The Northern Territory government has released a five-point “action plan” to assist Tennant Creek after the alleged rape of a two-year-old girl and pleas from the community to help combat drugs, alcohol and violence.

The response includes the immediate deployment of additional welfare workers to assist families and trial after-hours services, as well as $1m to improve violence prevention services, $150,000 for a prevention program and $450,000 for youth activities.

The Territory Families department, headed by Ken Davies, has also pledged to work with community elders and “enhance” family and sexual violence reduction services.

“We know that our local domestic, family and sexual violence reduction services have been stretched to capacity for too long, responding to chronic domestic and family violence in the Barkly region,” it said.

The royal commission into the protection and detention of children found that of the more than 230 substantiated cases of child abuse in the three years to 2015-16, just five sexual abuse victims were taken into care.

It also heard that, in the 10 years after the federal government’s NT intervention, child protection cases doubled, further stressing an “unsustainable” system unable to deal with a child protection crisis of “epidemic proportions”.

The two-year-old child was treated in hospital in Adelaide for injuries after a 24-year-old man allegedly sexually assaulted her at her Tennant Creek home.

The NT government was criticised by community members and family who said they had tried to raise concerns about the girl’s safety, but the department said that while more than 20 notifications were made about the young girl’s family, they did not relate to threats of sexual violence, and officers had been assisting the mother.

Tennant Creek community members and leaders suggested the NT government’s response to the assault was delayed and far too late after months of warnings about extraordinary rates of alcohol and drug abuse and violence.

After three suicides in three weeks last year, the Barkly mayor, Steve Edgington, wrote to the chief minister pleading for help. Edgington said he did not receive a response until after the alleged assault of the child was reported in the media.

The chief minister, Michael Gunner, was raised in Tennant Creek and told the Australian on Saturday that he was “not going to be walking away”.

“One of the strong messages we’ve heard is that government can’t fix everything, social service providers can’t fix everything, the community can’t fix everything,” he said. “The only way to ­actually get a solution is if all three respond, and all three are strong in responding.”

The Labor MP for the desert seat of Stuart, Scott McConnell, told Guardian Australia that one of the root causes of social issues in towns such as Tennant Creek was inadequate housing and services in remote communities.

“Service delivery is a serious problem,” he said. “For example, in Stuart we have closed clinics and closed police stations. In some cases there is less than before the intervention.”

This meant more people were coming into towns for longer periods, where life was dominated by alcohol even if that person themselves was not a drinker, and becoming what McConnell termed “internally displaced people” and “refugees in their own country.”

Some were also moving to town for work or to join the work-for-the-dole program, which was far less stringent and punitive than the remote community development program.

“Everyone wants to have a community that is functioning,” McConnell said. “It’s not some strange sort of apartheid, it’s about the rights of people to have basic services in the communities where they want to live. It’s equity of opportunity.”

He called for more economic development in remote communities, including assisting the growth of community-led industry, tourism and pastoral production.

“Without this, we’ll need more police and more jails.”

Last month McConnell announced he would not seek reelection at the end of his term – his first in government – saying he felt a debt to the Indigenous people he grew up with but the NT government was only further entrenching disadvantage by “trying to solve tomorrow’s problems with yesterday’s ideas”.

Over the weekend it was revealed a government housing initiative was building corrugated iron sheds with no windows or insulation and classifying them as bedrooms.

The NT government’s $200m “Room to Breathe” program seeks to address overcrowding with room extensions and add-ons to existing dwellings in 22 communities, but photographs of at least two such projects in Ali Curung showed what appeared to be tin sheds tacked on to houses.

The NT housing minister, Gerry McCarthy, took responsibility for the builds – by Alice Springs-based Ingkerreke Commercial – and said they would be rebuilt.