Aboriginal communities must be included when addressing climate change and related energy problems, according to speakers at a meeting of the Healthy Environment and Lives (HEAL) Network in Western Australia.
This is important for supporting self-determination and empowerment of communities, as well as ensuring solutions that work and that research outcomes continue beyond the funding cycle of projects, reports Jade Bradford for the Croakey Conference News Service.
Jade Bradford writes:
The HEAL Western Australia Network hosted its Kambarang seasonal yarn through an online meeting on Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar (land) in Boorloo (Perth) on 29 October. Network members include Aboriginal Elders and community members, people with lived experience, community organisations, policy makers, researchers and service providers.
The five main priorities for HEAL WA are housing, food, water, energy, and health. The network is guided by an Aboriginal Steering Group and aims to bring research and shared knowledges into policies and practices to improve people’s health within communities, environments and health systems.
The Kambarang seasonal yarn topic was ‘Energy Poverty and Production,’ and followed on from the Djilba seasonal yarn’s topic which was ‘Energy Poverty, Energy Transition, and the Impacts of Energy Production on Community and Country.’
During the Kambarang yarning session, presentations were shared with HEAL members from service providers and a community organisation.
The presenters shared updates on current projects, engagement activities within the community and future planning. HEAL members provided feedback throughout the session, sharing issues encountered by communities and recommendations for future partnerships and engagement with communities.
The importance of ensuring that community voices are heard and that co-design with community members is conducted prior to, and during any planning of projects and services was a key point of discussion. Community co-design and co-decision making needs to happen prior to, and during a project to ensure it remains relevant and effective to the people most affected.
Community voices at the centre
During the yarning session, HEAL members shared some of the challenges facing communities living in rural, regional and remote areas, including difficulties in accessing basic healthcare needs.
Health providers such as doctors, hospitals and aged care services are not always available and people may need to travel hundreds of kilometres to access services. It is also difficult for community members to purchase healthy food as it can be expensive or unavailable.
Often people working from city locations do not have the lived experiences of those who reside in communities outside the metropolitan areas. This is where gaps can begin between policies and services, and communities’ needs.
Concerns were expressed during the Kambarang yarn about Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and the difficulties community members are experiencing trying to use the technology. AMI is a pre-paid electricity meter which is credited using a mobile phone app, logging in via laptop or calling the provider to add credit.
Horizon Power is currently rolling out the technology in communities across Western Australia. In communities like in Beagle Bay, there is also a pre-paid card system linked up to the local fuel pumps, and credit is needed on the card before people can get fuel.
During the seasonal yarn, Yamatji Elder and HEAL WA Co-lead, Dr Mara West, shared concerns from community members surrounding the technology wherein some cases, community members had gone to get fuel from the bowser, only to find that they did not have enough credit. This had left them unable to get fuel to travel the 130 kilometres into Broome to do food shopping, she said.
Aunty Mara also raised concerns about the impacts on community members’ cultural obligations regarding sorry business.
“When the power goes out for mob and community, it not only affects the fridges, it affects the medications in fridges, it affects things like air conditioning and sometimes it also affects the fuel pumps. This then effects the health and wellbeing of community mob,” she said.
“The [pre-paid card system] might work well for some communities but it doesn’t work well for all communities.”
Aunty Mara said a lot of work still needed to be done to ensure that communities were involved in the co-design of policies and services, especially when addressing power and water supply issues. It is only when service providers and governments work in partnership and share decision-making responsibilities with community members that policies and services can be purposeful and impactful.
This is a key recommendation across HEAL’s research projects and is part of the Closing the Gap’s four priority reforms. The Kambarang yarn discussions centred around how critical it is for governments and organisations to work in partnership with those who are most affected by climate change and energy costs.
Aunty Mara said a huge problem currently was the widening of the ‘gap’ in the ‘Close the Gap’ targets and that it could only be solved by having Aboriginal voices at the centre of policies. This would also strengthen community empowerment and self-determination.
“Right now, Closing the Gap, a lot of our mob are saying it is not a gap anymore, it is a hole and it is getting bigger and bigger,” she said.
“It’s got to be up to our mob to find the solutions to be able to close that gap.”
Community priorities, presented during the meeting.
Empowerment and self-determination
Community inclusion in the co-design of policies and services requires genuine partnership and engagement. This enables empowerment and self-determination for communities who are being impacted by climate change.
Empowerment and self-determination come from handing over the decision-making powers to the communities and ensuring they have what they need to take action.
Associate Professor Brad Farrant, Co-lead of HEAL WA, and Co-Head of Aboriginal Health and Wellbeing at The Kids Research Institute Australia, said empowering communities was a big part of HEAL WA’s work to ensure that those most at risk have a strong voice in research, policy making and service provision.
“That is what you call true co-design, it is not a tick box exercise of, ‘[we’ve] already made all of the decisions but we are going to go and talk to some people in the community so we can go and say we did some community engagement,’” he said.
“We really need to have processes where those people that are most impacted or most at risk are involved. And [that] there is redistribution of decision-making power from the outset, so that whatever policy and service provision is decided is actually something that is going to be of use and of benefit to those that most need it.”
Associate Professor Brad Farrant: Re-distributing decision-making power
What was made clear during the Kambarang yarn is that communities want to learn more about energy and how to save on energy costs.
One service provider shared that including financial counselling, family and domestic violence support and partnering with community organisations to address other gaps had helped strengthen their relationships with customers. They also said providing payment extensions, offering flexible payment options and making disconnection a last resort had further positive impacts.
