Towards a materialist housing policy: air conditioners for remote communities

Remote communities in central and northern Australia are hot and getting hotter. Housing is crowded and not fit for purpose. Residents face increasing temperatures under the climate crisis while investment in housing supply is insufficient to address crowding or improve infrastructure to national minimum standards. Mechanical air conditioning is one obvious technical intervention to address the poor thermal performance of housing, but it is inconsistently available to remote housing residents. This article considers the status quo of remote community housing under current climate conditions and the implications of mainstreaming air conditioning, for governments, householders, and Aboriginal community-controlled organisations responsible for housing maintenance, without offering a reductive approach to policy or housing insufficiency. Rather, the article examines what else needs to function to garner the benefits of mechanical cooling, or to address hot houses effectively. It does so by highlighting the importance of a materialist focus to both the housing assemblage and its sustaining policy ecology, for remote housing advocacy.