Tenants, government housing providers and Indigenous organisations are often seeking different outcomes from social housing, which leads to considerable misunderstanding and diversity of views.

Indigenous housing occupies a complex policy environment in which policies and programs are in intermittent states of flux. As a result, the existing frameworks struggle to deliver sustainable outcomes. This study considers how conditionality in housing policy and management contributes to housing outcomes, and what modes of conditionality are most effective and in what contexts for Indigenous clients. It considers the most effective co-related household and governance arrangements to enable forms of reciprocity to occur. A key hypothesis tested is the critical necessity for a ‘recognition space’ involving mutual recognition of the moral relationships of duty and care between SHAs, intermediary organisations and tenants (see Figure 1 for a diagrammatic representation of the recognition space).

Completed over three years (2012–15), this project began with a literature review of housing policy in different jurisdictions spanning several decades to the present (Habibis et al. 2013). The research team then undertook five separate qualitative case studies across remote, regional and metropolitan locations: namely, Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory; the Goldfields region of Western Australia; and Mount Isa, Palm Island and Logan in Queensland.