Alongside bad news on incarceration rates and self-harm, there is a good news story in today’s Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators report for 2014 from the Productivity Commission.
The report compiles thousands of statistical indicators of well-being, from health to education and employment, and was prepared for the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). Among the key findings was this:
“The proportion of adult Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders whose main income was from employment increased from 32% in 2002 to 41% in 2012-13, with a corresponding decrease in the proportion on income support. Increasing proportions of employed people were employed in full time and managerial positions.”
Drill into chapters 4 and 9 of the report, and you find that this trend is reflected across a range of economic indicators: incomes have increased, home ownership has increased, the proportion of young indigenous people in full-time work or study after leaving school has increased.
This is not to say that indigenous disadvantage has disappeared: unemployment among (particularly younger) ATSI people, for example, has risen to 21% in the past five years and is five times as high as unemployment for the non-indigenous population.
Lawrence McDonald, head of the Productivity Commission secretariat, told Crikey yesterday that “even where there are improvements, in most cases there are still significant gaps [with the non-indigenous population]. In no instance could you say ‘our work here is done and needs no further attention’.”
For example, the commission’s preferred measure of employment-to-population ratio for ATSI people from 15-64 years rose from 38% in 1994 to a peak at 54% in 2008 and dropped back to 48% in 2012-13, but the comparable rate in the non-indigenous community is 77%:
Another graph contrasts the main sources of personal cash income for indigenous and non-indigenous Australians over the past decade and shows that the proportion of ATSI people whose main source of income was work rose from 32% to 41% — compared to 62% for non-indigenous people — while reliance on pensions and allowances fell from 50% to 46%:
Again, the proportion of indigenous people living in a house that someone in the household either owns or is paying off has risen substantially, from 22% in 1994 to 30% in 2012-13, but it’s still a fair bit lower than the comparable rate in the non-indigenous community of 72%
From 2002 to 2008, the median real gross weekly household income for indigenous households rose from $385 to $492, but fell to $465 by 2012-13 — which is just over half the comparable median weekly income of $869 for non-Indigenous households. The report found the gap has not changed significantly since 2002.
When everyone’s getting richer, McDonald told Crikey, “it’s hard to portray that as a bad thing”. But the truth is that while most measures of indigenous wealth have increased in absolute terms, “the gaps haven’t changed very much”.
Gaps are also opening up between urban and regional or remote indigenous communities on many economic measures (although the gap moves the opposite way on some other indicators, like mental health or cultural indicators like indigenous language).
“For many of the indicators you do see that the gaps become greater and the outcomes become poorer as you get into more remote areas, but indigenous people experience disadvantage relative to their neighbours no matter where they live,” said McDonald.
The opposite trend can be true for the non-indigenous population: remote areas, for example, often have very high incomes, generally due to mining.
Given many of the indigenous wealth measures peaked around 2008, the challenge now is to consolidate the gains made over the last decade. Productivity Commissioner Patricia Scott told Crikey: “There’s been a sort of slowing in progress in recent years, so you’ve got strong rises between 2004 and 2008 as the economy was zipping along — as you know the tide rises all boats — but as things start to slow a little, those with a more tenuous connection with the labor market find it hard.”
But the overall picture on employment appears encouraging and not quite evidence of chronic policy failure and a broken system, as billionaire Andrew Forrest’s Creating Parity review — still before the government — would have us believe.
It is useful to summarize the main features of the ongoing Australian Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide. Before the British Invasion in 1788, Indigenous Australians had been living in Australia for about 60,000 years. There were 350-750 different tribes and a similar number of languages and dialects, of which only 150 survive today and of these all but about 20 are endangered. After the brutish British Invasion, the Aboriginal population dropped from about 1 million in 1788 to about 0.1 million in the first century through introduced disease, deprivation and genocidal violence. The last massacres of Aborigines occurred in the 1920s but no Treaty has ever been signed. Indigenous Australians were only counted after a referendum in 1967 and were finally given some protection by the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act. In the 20th century up to 1 in 10 Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their mothers, the so-called Stolen Generations. However the rate of removal of Aboriginal children from their mothers is now at an historic high (see Paddy Gibson, “Stolen futures”, Overland , Spring 2013: http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-212/feature-paddy-gibson/ ).
In 2000 about 9,000 Aborigines out of an Aboriginal population of 500,000 died avoidably every year (the highest avoidable death rate in the world) but this had declined to about 2,000 annual avoidable deaths out of a population about 670,000 by 2011 (an avoidable death rate similar to that if impoverished South Asia) . Indigenous Australians are far worse off than White Australians in relation to housing, health, wealth, social conditions, imprisonment, avoidable death and life expectancy (see [1]. Gideon Polya, “ Ongoing Aboriginal Genocide And Aboriginal Ethnocide By Politically Correct Racist Apartheid Australia ”, Countercurrents, 16 February 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya160214.htm ; “Aboriginal Genocide” : https://sites.google.com/site/aboriginalgenocide/ ; Thomson N, Burns J, Burrow S, Kirov E (2004) Overview of Indigenous health 2004. Australian Indigenous Health Bulletin , 4(4), October-December 2004: http://archive.healthinfonet.ecu.edu.au/html/html_bulletin/bull_44/reviews/thomson/reviews_thomson_1.htm ; and MacRae A, Thomson N, Anomie, Burns J, Catto M, Gray C, Levitan L, McLoughlin N, Potter C, Ride K, Stumpers S, Trzesinski A, Urquhart B (2013). Overview of Australian Indigenous health status, 2012: http://www.healthinfonet.ecu.edu.au/health-facts/overviews ).
John Pilger’s movie “Utopia” reveals the appalling Aboriginal health conditions and differential life expectancy linked to poverty and crowded housing are revealed and contrasted with luxury Australian holiday accommodation for $30,000 per week (currently Aboriginal health problems are variously 2- 7 times higher than for White Australia and male and female life expectancies are 12 and 10 years less, respectively, than for White Australian.2,000 Indigenous Australians die avoidably every ) John Pilger: “ In the town of Wilcannia, New South Wales, the life expectancy of Aboriginal people is 37 — lower than the Central African Republic, perhaps the poorest country on Earth, currently racked by civil war ” (John Pilger, “Mandela’s gone but apartheid lives in Australia ”, Green Left Weekly, 26 December 2013: https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/55595 ; John Pilger. “Utopia”; Gideon Polya, “Film Review: “Utopia” By John Pilger Exposes Genocidal Maltreatment Of Indigenous Australians By Apartheid Australia”, Countercurrents, 14 March, 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya140314.htm ).
What can decent people do? Decent people should (a) inform everyone they can, (b) urge and apply Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against all people, parties, politicians, companies and corporations complicit in this ongoing, genocidal and ethnocidal Apartheid Australian maltreatrment of Indigenous Australians, and (c) vote 1 Green and put the Coalition last.