to buy properties that are suitable for the needs of the people they’re accommodating.”
About 1% of Victoria’s population, just under 54,000 people, identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, and that population is growing more than twice as fast as the non-Indigenous population, at 4.7% per year.
About 22% of Indigenous households in Victoria are reliant on social or public housing. The Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation and AHV noted in a submission to Infrastructure Victoria in June this year that “the sheer increase in growth of the Aboriginal population and the associated housing need suggest that Aboriginal homelessness and housing outcomes are likely to deteriorate, or at least not improve” in the next 30 years, unless housing options are expanded.
It said AHV, which was established in 1981 in response to the perceived poor treatment of Indigenous tenants in government-run public housing, had already seen the effect of increased levels of disadvantage on its tenants.
AHV manages the bulk of Indigenous community housing in Victoria but an additional 383 properties, housing about 1,500 people, are managed by other organisations.
The chairman of AHV, Tim Chatfield, said owning the properties it managed had been “a long-held aspiration”.
“It is a significant achievement toward self-determination for Victoria’s Aboriginal people,” Chatfield said. “It gives the Aboriginal community a greater say in how we meet our own housing needs.
“When Aboriginal housing is owned by Aboriginal people, we achieve better outcomes. Ownership of the properties means we will be able to grow the housing stock and improve services to our tenants.”
The transfer won’t affect the existing tenancies or rent paid by AHV’s 4,000 tenants.
Nick Foa, the director of Victoria’s housing department, said the increased stability provided by the move would allow people reliant on that housing to become more involved in the community, which would “bring about a huge benefit for all concerned”.
“Organisations such as Aboriginal Housing Victoria have a long history of supporting their community, strengthening and maintaining cultural and community ties,” the Aboriginal affairs minister, Natalie Hutchins, said. “This transfer is an excellent example of self-determination in action as it will allow Aboriginal Victorians to manage their own affairs.”
