Within the Australian Indigenous context, outstation refers to remote and small groups of First Nations people who relocated for resistance, in the face of assimilation.
[3][4] The underlying similarity among outstations is that the residents are living there by choice, sometimes because they wish to protect sacred sites and to retain connections to ancestral lands and ancestors, or because they wish to live off the land, or to escape social dysfunction prevalent in larger towns and communities[5] (as later described in the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991[6]).
[5] Governments were supportive of the moves, seeing benefits in health and well-being, maintenance of culture and the preservation of connection to country, known to be of great significance to Aboriginal people.
For about 30 years, the Commonwealth government assumed responsibility for the outstations, despite a lack of underlying policy, and they grew in number, particularly in the Northern Territory.
Some have or had thriving local economies based on arts centres, employment as Indigenous rangers, and harvesting plants and animals from nature, while others are dependent on welfare income.
It defined homelands as "small decentralised communities of close kin established by the movement of Aboriginal people to land of social, cultural and economic significance to them".
By the 1990s the difficulties emerged with the decentralisation process: some services were extremely expensive to deliver to multiple tiny communities in remote places with few possibilities for economic self-sufficiency.
[7][12] By this time, there had been a lot of criticism by politicians, and there were indeed many examples of waste, new houses built in uninhabited places, and suchlike.
However, there were also thriving and well-run communities, and it was intended to review the funding of the ORAs, increase accountability and implement management techniques which would keep the elements of outstations which improved the lives of their residents.
John Howard abolished ATSIC in 2005, after saying a year earlier that "the experiment in elected representation for Indigenous people has been a failure".
The policy targeted delivery of support and services to 20 larger Aboriginal communities in the NT, to be called "Territory Growth Towns", which would benefit from federal funding.
The report recommended:[11]In order to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, particularly Articles 3, 11, 12, 20 and 21, that the Australian and Northern Territory Governments commit to: According to NT politician Alison Anderson in 2013, there were 10,000 people living on 520 homelands, representing about 25 per cent of the remote Indigenous population of the NT, in about 2,400 dwellings.
[citation needed] Individual small communities continue to exist, although not described as outstations because they are not part of a federal or other program that advocates "the homeland ideal"; "settlements" is the more usual term these days.
In 2015, the then Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, Adam Giles, agreed that his government would take "full responsibility" for delivering services to homeland, in exchange for A$155 million paid out as a once-only payment.