Senator Andrew Bartlett
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
 
Overcoming Disadvantages for Indigenous People
A week ago I wrote about the scandalous levels of disadvantage and inequality endured by many indigenous people in Australia, and how we seem to be able to look the other way about it even when we are looking directly at poverty and early deaths in African countries.

A new report by the Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision has just been published assessing some of the key indicators of indigenous disadvantage in Australia. The report is one of a series which it says “reflects a new determination by Australian governments to address the root causes of disadvantage”.

Without in any way dismissing the report or the process by which it was compiled, both of which are valuable, I’ll judge how determined Australian governments really are on the basis of the concrete actions they take and the public leadership they show in eliminating this disadvantage and inequality, rather than how many reports they commission.

Every time a report comes out - whether it’s on Aboriginal health, or kids being abused, or the number of homeless, or the prevalence of poverty in Australia, it gets a bit of mainstream publicity. For example, there was an article in The Australian and reports on the ABC about this latest document. But as this report notes, there has not been dramatic improvement in recent years. These reports tend not to lead to major change, and seem not to cause any major political issues. Everyone – the media included – assumes it will go nowhere and we don’t follow it up and demand to know why it goes nowhere. The politicians know if they just keep quiet, or at best make sympathetic clucking noises, it'll just fade away and be buried by whatever the latest ‘important’ story is.

Unless Governments choose to make this a higher political priority, the same will happen again. To repeat an example I have already used, this latest report identifies that “The proportion of live births during 1999–2001 with low through to extremely low birthweight was more than twice as high for babies born to Indigenous mothers than for babies born to non-Indigenous mothers.” The Australian Medical Association has identified ways this can be addressed at a cost of around $20 million. This money is yet to be provided by the federal government, yet they are prepared to spend the same amount on a completely illegitimate advertising campaign to promote their policies and protect their own jobs.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Tuesday, July 12, 2005 Permalink
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