Alice Springs's Tangentyere CEO Walter Shaw defends state of town camp housing

The leader of Alice Springs's town camp authority rarely gives interviews anymore.

The fourth-generation town camper, Walter Shaw, has been in the role for more than 15 years but has largely kept out of the spotlight, even as his council faces national scrutiny.

Most recently, the alleged abduction and murder of five-year-old girl Kumanjayi Little Baby, who was taken from an Alice Springs town camp house, has triggered questions about the state of the camps: 16 small Aboriginal communities on the town's fringes.

Mr Shaw is the CEO of Tangentyere Council, one of the key organisations charged with providing services to town camps and managing the maintenance of homes in them.

"I think the events of what's taken place with the tragedy around Kumanjayi Little Baby should enact change," Mr Shaw told 7.30 in an exclusive interview.

For the hundreds of residents who call the town camps home, the issues faced are many and varied: broken locks and showers, late-night uninvited drunken visitors and overcrowding.

"But when it's out of my hands to allow for a house to be upgraded and brought up to standardised living conditions, governments have to take responsibility with regard to how we all manage our houses, whether it be on town camps or remote communities.

"I think we're doing as much as [what's in] our contract to do with regard to up-keeping of housing on the town camps,."

Many Alice Springs residents have a perception that Tangentyere Council should and could be doing much more to ensure that residents are safe and looked after.

When images of the home Kumanjayi Little Baby was taken from spread across the media, that scrutiny escalated.

Coalition senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price questioned "how on earth" the amount of government funding received by Tangentyere could be justified, considering the results on the ground.

"Anyone with eyes in their head can walk around a town camp and see the conditions in which our most marginalised are living in and the squalor that children are living in," she said in a Senate estimates hearing last week.

The senator is calling for more external scrutiny of the organisation.

Mr Shaw said that despite Tangentyere not having released an annual report on its website for four years, the council was being fully transparent with its operations.

"We've released our finances to the rest of Australia, the rest of the world, and that is as transparent as we can be," he said.

'Like it's from World War I or II'

The organisation's 2024–2025 financial statement shows Tangentyere Council received $27 million in government and philanthropic grants to deliver services, repairs and maintenance at the town camps.

Among those services, Tangentyere runs night patrols, family and anti-violence programs, and staffs community centres across the camps.

But residents have told 7.30 they are not seeing the full results when it comes to their housing.

Kumanjayi Little Baby's grandfather Robin Japanangka Granites does not live in a town camp, but has many family members who do, and is appalled by the state of many of their homes.

"They are all dirty, the grasses are so thick and so tall, you can see markings in the paint, holes in the roof, holes in the cement," Mr Granites said.

"That's how damaging it is for us to live in town camps.

"I'd rather [Tangentyere] doing more than what they're doing right now."

Mr Shaw defended his organisation and how it is working and said that he was "restricted in terms of what our aspirations would like to be with upkeeping the houses on town camps" due to his contracts with the NT government.

A complex bureaucratic web

Between the 1950s and 70s, town camps were set up on the outskirts of Alice Springs by Aboriginal leaders who had been displaced from their traditional lands but could not establish homes in the township due to a discriminatory policy prohibiting Aboriginal people from settling within its boundaries.

In the decades since, the camps have been subjected to successive NT and federal government policies that have left the camps and their residents stuck in a bureaucratic web of complex lease arrangements.

The Commonwealth leases the camps to the NT government, which is responsible for funding them.

Mr Shaw says that many individual repair jobs have to go through a lengthy approval process with the NT government.

"There is an underspend when it comes to the repairs and maintenance in terms of maintaining upkeeping of housing on town camps," he said.

NT Housing Minister Steve Edgington told 7.30 he conceded there was a level of hold-up that sat with the NT government.

"From some of the reports I've seen, we are taking too long to some of those reports," he said.

But in a statement to 7.30, he acknowledged the need for systemic reform for town camps.

"Stories of broken locks and unsafe homes is not acceptable — and I don't accept it," he said.

"The level of need is very high, and decades of underinvestment take time to turn around."

Mr Edgington said his department was "taking immediate action to improve standards in town camps, across housing, community facilities and safety".

"Part of our reform work is making that system clearer, so residents know exactly who is responsible for repairs and services," he said.

"Overall, there needs to be a focus on stronger governance, clearer service responsibilities, better coordination and improved accountability."

He also said that the transformation of town camps "has to be a shared effort".

"Government, Aboriginal organisations, service providers and residents all have a role in building a safer, more accountable and more sustainable model for town camps," he said.

Mr Edgington was asked if he continued to back Tangentyere Council in maintaining the town camps, and he said their "reporting requirements are being met".

'Terrorising people' in their homes

On the night that Kumanjayi Little Baby went missing, she was visiting Old Timers town camp with her mother, where NT Police have confirmed a party with drinking involved took place.

Alcohol is banned in town camps under federal legislation, but town camp residents say that the flow of liquor continues.

Anthepe town camp leader and Tangentyere Council board member Cedric Miller said one of the biggest problems facing the camps was uninvited visitors, many of them from remote outback communities who had come into town and were often fuelled by alcohol.

He also told 7.30 town camp residents faced the threat of criminal behaviour from gangs in the region.

"They're going into houses, terrorising people in houses.

"That's not safe, but we need to start talking and start talking to our mob."

Alice Springs-based NT Police Commander James Gray-Spence defended how the camps were policed, saying officers had sweeping powers to control alcohol flow into town camps, and that the powers were often used.

"It's common that as soon as police are on a town camp responding to any type of disturbance," he said.

While Mr Shaw has personally long been sceptical about alcohol prohibition on town camps, he said Tangentyere would be prepared to take on a greater role in stopping alcohol flow to help better protect residents.

"We would like to have that and hold that role, but that's set against the prescriptive nature of us not managing the town camps and when it comes to overall management of the town camps, that responsibility falls on the NT government public housing," he said.

"Our aspiration is to move towards a community housing model and that being adopted so that Tangentyere would eventually take that social responsibility on."

Tangentyere holds aspirations to take over the running of town camps, away from the NT government, which Mr Shaw said would cut bureaucracy around new homes and repairs.

He said if the federal and territory government were in agreement with the move, the handover of the camps to Tangentyere could happen within the next three years.

Mr Edgington said the NT government supported "stronger community involvement and Aboriginal-led housing models".

"The challenge is making sure that whatever model is used is sustainable, well-funded, and delivers consistent housing outcomes," he said.

In a statement, the federal government said "building new homes and strengthening repairs and maintenance in remote NT communities, including the Alice Springs town camps, continues to be a priority through the NT Remote Housing Package".

"Under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, all governments have committed to working in partnership with First Nations people and strengthening community-controlled organisations."

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