HEAL WA members recommended that governments, service providers and organisations should work together through workshops with community members, including HEAL WA Seasonal Yarns at local and state levels. This would help them to share learnings from previous engagement activities and to ensure that ongoing barriers were addressed effectively by embedding the voices of community.
Communities like Djarindjin, north of Broome, are demonstrating how Aboriginal people are playing a bigger role in the energy transition space. The ABC reported in April that the Djarindjin Aboriginal Corporation are planning on generating their own electricity through a solar and battery farm.
Projects such as these provide a way forward for communities that have less impacts on the environment and community wellbeing. The video Dangaba: The Story of Fracking by Madjulla Incorporated was shared during HEAL’s Djilba yarn in August. It shows the destruction caused by energy resource extraction in the Kimberley to Country and waterways.
Videos such as Dangaba remind us of the two-way learning process that is essential between non-Indigenous and Indigenous people so that Indigenous and western knowledges are brought together to better tackle issues such as the impacts of climate change.
Energy is life
Chronic health conditions are more prominent among Aboriginal people, therefore, the importance of keeping the fridges within their homes going is a vital support to their lives. Remote communities regularly experience power outages.
Another ABC article, published in June last year, reported that when families in the remote community of Mowanjum run out of power, often due to lack of credit on their pre-paid power cards, they faced a minimum 24-hour outage. Most households experienced outages two to three times per week.
Advocacy group Original Power released a report last year, ‘The Right to Power – Keeping First Nations communities on prepayment connected,’ which found the main reason for disconnections was affordability, with extreme temperatures escalating the issue.
The same report detailed that 74 percent of community members using pre-paid meters in Western Australia were topping up their credit from a store. Issues surrounding this were mentioned during the Kambarang yarn on how this can present other challenges such as additional travel requirements and fuel costs.
Many communities are also still using LPG gas bottles, raising health and financial concerns that were discussed by HEAL WA members during both the Kambarang and Djilba yarns. Gas bottles are expensive and can be difficult to obtain. Transport also needs to be organised to the customers’ home.
For community members struggling to keep up with the cost of living, this means purchasing smaller gas bottles more frequently. Over time, this only increases financial strain on community members with the increased number of trips to and from stores.
Some stores do not offer installation of gas bottles either, so the elderly and those with medical conditions and disabilities also face additional challenges. Households who can’t afford bottled gas are forced to find other methods to cook and keep warm by lighting fires, increasing safety risks.
Earlier this year, ATCO gas announced it would decommission its gas supply network to the City of Albany in the Great Southern region of Western Australia. That has left community members having to go back to using bottled LPG gas or having to electrify their homes. For people living in social housing residences, the option of electrifying is not possible.
Farrant said discussions during the Djilba yarn noted the additional expense of purchasing gas bottles and the high greenhouse gas emissions from the fossilised methane increasing the risks to the environment and communities.
This was a particular concern for people in social housing, he said. “The Government and other housing providers should be looking to electrify houses and get away from bottled gas in particular but [also] all gas,” he said.
As well as a shift away from bottled gas in social housing, HEAL WA is also advocating for improvements to the thermal qualities of housing through solutions that reduce the cost of energy while making homes more climate resilient.
To support such climate adaptation, West has been working together with researchers from Murdoch University and community research partners as part of the ‘Wakuthuni Heatwaves Project.’
The project is carried out by the Coolamon Research and Advocacy Centre in the Ngangk Yira Institute for Change at Murdoch University. It explores the impacts of climate change and heat through working together with local communities.
“People have really jumped on board because what [this] particular project has done is combine mainstream scientific knowledge with Aboriginal scientific knowledge and that has been really good to see because it empowered the community mob to have a lot more input,” she said.
Aunty Mara said a lot of work was still needed to improve power and water supplies in communities. It was especially important that communities are involved in conversations about upgrades and that whatever is developed is co-designed, she said.
Dr Mara West, highlighting the importance of co-design in improving power and water security
Research matters
Compiling the research to support this work depends on funding and the life of the funding. With funding for HEAL research projects coming to an end in 2027, Aunty Mara said that it was important that research funding also allowed for exit strategies that empower communities to take action.
“We have to get funding that is going to be sustainable and we have to get funding that recognises that realistically there should be an exit strategy built into each research project,” she said.
“A research project might be carried out in a community and it might take three [or] four years. When the funding runs out in the fourth year, you don’t want to leave the community high and dry.
“What you want is a research exit strategy that says that the community can carry on [the research findings]. It might be offshoots to the study where community members say ‘Oh we can do that’.”
Aunty Mara said it was important for research projects to employ local community members in addition to the co-designing of research programs. This is so that Aboriginal people can take the lead with implementing the solutions the research has uncovered once it is complete. However, communities would require the support and resources to do so.
“We talk about co-designing of programs and that’s good but there has to be something a bit more substantive that follows that. I think that exit strategies give the mob the power to put in a plan for themselves to say ‘this is what we are going to be doing when the research finishes’. But they need to have the power and the resources to do that,” she said.
“If that happens, that is real empowerment and that is real self-determination.”
Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River). Photo by Jade Bradford
• Jade Bradford is a proud descendant of the Ballardong Noongar people in Western Australia and a longstanding member of Croakey Health Media
Also read: Australian Government urged to centre Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership in climate policy
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