A tale of (at least) three reports : agency and discourse in the Alice Springs town camps

The Alice Springs Town Camps are ongoing sites of Aboriginal community life, service delivery, and advocacy. As with other Town Camps throughout Australia’s Northern Territory, they are also the target of numerous program and policy reviews, as well as recurrent media attention that focuses on a variety of ills and rarely on community voices or experience. This paper works through three reports, contrasting community-based research by the authors that found the Camps are strongholds of community history, identity, and aspiration with the most recent review of the Northern Territory Camps undertaken for over $2m by a private consultancy that recommended the closure of the Camps. Between these two reports lies a third by the Public Accounts Committee of the Northern Territory Government that found serious errors in the contracting process for housing service delivery on the Camps; errors that had come at the expense of community-based service providers. The paper draws on the Town Camp community research and work by other Aboriginal communities that shows in contrast to a persistent dominant narrative of economic development as requiring the closure or privatisation of Camps, communities are already interested in and pursuing hybrid models that respect their histories and aspirations.