ALLYSHIP PHOTO: Dr Simon Quilty and Norman Frank Jupurrurla Country’s been telling us for a long time, but we didn’t know what climate change was. We’re now starting to wake up.” Mr Jupurrurla, Advocate and researcher At the heart of their concern is poor housing in many communities in the Northern Territory, which underlies many significant health harms, from rheumatic heart disease to COVID-19 transmission. As they wrote in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, “housing stock is outrageously inadequate, poorly designed for the local environment, uninsulated, often profoundly overcrowded”.35 Climate change is making this worse, with many people forced to live outdoors in corrugated iron tin sheds, with no running water, no power, no insulation and temperatures soaring as high as 60 degrees Celsius. On top of that, many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples lack access to clean, affordable and reliable power supplies. They live with extreme energy insecurity, often relying on prepaid electricity meters, which turn the power off if credit runs out. At times they are forced to choose between power and food. In a study conducted by Mr Jupurrurla, Dr Quilty and the Australian National University, researchers examined data from the smart meters of 3,300 households in 28 remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. They found that nine out of 10 households in some communities experienced a disconnection from electricity at some time during 2018–19. Almost three-quarters of households using prepaid electricity meters had their household power disconnected more than 10 times in that year. 36 10+ 10+ Solar energy would seem an obvious solution for communities like Mr Jupurrurla’s in Tennant Creek, which over the past year has sweltered from temperatures above 40 degrees on almost 50 days, but until last year there was not a single solar installation in any Aboriginal public housing unit in the Northern Territory. After major efforts by the two men and then pushed over the line by Original Power, Mr Jupurrurla became the first Aboriginal public housing tenant in the Northern Territory to have solar panels laid. But then the system failed him again, taking months of concerted, high-profile lobbying until a range of bureaucratic barriers were addressed and the panels were switched on. The benefits were immediate, improving health, finances and comfort. But Mr Jupurrurla and Dr Quilty say the experience is yet another damning example of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices not being heard and the social, cultural and environmental determinants of health being ignored. Transforming Power: Voices for Generational Change 39