Jacinta Nampijinpa Price says the gap in outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is 'more about place than race'. Is that correct?

RMIT ABC Fact Check

Posted Friday 13 Oct 2023 at 1:09amFri 13 Oct 2023 at 1:09am

In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, No campaigner Jacinta Nampijinpa Price said the gap in outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people was "more about place than race". RMIT ABC Fact Check finds that claim to be oversimplified.(ABC News: Luke Stephenson)

The claim

In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference ahead of the Voice to Parliament referendum, No campaigner and Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians Jacinta Nampijinpa Price said that when it comes to Indigenous disadvantage, geography matters more than race.

Referring to the "differences in outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians", Senator Nampijinpa Price said: "The gap is more about place than race."

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"The gap doesn't simply exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The gap exists between those who live in the cities and those who live in remote and regional Australia," she said.

So, is location a more important contributor to the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.

The verdict

Senator Nampijinpa Price's claim is oversimplified.

Most indicators in the Productivity Commission's Closing the Gap data show that outcomes worsen for Indigenous Australians as remoteness increases.

However, in many cases, the same trend does not apply to non-Indigenous Australians, whose outcomes are often similar whether they live in major cities or in remote areas.

For some other indicators, the link between remoteness and worsening outcomes for Indigenous people is either not present or ambiguous.

There are, for example, noticeably higher rates of Indigenous children in out-of-home care in the major cities than in remote areas, according to the AIHW.

And on all but one indicator that could be analysed by remoteness, there remains a gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the major cities, where 41 per cent of Indigenous Australians live (15 per cent live in remote and very remote areas).

Experts contacted by Fact Check said the disparity in various outcomes between the two populations was due to a combination of influences, such as geography, racial discrimination and other factors, which could not be disentangled.

a person in an Akubra hat silhouetted against an Indigenous flag — Geography is a factor in Indigenous disadvantage, but it interacts with other factors such as racial discrimination, according to experts.(AAP: Mick Tsikas)

Context of the claim

Fact Check contacted Senator Nampijinpa Price's office to ask for the source of her claim, but did not receive a response.

In 2021, before entering parliament, she authored her own report about Indigenous disadvantage, published by the Centre for Independent Studies, a conservative-leaning think tank. The report concluded that remote and very remote Indigenous communities had become victims of a "wicked problem".

"While it cannot be said the issues identified [in the report] are exclusive to Indigenous communities, it is clear that Indigenous communities are subject to them at a far greater proportion than almost every other location in Australia," it read.

Incorporating a range of data on employment, education and health, her analysis compared Indigenous outcomes in major cities, regional areas and remote areas, finding that they worsened as remoteness increased.

The report also analysed crime in places where at least 20 per cent of the population was Indigenous, according to the 2016 census, which amounted to an examination of 67 of 1,787 "reporting areas".

This analysis covered five states plus the Northern Territory, with the ACT and Tasmania excluded "due to the small size of their Indigenous populations".

Notably, although Victoria was included, there were no "reporting areas" in the state with an Indigenous population above 20 per cent.

What is 'the gap'?

Aboriginal child wearing brightly coloured shirt reading 'Reading opens doors'. — The gap can refer to disparities across number of indicators in a range of subject areas, including, for example, education.(ABC Radio Darwin: Gabrielle Lyons)

Senator Nampijinpa Price referred to "the gap" between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Francis Markham, a research fellow at the Australian National University's Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, told Fact Check that this colloquial phrase had been used informally for decades to describe the disparity in outcomes between the two populations across a wide range of policy areas such as education, health and employment.

In 2008, following a campaign led by Indigenous health organisations, an initial six Closing the Gap targets were formally adopted by state, territory and federal governments under a new National Indigenous Reform Agreement.

In 2014 that number became seven, with the addition of a target on school attendance.

The latest agreement, from 2020, was endorsed by the former Coalition government and contains 19 formal targets across 17 socio-economic areas. These cover a broader set of measures than Senator Nampijinpa Price's report.

