In June 2025, the Northern Territory (NT) Government launched its Northern Territory Homelessness Strategy 2025‒2030 at the YiSSA accommodation facility in Darwin. The Strategy is a requirement under the National Social Housing and Homelessness Agreement, and it was described as ‘a plan built with and for Territorians to help end homelessness across our communities’. In a short Q&A session at the launch, a question from the homelessness sector about the lease arrangements underpinning YiSSA was quickly rebuffed. Twelve months later, the NT Government announced YiSSA’s closure.
YiSSA is located on Batten Rd in Marrara on former swamp land that was used as an asbestos waste dumping ground. It is operated by the Aboriginal community-controlled organisation Yilli Rreung Housing Aboriginal Corporation (YRHAC) and includes short-stay accommodation for up to 28 days. The short-stay accommodation exists alongside the Integrated Homelessness Supported Accommodation Program (IHSAP), which is operated by Mission Australia and provides accommodation for one or more years to clients prior to entering social housing or the private rental market. At the time of the closure announcement, there were 383 residents accommodated at YiSSA, including 145 children. YRHAC and Mission Australia were initially given 90 days to vacate the site, with a subsequent NT Government instruction requiring short-stay residents to vacate by 25 August and remaining residents to vacate by 11 October (see here and here).
The NT Government’s justification for the site’s closure specified a failure to come to satisfactory terms for a lease with Ausco Modular, which owns the accommodation at the former workers’ village. Media reporting showed the NT Government has, since 2021, paid Ausco Modular between $2.5 and $3 million per annum to use the modular buildings and had offered $3 million for their purchase, while claiming the company wanted between $8 and $12 million. Ausco Modular is owned by the Modulaire Group, which is in turn owned by the Brookfield Corporation, the world’s second-largest alternative-asset manager. Following the closure announcement, the Commonwealth Government offered to split the purchase price of the accommodation infrastructure, with the NT Chief Minister responding, ‘we just can’t waste people’s money irresponsibly like that’, raising questions about the original explanation of a failure to agree to satisfactory commercial terms.
This stoush has occurred amid a long-term housing and homelessness crisis in the NT. The NT has a population of about 260,000 people, about 159,000 of whom live in Greater Darwin. At the 2021 Census, the NT had a total of 13,104 people experiencing homelessness at a rate of 564 per 10,000 people. Victoria had the next-highest rate across Australian states and territories, at 47 per 10,000 people (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2023). In the NT, high rates of severe overcrowding in both remote communities and urban social housing contribute to the prevalence of homelessness. Census figures estimated about 660 people sleeping rough in the NT, which is likely a significant undercount. Flooding in the communities of Nauiyu and Palumpa increased the number of remote residents camping in Greater Darwin this year. As of June 2026, there were 5,550 applications for housing on the NT social housing wait list, while the total number of social housing allocations across the NT for the prior year was 191.
YiSSA is a cornerstone of the Greater Darwin homelessness system. While the NT Minister for Children and Families Robyn Cahill stated that there was a transition plan for YiSSA residents at the expiry of the lease, no details of this plan are available. The likely scenario in October should be understood as a mass eviction of almost 400 of the NT’s most vulnerable citizens into a housing and homelessness system that cannot accommodate them—the 300 people on YiSSA’s waitlist is simply the most stark evidence of the collective under-provisioning. Upon exiting YiSSA, residents are likely to stay with family at crowded urban social housing or to sleep rough. This will put pressure on existing tenancies amid an NT Government ‘crackdown’ on antisocial behaviour in public housing. Increased accommodation precarity is also likely to increase child intervention and removal, following reforms to child protection legislation that will make the reunification of Aboriginal children with their families more difficult (see here and here).
The current National Social Housing and Homelessness Agreement revised the basis of Commonwealth homelessness funding, implementing a needs-based calculation that saw funding for NT homelessness services increase sevenfold from 2024‒25. Subsequent investment has increased support for tenancy sustainment and assertive outreach programs and established a central intake service for homelessness support services. Yet decisions such as YiSSA’s closure undermine the potential efficacy of such programs and weaken the homelessness system’s capacity to respond to need. Tenancy sustainment contends with crowding as a symptom of social housing undersupply, outreach workers witness potential clients multiply without a corresponding expansion of short- and long-term accommodation options, and the centralisation of referrals addresses administrative duplication rather than accommodation scarcity.
In a small jurisdiction with widespread homelessness, the withdrawal of any service can have significant flow-on effects across the system. Where the system is already failing to meet the collective need, it is reasonable to ask whether it can withstand the removal of its cornerstone service. In ecological analysis, collapse is less often a consequence of a singular event than an outcome of compounding pressures that undermine the system’s ability to maintain itself. Stress begins to accumulate, the ecosystem loses species or functions, resilience to further disturbances is diminished, and the rate of feedback loops accelerates to compound damage. A tipping point may be reached, beyond which the usual mechanisms of recovery lose their efficacy, and the ecosystem may shift toward a different, degraded, stable state. If YiSSA closes, what system remains?
In Greater Darwin, the impacts of YiSSA’s imminent closure are compounded by the system’s service diminishment elsewhere in recent years. For example, in 2025, the Y Hostel in Darwin’s CBD closed its doors, having offered low-cost accommodation to 40 to 50 people experiencing homelessness or visiting from remote communities.
