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Community Living Areas

The Forgotten People History In Practice

Community Living Areas in practice

Community Living Areas are important to people who feel a strong sense of responsibility for their traditional lands.

They also attract people who want some control over their lives and an alternative to existence in communities on the fringes of non-Aboriginal society, with all their attendant problems.

Most of the smaller CLAs require a high level of participation from their residents and ban liquor from being brought into the communities. Several excisions have become fully fledged townships.

For those communities which do successfully negotiate the labyrinthine path to gaining title to a CLA, they then face the failure of the Commonwealth Government to fund the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) sufficiently to provide housing to newly established areas, and ATSIC's own national policy decision not to provide infrastructure to outstations.