As these issues are more colloquially and officially understood to represent "the gap", and include data for all states and territories, Fact Check will use them as a starting point to assess the senator's claim.

Notably, the latest targets are less focused on Indigenous and non-Indigenous comparisons, with state and territory governments emphasising the need to "raise our sights from a focus on problems and deficits".

In keeping with Senator Nampijinpa Price's claim, however, Fact Check has focused its analysis on the difference in outcomes "between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians".

Making sense of the data

The federal government publishes yearly Closing the Gap reports on progress towards the targets. The latest data can be found on the Productivity Commission website.

Where data is available, progress against each target is measured by a principal indicator, accompanied by a number of "supporting indicators" relating to "factors that are likely to significantly affect whether a target will be met".

Target one, for example, aims to eliminate the difference in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians by 2031.

Its main indicator is life expectancy by year of birth, and its supporting indicators include main causes of death and rates of access to health services.

Fact Check will focus on the report's principal indicators, incorporating data from outside the Closing the Gap report for context.

For the purposes of this analysis, the data has been grouped into five broad areas: physical and mental health; education and employment; families, housing and children; incarceration; and languages and land rights.

Wherever possible, Fact Check has analysed the data by remoteness area, as defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This allows for comparisons between populations living in major cities, inner and outer regional areas and remote and very remote areas nationally.

Click or tap the boxes below to read the analysis of each target area.

Physical and mental health

A sign out the front of the Ngukurr Health Centre — Indigenous health services are crucial to closing the gap in health outcomes.(ABC News: Jane Bardon)

In this area there are three indicators:

Life expectancy and healthy birth weight

Both of these indicators show that a gap exists between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians across all geographies, whether remote or urban.

They also show that Indigenous people have better outcomes in the major cities than they do in remote areas.

Indigenous males, for example, can expect to live 6.2 years longer in the major cities (72.1 years) than in remote and very remote areas (65.9).

However, the life expectancy of their non-Indigenous counterparts differs by just one year, depending on whether they live in cities (80.7) or remote areas (79.7).

So while the gap increases with distance from the major cities, that's because on these measures remoteness doesn't affect non-Indigenous people in the same way.

Ian Ring, a professor in the Division of Tropical Health and Medicine at James Cook University told Fact Check that when it came to health, remoteness affected Indigenous and non-Indigenous people differently.

"There's a popular belief that Aboriginal people will access mainstream [health] services in the same way as non-Aboriginal people and that they will be equally effective. And all the evidence is: that is simply not true," he said.

According to Professor Ring, Indigenous people were often not comfortable accessing these services, "which is why the crucial thing that's happened in Australia is there's been the development of health services run by and for Aboriginal people".

A 2016 report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare noted that because mainstream health services were "not always accessible [to Indigenous people], for geographic, social and cultural reasons", Indigenous-led services were "important providers of comprehensive primary health services for Indigenous Australians".

However, it found that 37 areas around the country lacked easy access to Indigenous-specific primary health care services or GP services, with many of these areas located "in Remote and Very remote areas of Queensland and Western Australia".

Suicide rates

Data for suicide rates reveals that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people experience worse outcomes in remote areas than in the major cities, but that rates for Indigenous people are higher across all geographies.

Research from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) also shows that suicide rates increase with remoteness, for both the general population and Indigenous people specifically.

However, the AIHW noted in a 2022 report on suicide risk among Indigenous people: "Evidence also suggests that there is considerable variation in suicidal behaviours … even when community environments are similarly remote."

The report highlighted the potential effect of various other factors that may play a role in suicide, including some exclusive to First Nations Australians.

"Suicidal behaviour among Indigenous Australians has been linked to trauma from the effects of colonisation, such as the loss of connection to culture, Country and spirituality and the removal of children from their families, which is a trauma that is passed down through generations," the report said.

