Ideas@TheCentre
Report card on Indigenous disadvantage
Sara Hudson |
29 January 2010
Education - D
Showed a slight increase in the number of Indigenous 19-year-olds completing Year 12 but negligible improvement in student performance. In some NT Indigenous schools, 100% of the students failed to meet national minimum standards. However, the Education Minister’s decision to go ahead with the controversial website My School, which lists NAPLAN results by school, is a step in the right direction and has helped save the government from a failing grade.
Health - D
Showed a commitment to ‘close the gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous life expectancy and other health measures by increasing funding for Indigenous health. Not clear whether the government knows what to do with the extra funds. The government needs to realise that more money is not the only answer.
Housing - E
Indigenous housing was the government’s Achilles heel in 2009 with media backlash over the failure of the Indigenous housing scheme. The Indigenous Affairs Minister showed some determination in trying to resolve the crises, but the government would have done better to implement private property rights in Indigenous townships.
Employment - E
Still does not appear to know the difference between supply and demand; continued to defend low employment on a lack of available jobs in remote areas; and has not addressed criminally poor education, which acts as a barrier to employment. Still made the same old excuses and avoided making hard decisions, such as removing Remote Area Exemption rules for Centrelink benefits.
Crime - E
There are 6,605 Indigenous people in prison and no apparent strategy to stem the rising tide in incarceration rates.
Overall comment
The results are a mixed bag, and grades given do not necessarily reflect some of the positive measures that the government has made this year. It has done well to continue with the NT intervention and to look at universal welfare quarantining. But the horrific delays in delivering new housing in the Northern Territory have shattered the belief in the government’s ability to deliver on promises. Needs to overcome the business-as-usual approach and entrenched resistance to change and make some real reforms, particularly in employment and education.
Along with government action, there should be greater expectation that Indigenous Australians do more to resolve their own problems - the fact that so many seem unable to, is an indictment of appalling separatist polices of the past and the legacy of ‘passive’ welfare.
Sara Hudson is a Policy Analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies.
