Paper short abstract:

Taking the highly contested arena of Australian Indigenous public housing as its focus, this paper explores the porosity of policy. Who ‘owns’ the problem of Indigenous housing, when questions of housing ownership are seen as part of the problem?

Paper long abstract:

Taking the highly contested arena of Australian Indigenous public housing as its focus, this paper explores the porosity of policy: as a material artefact which acts; as a transient creation which embeds and exudes moral properties; as property which shapes ideas about the reverence of household property; and most pertinently, as a site where ideas about ownership, property and agency collude and collide. Who 'owns' the problem of Indigenous housing, when questions of housing ownership are seen as part of the problem? Why the tremendous effort to garner 'ownership' for policy words if such processes create conditions for upstream disavowal? With these questions as backdrop, this case study explores the social life of the National Indigenous Housing Guide (Vol III). The Guide is a collaboratively formed set of guidelines, drawing on the knowledge of advocates, professionals, industry, householders and bureaucrats, to describe ideal technical solutions for the extraordinary material strain typically suffered by Indigenous housing infrastructure (think overcrowding, rust, calcification). They are the Australian Government's agreed and recommended policy. But the guidelines do not sit passively on call, awaiting mobilisation into the world of practice, but are themselves dynamic - decaying some policy bonds, opening up new debates, and otherwise creating performances in the world. If implemented to their word, the Guide increases both the cost of building properties and the irritation of contractors. Such are the issues behind the transformation of bland policy guidelines about properly displayed forms of property ownership into a new form of controversial hot property.