It also noted a number of more general factors whose impact on the Indigenous population is greater, for example, a history of exposure to suicide or family violence.

Families, housing and children

Child Protection — Indigenous children remain disproportionately over-represented in the out-of-home care sector.(ABC News: Paul Strk)

In this area, there are three indicators:

Domestic and family violence

This indicator relies on data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' (ABS) National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey.

According to the 2018-19 national results, 8.4 per cent of Indigenous women aged 15 years and over had experienced actual or threatened violence from a family member or intimate partner in the previous 12 months.

The dataset does not contain an equivalent measure for non-Indigenous females; however, Kyllie Cripps, a Palawa woman and professor of Indigenous studies at Monash University's Indigenous Studies Centre, told Fact Check that data from the ABS's Personal Safety survey (2020-21) provided comparable data for the general population for women aged 18 and over.

That survey showed 1.9 per cent of women had experienced actual violence (excluding threats of violence) from a family member or intimate partner over the previous 12 months.

The ABS provided Fact Check with a breakdown of the 2018-19 survey data for Indigenous women by geography.

The data showed that "place" made no difference to the rate of actual or threatened violence against Indigenous women, with both remote and non-remote areas reporting a figure of 8.4 per cent.

Professor Cripps said that remoteness does not necessarily drive higher rates of domestic violence, although it does affect access to help.

"If you're a victim of domestic and family violence in remote Australia, the reality is your access to help is significantly hampered," she said.

"If you're on an outstation, your neighbours might be hundreds of kilometres away, or more."

This, Professor Cripps said, meant that the likelihood of death following a catastrophic injury due to domestic violence was increased in remote areas.

Out-of-home care

When it comes to children living in out-of-home care, the rates for Indigenous people are well above those for non-Indigenous people across all states and territories.

Although the Closing the Gap data is not broken down further by geography, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare publishes its own data, disaggregated by remoteness area.

The latest available when Senator Nampijinpa Price made her claim, for June 2021, shows that the rate of out-of-home care for Indigenous children is more than twice as high in the major cities than in remote and very remote areas, running contrary to the senator's claim.

Professor Cripps said the added surveillance in the cities created more opportunities for Indigenous children to be reported and therefore subject to a removal order.

"You will have parents who are required to routinely turn up to maternal health in ways that they won't have to in remote areas," she said.

Professor Cripps added that parents who had been through the foster system themselves were automatically flagged to child protection services when they had a child, and would then also be reported to authorities if health workers observed precariousness in the parents' housing situation or any "risky" behaviour such as drinking or smoking.

"They've already been reported because they've aged out of the system. And then they're automatically reported again if they're showing any risky behaviours.

"So the likelihood of [them] losing that baby as soon as it's born is significantly high."

Appropriate housing

Across the country, there still exists a gap between the number of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people living in adequately sized housing, although the divide is smaller in the major cities.

The data shows that a decreasing proportion of Indigenous people live in adequately sized accommodation as remoteness increases.

On this measure, however, remoteness does not have the same effect on non-Indigenous people living outside the major cities, with those in remote and regional areas faring no differently to each other.

Professor Cripps said the disparity in housing outcomes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people was mainly down to two factors: the availability of social housing, and racial discrimination in the private housing market.

In remote areas, she said, the lower availability of social housing likely interacted with worse racial discrimination to force Indigenous people into overcrowded accommodation more frequently than elsewhere.

Incarceration

the bars of a prison cell — Remoteness increases incarceration rates among Indigenous people, but there is more to the story.(Ichigo121212, Pixabay Licence)

In this area, there are two indicators:

When it comes to incarceration, Indigenous children and adults are locked up at much higher rates, relative to non-Indigenous people, in all states and territories.

The Closing the Gap data is not broken down by remoteness area, but the ABS National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey, last conducted in 2014-15, asked respondents if they had ever been incarcerated.

