When the hot winds hit Roebourne, as many as 16 people pile into Yindjibarndi elder Lyn Cheedy’s home – one of the few with air conditioning
Every single Australian politician should be forced to spend two weeks in the outback with no air conditioning right now.
Air conditioning is not a luxury. It’s a necessity, and that goes double in outback communities, especially indigenous ones where there is no option BUT public housing.
Outback heat is not like heat in the city. It’s unbearable. You get a week straight of 45+ (113 degrees in American) and by the end you’re ready to consider 35 degrees a mild day. If you’re lucky, you get a couple of them before it jumps back up. It doesn’t cool down at night and because almost all the housing is transportable (it’s very expensive to ship anything up here), the insulation is very poor. The water coming out of the tap is already hot. Those box air conditioners like the one in the article don’t even work after a few days of non stop heat.
Indigenous communities deserve FAR better. At the very least, they deserve an air conditioned home on their land. Politicians deserve to bake in the heat until they stop being the worst landlords in the country and realise indigenous people deserve basic human dignity.
