Indigenous jobs rate jumps but gap is not closing

The percentage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians with jobs is climbing, but Australia is not on track to close the gap in most other areas

Linda Burney says ‘every level of government needs to redouble its efforts to improve outcomes for First Nations peoples across a range of targets’. Picture: Gary Ramage

The employment rate among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians has jumped significantly, new data from the Productivity Commission shows.

However, the latest data update for the national agreement on Closing the Gap to be published Wednesday shows the percentage of Indigenous babies born a healthy weight has gone backwards.

The first update on Closing the Gap since June last year provides new information for nine of the 17 targets set in 2020. It shows that, overall, Australia is on track to meet just four of the targets by 2031.

Finding and collating reliable data to measure progress has been a major challenge since all governments and a coalition of Indigenous organisations signed a redesigned and expanded Closing the Gap agreement in 2020. For some of the targets, available data is either too old or there is not enough of it to reach a conclusion about whether there has been improvement.

One of the targets considered crucial in Indigenous health is that, by 2031, 91 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander babies will be born a healthy birthweight. Australia was on track to meet that target in June last year but fresh data obtained by the Productivity Commission shows that is no longer the case: there was no net improvement in Indigenous birthweights between 2014 and 2020. In 2019, 89.5 per cent of Indigenous babies were a healthy birthweight.

However this decreased to 89 per cent in 2020, which was the same percentage recorded in 2014, 2015 and 2016. By comparison, 94 per cent of non-Indigenous newborns were a healthy birthweight in 2020, an overall increase of 0.2 per cent over the previous six years.

The new data shows that, overall, 11 out of 17 Closing the Gap targets are now not on track to be met by 2031 and four are on track. There is not enough information to know if the remainder are likely to be met, but the national agreement commits all states and territories to better data collection. One of the changes is that the Productivity Commission now publishes and regularly updates an online dashboard of available data about each target.

Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney said: “The gap is not closing fast enough and on some measures it is going backwards”.

“Every level of government needs to redouble its efforts to improve outcomes for First Nations peoples across a range of targets.”

Ms Burney described the Productivity Commission’s newly-published data on Indigenous employment as encouraging.

It shows that in 2021, 55.7 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 25-64 years were employed. This is an increase from 51.0 per cent in 2016. The Closing the Gap agreement states that 62 per cent of Indigenous people aged 25-64 will be employed by 2031 and Australia is on track to meet that target.

The new data records improvement against seven other targets but not enough to say they are on track. For example, Indigenous life expectancy is improving but not fast enough to close the gap with non-Indigenous Australians by 2031.

Nationally, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander males born between 2015 and 2017 are expected to live to 71.6 years and females to 75.6 years while non-Indigenous males and females born between 2015 and 2017 are expected to live to 80.2 years and 83.4 years respectively.

Between 2005–2007 and 2015–2017, the gap in life expectancy narrowed for males (from 11.4 years to 8.6 years) and for females (from 9.6 years to 7.8 years).

The latest data is published a month after the release of the 2023 Closing the Gap Implementation Plan that promises more than $400m for projects including safe and reliable water supplies in remote and regional Indigenous communities. This is specifically for communities that currently do not have access to clean drinking water.

The funding also includes a $111.7m commonwealth contribution to a new one-year partnership with the Northern Territory government to speed up the construction of new remote housing. This is intended to reduce the worst over-crowding.

“More of the same isn’t good enough. We need to do things differently by working in partnership with communities to get better results,” Ms Burney said.

“The Closing the Gap Implementation Plan, launched last month, sets a clear path forward for how we plan to achieve the targets and priority reforms set out in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap.

“We will continue to work in partnership with the Coalition of Peaks and state and territory governments and eventually a Voice to address these results.”