The data shows that incarceration rates were lower among Indigenous people in non-remote areas than those in remote areas.

For help in analysing the data, Fact Check consulted two academics from the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University: Krystal Lockwood, a Gumbaynggirr and Dunghutti woman and lecturer, and Troy Allard, a senior lecturer in the school.

In a statement, they said there was evidence that geography did affect incarceration rates among both the general and Indigenous populations, but that it was "important to understand how remoteness is impacted by other factors".

"In Australia, both place and the experience of being Indigenous are important to consider …, along with the myriad other social determinants of justice, including education, housing, alcohol and drug use, mental health, physical health, systemic discrimination, poverty, exposure to violence and trauma, offence types, and the operation of the criminal justice system itself."

The researchers added: "When other social determinants of justice are taken into account (particularly socioeconomic status), the impact of remoteness on incarceration can either be removed or becomes smaller. Such findings point to the explanatory factors themselves being interrelated."

Indeed, a 2008 study conducted by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research found that among the general population of the state, offenders in remote and regional areas were less likely to be incarcerated than those in inner metropolitan areas after controlling for "legally relevant factors" such as age, sex, Indigenous status or whether the offender had previously been to prison.

The study also found "no interaction effect … for Indigenous status and area of residence, suggesting that Indigenous offenders were neither more likely to be imprisoned nor less likely to be imprisoned within any particular area of residence."

Dr Lockwood and Dr Allard told Fact Check: "To make real change, it is unproductive to try and isolate the impact of each of the social determinants — you have to understand how they interact. That's why best-practice models view individuals and communities holistically."

Education and employment

Historic Tiwi timber harvest — Employment and education outcomes decline for Indigenous people as remoteness increases.(Matt Brann)

There are seven indicators in this area:

Qualifications and employment

Across all of these indicators, the data shows that Indigenous people experience worse outcomes as remoteness increases.

On job prospects, for example, 62.1 per cent of Indigenous people aged 25-64 living in major cities were employed in 2021, compared with 35 per cent in very remote areas.

But with most of these indicators, the same effect is not seen for non-Indigenous people. Indeed, in the example above, remoteness seems to have the opposite effect.

Dr Markham said this was explained by the differing population characteristics of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous cohorts.

On the one hand, he explained, there were Indigenous people "living predominantly in very remote communities on lands that have been handed back to them through land restitution processes, like native title land rights … where there are very few jobs available that suit people's skills and attributes".

On the other, non-Indigenous people in very remote communities were likely to be more transient workers, such as fly-in fly-out (FIFO) or mining employees, or those who had taken short-term management roles, Dr Markham said.

"They're people who, if they become unemployed, will almost certainly leave very remote Australia and head back to where they grew up or where they've got connections."

In schools, too, Indigenous and non-Indigenous people were likely to have different experiences in remote areas.

Dr Markham said that in very remote Australia, non-Indigenous workers "tend to leave when they have kids," meaning their children end up attending school in less remote areas.

"And then there is considerable segregation in schooling in remote service towns like Alice Springs, not to mention the preponderance of non-Indigenous children from very remote areas who attend school of the air [radio or online school] or boarding schools rather than local Indigenous community schools."

When it came to school attendance rates, which were formerly part of the Closing the Gap targets and also considered by Senator Nampijinpa Price's report, the 2020 Closing the Gap report showed declining outcomes among Indigenous people who live further from the cities.

Like other indicators in this area, remoteness did not affect non-Indigenous people in the same way, with little difference between those living in the major cities and in remote areas.

Early education

There is one indicator where the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people has been closed at a national level.

In 2022, 99.2 per 100 Indigenous four year olds were enrolled in a preschool program, while the rate for their non-Indigenous peers was 88.4 per 100.

But this pattern doesn't hold in remote areas, where rates declined significantly for both cohorts, and an Indigenous child was instead less likely to be enrolled than a non-Indigenous child.