Two linchpin services of Greater Darwin’s homelessness system are the Darwin Sobering Up Shelter (SUS) and Ozanam House. The SUS provides overnight accommodation to homeless adults who are under the influence of alcohol and other drugs and are at risk of harm. A prior incarnation of the SUS was co-located with a withdrawal service operated by the Top End Health Service and the Stringy Bark Residential Rehabilitation Treatment Service (see PWC’s 2018 Review of the Northern Territory Sobering Up Shelters, Department of Health). However, the SUS was relocated to temporary modular accommodation at the entrance to Berrimah Correctional Centre as the NT Government repurposed the rehabilitation centre into a women’s prison in 2024. The SUS now operates without on-site detoxification or rehabilitation services, exemplifying its moniker as a ‘spin dry’ for intoxicated clients (see here and here).
Ozanam House is a day centre located in Darwin’s northern suburbs that provides breakfast and dignity services to clients, with scheduled attendance from various service providers. The St Vincent de Paul Society operates Ozanam House, which relocated in 2024 from its Stuart Park site after pressure from neighbours and secured a lease at the Coconut Grove site until 2029 (see here and here). Ozanam House is consistently full in the morning, including by clients who sleep rough in Palmerston and catch two buses into and out of the CBD for breakfast in Coconut Grove. The need for a similar day centre at Palmerston has been recognised, but an inability to secure permits has stifled its development for over a year. In the meantime, the NT Government has graduated its first cohort of Police Public Safety Officers, a new armed police rank to patrol public transport, public housing, and ‘hot spots’ such as bus interchanges and shopping centres.
While a short- and long-term accommodation facility, a sobering-up shelter, and a day centre ostensibly have different purposes, the removal of any one of these will increase demand on service delivery elsewhere. What, if anything, is likely to fill the vacuum?
The NT’s remote communities, often used as a safety release valve for visible social tension in the larger towns where most non-Indigenous residents live, are similarly failing to meet accommodation needs. The $4 billion NT Remote Housing Agreement established in 2024 seeks to halve remote crowding by constructing 2700 houses over 10 years. With progress behind schedule, the NT Government is also in dispute with the Commonwealth over whether agreement funds support administration and land servicing costs, and is citing increased construction costs for a significantly reduced housing target. In contrast, the NT Government demonstrated its commitment to constructing an alternative form of accommodation by announcing in August a privately operated 1200-bed men’s prison, with a successful private partner to be selected by EOI in 2027. This announcement also included plans for a new 200-bed women’s prison.
Right now, from within the NT, it is difficult to make sense of the shifting homelessness system, including the apparent contradiction between the promise of a new homelessness strategy, alongside increased Commonwealth investment, and the decision to close the cornerstone homelessness accommodation service. Critical theory offers a range of frameworks for examining the active marginalisation of Aboriginal people experiencing homelessness, among them economies of abandonment[[i]](https://arena.org.au/system-collapse-homelessness-in-the-northern-territory/#_edn1), wild policy[[ii]](https://arena.org.au/system-collapse-homelessness-in-the-northern-territory/#_edn2), necropolitics[[iii]](https://arena.org.au/system-collapse-homelessness-in-the-northern-territory/#_edn3), advanced marginality[[iv]](https://arena.org.au/system-collapse-homelessness-in-the-northern-territory/#_edn4) and infrastructural violence[[v]](https://arena.org.au/system-collapse-homelessness-in-the-northern-territory/#_edn5). Whichever we prefer, it is evident that the continued function of key homelessness services is far from guaranteed and even with funding secured, they face conditions of locational precarity, contracting insecurity, worker burnout and service contraction. The capacity to implement anything beyond a crisis response is severely constrained.
Are we approaching system collapse, or living through it? It is impossible to know, but it is certainly the case that the settler-colonial provision of housing and the response to homelessness have never been adequate to need in the NT. The inadequacy today may be a shift in degree rather than quality. But in reflecting on the trajectory of NT responses to (and the production of) social marginalisation we might also point to residual and emergent arrangements. In this way, the contrast between the temporary and modular accommodation of the Darwin SUS, Ozanam House, and YiSSA and the promise of a new privately funded 1200-bed men’s prison is stark. We should be concerned about how individual service withdrawal threatens the collapse of the NT homelessness system and the expansion of the carceral economy to take its place.
[[i]](https://arena.org.au/system-collapse-homelessness-in-the-northern-territory/#_ednref1) Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
[[ii]](https://arena.org.au/system-collapse-homelessness-in-the-northern-territory/#_ednref2) Lea, Tess. 2020. Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
[[iii]](https://arena.org.au/system-collapse-homelessness-in-the-northern-territory/#_ednref3) Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture. 15(1): 11‒40.
[[iv]](https://arena.org.au/system-collapse-homelessness-in-the-northern-territory/#_ednref4) Wacquant, Loïc. 1996. The rise of advanced marginality: Notes on its nature and implications. Acta Sociologica. 39(2): 121‒139.
[[v]](https://arena.org.au/system-collapse-homelessness-in-the-northern-territory/#_ednref5) Rodgers, Dennis and O’Neill, Bruce. 2012. Infrastructural violence: Introduction to the special issue. Ethnography. 13(4): 401‒412.
Liam Grealy is a settler scholar living on Larrakia Country in northern Australia. He is employed as Associate Professor at Menzies School of Health where his work includes program evaluation and analysis of housing and infrastructure policy in regional and remote Australia.
