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Final article in a series of three. Reproduced from The Guardian Labs. First published 9 March 2020.
Meet Kylie and Naomi, who are great examples of how Indigenous home ownership changes lives long after the SOLD sticker goes up.
The ability to buy a home and pass it on to the next generation has been shown to greatly enhance pride and empowerment for Indigenous Australians.Home means something different to everyone. It can be a place to relax, a fortress of solitude or a lively community hub. But for Indigenous homeowners, the impacts reach far beyond this, as Kylie and Naomi have discovered.
Before Kylie moved into her own home, she was missing a place of belonging. She and her partner wanted a place to call their own, but coming from a place of hardship meant their financial history wasn’t a good fit for a mainstream bank.
“I didn’t have a clean past,” Kylie says. “I had outstanding debts. Putting it all down on paper, we had a lot of hard work to do.”
Kylie was able to secure financing through Indigenous Business Australia (IBA). After she was first rejected, IBA helped Kylie understand how to bolster her application and get it over the line.
“It was around budgeting, financing, a lot of things that were really foreign,” Kylie says. “It was structured and about IBA walking with us every step of the way: this is what you need to do first, this is what you need to have in the bank. All that stuff we didn’t understand. At first it seemed really daunting, but IBA just pushed through.”
For Kylie, this restored hope for a life she never thought she would have. “I felt like somebody believed in me,” she says. “It made me feel like achieving this dream is really within reach.”
As well as having a place to call her own, Kylie has gained financial literacy skills that will help her stay ahead for the rest of her life. She says IBA helped her learn a “new language” to better manage her money.
“It’s been an educational process as well,” she says. “We know what it is to be saving. I’ve started looking at what my super projection is, how I can have a really nice retirement fund. We’re doing renos, and we’re going to redo our financing on the house. We’re doing all these things that make everything worthwhile.”
“Now my kids will go on to get an education and know they have a place."
The impact of home ownership flows into Kylie’s work. She’s a community development manager, working with rough sleepers and people who are marginalised. She says having her own home gives her a place to recharge, so she can be great at what she does, and that helps everyone.
“It gives me this intense level of gratitude,” she says. “Having a place means that I turn up to work every day. It means I’ve been employed. I’m valued in my field of work. I work alongside my community, and I get to go home and turn off and realise how lucky I am, because that was my story not too long ago.”
But for Kylie, the happiest outcome has been having her kids at home with her. As research from Deloitte shows, this has lasting flow-on effects. One-third of Indigenous homeowners surveyed said their children had become more interested in further education.
“Now my kids will go on to get an education and know they have a place,” says Kylie, whose son recently finished high school and has been accepted to university. Kylie was able to attend his orientation, to see him on his way into the world.
“We would not have had this if we didn’t have IBA,” she says. “All that stuff, it’s because I have a place of being. Now I’m a role model.”
In her job, Naomi, a proud Aboriginal (Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay) and Torres Strait Islander (Erub/Darnley Island) woman, encourages her staff to engage in the IBA home ownership program and helps them apply. “We know it is a game-changer,” she says. “We know it makes generational change.”
Naomi has seen the value of the program first-hand. She says she had previously been pre-approved for a vehicle loan, but when she went into a branch and was asked about her Aboriginality, the loan application was declined. Banks didn’t feel like a safe place for her. “It made me afraid to deal in the mainstream.”
She found out about the home ownership program through her parents. Unlike the banks, IBA treated her “like family” throughout the application process.
“I remember getting the advice that we’d been pre-approved and could look for a house. It almost makes you feel like you’ve won the lottery. There was support for what to look for in a home and the kinds of things that would need to happen when we found it. It was a really helpful, holistic process.”
Once the application was finalised, Naomi bought her first home. This came with a sense of equity and self-determination, something she says has had a huge impact on her as an Aboriginal person, and on her wider community.
“It gave me a sense of security – my children are going to be OK.”
Current and intergenerational wealth increase as households enter into homeownership and are able to grow equity in their homes.
Deloitte’s research confirms Naomi’s experience: the vast majority (84%) of Indigenous homeowners surveyed said home ownership had helped them feel safer for themselves, and 87% felt more confident about the future. Given the generations of trauma and exclusion forced on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, there is extra meaning in coming home.
“Being an Aboriginal homeowner helps us to help our extended family. To help them with accommodation for short or long periods and help them to empower themselves. It extends beyond our children – to our extended family and friends. It enables us to be there for others and to enact and enable greater change,” Naomi says.
Thanks to the program, Naomi’s kids now talk to her about their own future homes. It’s become normalised for them, something they feel is their right. “I love that Aboriginal children can engage in dreams for houses, dreams for jobs and dreams for hard work,” she says.
“As a dispossessed people, having a home, as opposed to having country or a place to be, there’s safety and stability there. You can be safe and free. We can really challenge the intergenerational traumas attached to Aboriginal people just through stability and safety and a place to be that’s yours.”
And, Naomi says, the impact will continue for generations to come: “It is the legacy that we pass on to our children.”