Meanwhile, the proportion of Indigenous children assessed as developmentally on track decreases as remoteness increases. Once again, this trend is not present for non-Indigenous children, who have better outcomes across all areas.

Internet access

Finally, for internet access, the Australian Bureau of Statistics supplied Fact Check with a breakdown by geography of the data used in the Closing the Gap report.

The data shows that Indigenous people aged over 15 in non-remote areas accessed home internet at around double the rate of those living in remote areas (82.1 per cent compared with 42.3 per cent)

The rate of those who didn't access the internet at all in the last 12 months or didn't know if they did (46.9 per cent) was also highest in remote areas.

Data from the 2016 census — the last to ask a similar question about internet access — showed a gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people across all geographies, with outcomes declining for both groups as remoteness decreases.

However, it's important to note that both sets of data are significantly out of date, with the information collected before the initial build of the National Broadband Network was completed.

Languages and land rights

Indigenous dancers of the Butchulla people on Fraser Island in south-east Queensland on October 24, 2014. — Land rights and Indigenous languages have an advantage in remote communities compared to the major cities.(ABC Local: Ross Kay)

There are two indicators in this area:

Neither of these indicators has an equivalent non-Indigenous measure, nor is the Closing the Gap data broken down by remoteness area.

Nonetheless, Dr Markham said that when it came to land rights and languages, remoteness was an advantage.

"Very remote Australia is the biggest landmass … and the percentage of land returned … is very high."

By contrast, "Land return in major cities is miniscule," he said, with Indigenous people typically struggling to get land back.

Dr Markham noted that Indigenous languages also had an advantage in remote areas, because these places were colonised later and had larger Indigenous populations.

"One thing that helps with language maintenance is a density of speakers," he said.

Data for the chart below was collected by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies through its 2018-19 National Indigenous Languages Survey.

It shows that the number of "strong" traditional languages — that is, those "used by all age groups, including all children, and [where] people in all age groups are fluent speakers" — was highest in Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland.

Analysis of the data

Fact Check analysed 13 main indicators where data from the Productivity Commission or another organisation could be broken down by remoteness area. Of these, 11 showed a worsening of outcomes for Indigenous people as remoteness increased.

However, they also showed that this same phenomenon was not experienced by non-Indigenous people.

According to Dr Markham, place and Indigenous status "interact to produce the kinds of results that we see in these indicators".

For that reason, he questioned the wisdom of arguing that one was more important than the other, telling Fact Check: "It's a mistake to try and separate place and race and say that they're things that you can discreetly pull apart."

For example, there is a correlation between geography and incarceration rates. But experts contacted by Fact Check agreed this link becomes weaker when taking into account other factors.

Importantly, for the vast majority of indicators that revealed a clear link between geography and worse outcomes, there was still a gap in outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in major cities and regional areas.

This matters because larger proportions of Indigenous people live in major cities (41 per cent) and regional areas (44 per cent) than in remote areas (15 per cent), according to the 2021 census.

Dr Markham noted that regional areas, which have the largest Indigenous populations, would have the largest impact on the formal Closing the Gap targets, which were nationally focused.

But he said there were "still large gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in major cities where Indigenous people tend to have the best socioeconomic outcomes. And even if all Indigenous people had, on average, those outcomes, you wouldn't see the gaps close on most measures."

Finally, there are some indicators where Indigenous people living in the cities have the same or worse outcomes as their regional and remote counterparts.

For example, Indigenous children are more likely to be in out-of-home care in major cities than in regional or remote areas, according to the AIHW.

And according to data from the ABS, among Indigenous females aged 15 and over, the risk of being threatened or physically harmed by a family member or intimate partner is the same in remote and non-remote areas.

All in all, while there is a relationship between place and Indigenous disadvantage, it is not consistent across all indicators. Moreover, geography often affects non-Indigenous people differently, and there is still a gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people even in the major cities.

Principal researcher: RMIT ABC Fact Check Managing Editor, Matt Martino