Indigenous Australians

Indigenous Australians live, on average, between 10 and 20 year shorter lives than non-indigenous Australians. Part of the problem with estimating the difference in life expectancy is that nobody’s too sure exactly what it is, but it’s around 10-20 years difference.


We know with a little more certainty that the health outcomes for indigenous Australians are diabolical and, if you’re an Australian, frankly embarrassing. Indigenous Australians are twice as likely as non-indigenous Australians to have asthma, they are three times more likely to have diabetes they are more likely to suffer from renal failure and digestive conditions.

Perhaps the most tragic among all these figures is the death rate among children. Indigenous infants are more likely to die than non-indigenous infants and, while the situation is improving, the fact is that indigenous children die at twice the rate of non-indigenous children.

Despite their poor health, “Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) claim rates for GP visits were 17% higher for Indigenous than non- Indigenous Australians in 2010–11, but claim rates for specialist services were 39% lower.” In other words, although their health is chronically poor, indigenous Australians tend to simply see their local GP rather than a specialist. Certainly this is a problem for those living in very remote areas, but indigenous Australians are much more likely to live in very remote regions.

These health issues lead to an age distribution at death that looks like this. Indigenous Australians die younger and from preventable causes.

Indigenous Australians are less likely to finish school and do more poorly while they are at school (note1)

Indigenous Australians are 14 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-indigenous Australians and although the average prison term for non-indigenous Australians is likely to be about 16 months longer than their indigenous counterpart we also know that the proportion of indigenous Australians imprisoned is actually increasing.

Around 59% of Indigenous males are in paid employment compared to around 85% of non-indigenous. For females the rates are 43% and 69% respectively.

The list goes on and on. By almost any measure, many if not all of them preventable, Indigenous Australians have worse outcomes compared to non-indigenous Australians. Certainly many of these figures are improving, but it remains simply unacceptable in a first world country to have one group of people demonstrably worse off than the majority based on nothing more than their ancestry. Furthermore, the improvements have, in no small part, come from the increasing number of urban people that are identifying as indigenous. The whole argument about who is aboriginal is another question, but the fact remains that many people that would have previously hesitated to identify as an Indigenous Australian are now willing to do so and overwhelmingly these people live in middle class suburbia and enjoy outcomes not dissimilar from ordinary Australians.

So there is a real problem that requires real solutions. It’s an urgent problem too - people are dying. Children are dying. Even those that are not actually dying are suffering from poor health, receiving substandard education and being incarcerated at rates well above what they should be.

So can somebody please tell me how changing the constitution managed to make it to the top of the list of Aboriginal issues that we need to deal with?


Note 1 - In every year that benchmarks were published for numeracy and literacy, indigenous children did worse than their non-indigenous cohort. Usually more than 20% worse. The benchmark figures are no longer published, but there are still undertakings from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority to “ reduce the educational disadvantage of […] Indigenous children”, so presumably the problem hasn’t gone away.

Photo by Mombas at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Legoktm., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3982282