ADVOCACY: NAIDOC Week 2025
This year NAIDOC week celebrates “Strength, Vision & Legacy” – a fitting aspiration.
HH wants to take this opportunity to thank the thousands of people who have, over 40 years, surveyed and fixed almost 11,000 houses!
From the NAIDOC theme;
This year, the National NAIDOC Committee takes an important step toward independence, embracing self-determination as a model for the next generation. With every story shared, every act of resilience remembered, and every cultural practice celebrated, we honour a legacy that reaches far into the past and extends into the future. As we celebrate this milestone, we look toward the next 50 years with excitement and confidence, while everyday ensuring that NAIDOC remains a movement grounded in community-led vision and integrity.
2025 National NAIDOC Week Poster – by Jeremy Morgan Worrall – “Ancestral Lines”
Strength, Vision and Legacy…
Healthabitat has long maintained that a functional house is foundational to the goals of strength, vision and legacy. Over the last 40 years the work of fixing houses has been done by literally thousands of people around Australia. Their work has proven that focused design can improve even the poorest living environments.
Healthabitat started in 1985, in Central Australia, where Yami Lester was running a health service. Eighty percent of what walked in the door, in terms of illness, was infectious disease — third world, developing world infectious disease, caused by a poor living environment. He assembled a team with the brief – “Uwankara Palyanku Kanyintjaku,” – which, translated, is “a plan to stop people getting sick”. From this team came Housing for Health, a method of assessing and fixing the parts of a house that keep people healthy. This is based on the best practice national and international health data in the form of the 9 Healthy Living Practices. In 2010, an independent study found that this method of routine maintenance work has led to up to a 40% reduction in hospital admissions.
This method has now been rolled out to 10,779 houses across 286 projects, employing around 3000 Indigenous staff.
Healthabitat strongly supports “Strength, Vision and Legacy” through the foundational work of functional housing.
