The cunning of data in Indigenous housing and health

This article explores why it is so difficult to provide and sustain decent public housing in Indigenous communities, highlighting the curious role that data reporting and analysis plays in perpetuating this state of affairs. Drawing on data amassed by the Housing for Health (HFH) program that has focused on “health hardware” functionality in almost 9,000 houses in over 215 communities across Australia, we note inroads made to the language of policy (through, for example, the development of a National Indigenous Housing Guide). However, we also note the more limited effect on those policy practices that ordain substandard housing function. There is an intimate relationship between this outcome and the paradoxical state of the Indigenous housing and health evidence base, a field which is simultaneously awash with multiple databases providing synoptic information at regional, state/territory, and national levels, yet lacking specificity in relation to the health-enabling status of housing infrastructure.