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Background Note
Indigenous socioeconomic indicators
Online only 11 February 2008
John Gardiner-Garden
Social Policy Section
Introduction
This Background Note offers
a brief guide to statistical descriptions of Indigenous Australians’ socioeconomic
situation. It looks first at the context of inputs and outcomes, then
at works that offer overviews or summaries of Indigenous socioeconomic
indicators, then at sources for most of the data that is used.
In recent years the Commonwealth Government has been committing more
resources than ever before to the improvement of Indigenous circumstances
(see John Gardiner-Garden, Commonwealth
Indigenous-specific expenditure 1968–2006, Background Note,
Parliamentary Library, Canberra, 8 August 2007), and has been attempting
to reform mechanisms for social development and facilitate greater social
inclusion. Nevertheless, the socioeconomic circumstance of many Indigenous
Australians has remained dire. The estimated shortfall in the area of
Indigenous housing has been estimated as $3.5 billion (extrapolating from
an earlier ATSIC figure) and in health has been estimated by Oxfam Australia
in Close the Gap: Solutions to
the Indigenous Health Crisis facing Australia
as between $350 to $500m per annum. It is also still the case that Indigenous
Australians, by nearly any socioeconomic statistical measure, are worse
off than non-Indigenous Australians.
The most comprehensive and recent overviews of available Indigenous socioeconomic
indicators are:
Population
figures
Indigenous
households and families
Language
and culture
Health
Income
Employment
Education
Housing
and homelessness
Indigenous
peoples and criminal justice systems
Child
protection
• Productivity
Commission, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage:
Key Indicators 2007 – including the following:
This publication also has an overview.
Preliminaries and Introductory
Chapters
Education
Justice
Emergency Management
Health
Community Services
Housing
Statistical Appendix
The data in this Indigenous Compendium are drawn from the Productivity
Commission’s annual Report on Government Services Provision. The
2008 Indigenous Compendium is currently being compiled and is due for
publication in May 2008. Until the 2008 Compendium is published, the latest
Indigenous information can be found within the larger 2008 Report on Government Services
Provision interspersed between broader community data.
The data found in the above mentioned overviews is often not as current
or comprehensive as the overviews’ titles might suggest, as the sources
they are drawing upon (described below) all have limitations in this respect.
Some of the most recent, relevant and widely used sources of Indigenous
socioeconomic data are produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics
(ABS):
- The ABS’s five-yearly Census of Population and Housing offers
the most comprehensive survey of the Indigenous population. Indigenous
Profiles are now available for a wide range of geographic areas by going
to the ABS site 2006 Census
then click on ‘Community Profile’ then either select tab ‘State&City’
or type specific location then choose ‘Indigenous Profile’. These profiles
cover key census characteristics of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
persons, families and dwellings and include comparisons with non-Indigenous
people. Population-related Indigenous data from the 2006 Census has
also been published in Population
Distribution - Indigenous Australians, 2006 (ABS Cat. no. 4705.0).
The ABS also conducts, on a non-regular basis, three other surveys of
relevance which have given rise to recent publications.
- National
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey, 2002 (ABS Cat.
no. 4714.0), is designed to enable analysis of the interrelationship
of social circumstances and outcomes, including the exploration of multiple
disadvantage, that may be experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Australians. Unlike the census, however, it has not been repeated
since 2002 and only surveys a relatively small number of Indigenous
people.
- National
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey, 2004-5 (ABS
Cat. no. 4715.0), is the largest health survey of Indigenous Australians
conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). It was conducted
in remote and non-remote areas throughout Australia and was designed
to collect a range of information from Indigenous Australians about
health related issues, including health status, risk factors and actions,
and socioeconomic circumstances. Although considerably larger than the
supplementary Indigenous samples taken in the 1995 and 2001 National
Health Surveys, it is still a survey of only about one in 45 of the
total Indigenous population.
- The Community Housing and Infrastructure Needs Survey (CHINS)
enumerated from March to June, 2006, collected information on the status
of housing, infrastructure, education, health and other services available
in discrete Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities throughout
Australia, as well as selected information on Indigenous organisations
that provide rental housing to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
peoples. Information from this survey was summarised in Housing
and Infrastructure in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities,
Australia, 2006 (ABS Cat. no. 4710.0).
The ABS also periodically attempts to draw Indigenous-related information
from its monthly Labour Force Survey:
- Labour Force Characteristics
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, Experimental Estimates
from the Labour Force Survey, 2006 (ABS Cat.
no. 6287.0) pools monthly data and attempts to offer Indigenous labour
force characteristics by sex, age, state or territory, and remoteness.
The ABS, however, only considers the estimates experimental due to the
experimental nature of the Indigenous population projections used in
producing the estimates and the small sample of Indigenous people in
the Labour Force Survey. Also, due to a change in methodology, estimates
from the 1994-2000 release under this same catalogue number as Occasional
Paper: Labour Force Characteristics of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Australians, Experimental Estimates from the Labour force Survey
(ABS Cat. no. 6287.0) are not strictly comparable with the estimates
for 2002-2006 in this same series. Due to difference in methodologies
and definitions Indigenous estimates from the Labour Force Survey are
not, moreover, comparable with those from other sources such as the
five-yearly Census of Population and Housing, the National Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey or the National Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey.
The ABS has also worked in conjunction with the Australian Institute
of Health and Welfare to produce a series of publications which combine
information from surveys such as those mentioned above with data from
a wide range of administrative sources:
- The
Health and Welfare of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples,
2005 (ABS Cat. no. 4704.0) provides
a comprehensive statistical overview, largely at the national level,
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and welfare. In addition
to a wide range of administrative data sources, the report uses results
from the 2002 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social
Survey. Among the topics included are: maternal and child health; risk
factors; ill health; disability and ageing; mortality; and access to,
and use of, services.
A final source of data is administrative data from the state education,
housing and health systems. For example, the annual National
Report to Parliament on Indigenous Education and Training is the
main source of indicators for outcomes in all sectors of Indigenous education
and training. Such administrative data can, however, be a couple of years
behind public release date. For example, the latest of the above mentioned
National Indigenous Education reports, recently released, offers 2005
data and the latest of these reports available on line is the one released
in 2006 and offers 2004 data. Even when the data is not dated it can be
regionally or thematically patchy. This same observation was made in Overcoming
Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2007: Overview, a report that
uses state and territory administrative data:
This Report contains further improvements in its scope and content.
Nevertheless, and despite COAG’s endorsement of the indicator framework,
data in some critical areas remain poor. For example, we still do not
have meaningful comparative data on school attendance, or on learning
outcomes for Indigenous children according to the degree of regional
remoteness. Hospitalisation data for Indigenous people in NSW and Victoria,
the two largest states, are considered to be of insufficient quality
to be published.
For copyright reasons
some linked items are only available to members of Parliament.
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