Increasingly over the past three decades, the scale and the nature of initiatives aimed at achieving social justice for Indigenous Australians have been guided by information about the size, composition, and changing location of the officially identified Indigenous population. The data drawn from five-yearly censuses and, progressively, from other surveys and administrative collections have aided in determining the global quantum of Indigenous need for government services. More recently, there has been a growing recognition that an understanding of the dynamics of demographic change is important for the formulation of policies that are based on some estimation of anticipated requirements, and not solely on current or historic assessment of government obligations (Taylor 2001).

The age structure and related growth of the Indigenous population differs markedly from that of other Australians, and this has consequences for the direction of public policy. For example, Indigenous Australians are on average much younger than the rest of the population and will continue to be so for decades to come (their median age is 19 years compared to 35 years for the general population). As a consequence, the focus of population expansion in the years ahead among Indigenous Australians will be among those of working age (15–64), especially in the school-to-work transition years, whereas for the rest of the Australian population the focus of growth will be amongst the aged (over 55 years). These are opposite ends of the social policy spectrum and point to quite different needs. Such is the momentum for growth built into the Indigenous age distribution that it is estimated that the population aged 15–64 will be 16 per cent greater by 2006 (285 000 compared to 245 000 in 2000). This is the figure adopted for the use in the present analysis.

It should be noted, however, that this estimate of the future size of the Indigenous working-age population is conservative. The Indigenous population is enumerated by self reporting, and consequently there is a major methodological difficulty in projection, deriving from the absence of a rigorous model for capturing change in the propensity of individuals to identify as Indigenous. Different assumptions regarding this propensity can produce widely differing population estimates (ABS 1998). Thus, the low series ABS projection, as used above, assumes no further growth due to increased identification as Indigenous. On the evidence of past census counts this seems an unreasonable expectation and so higher projections, based on varying assumptions about increased propensity to identify, are also provided. Of these, the published high series assumes a continuation of the rate of new identification observed over the most recent inter-censal period. This yields an Indigenous working-age population of 650 000 by 2006.

Despite a 44 per cent increase in Indigenous employment between 1991 and 1996, the underlying rate of employment was little altered, with only 26 per cent of the adult population engaged in mainstream work (Taylor & Bell 1998). There were two reasons for this anomaly. First, much of the recorded employment growth was due to increased participation in the CDEP scheme. By 1996, as much as one-fifth of the Indigenous workforce was employed by the scheme. Another contributory factor was an increase in wage-subsidised employment and training under the Federal government’s Working Nation initiatives. Against these government-sponsored labour market interventions, growth in mainstream work was negligible. The second reason, as might be expected, was demographic—quite simply, growth in jobs, especially mainstream jobs, failed to keep up with growth in the Indigenous working-age population.

A number of studies have analysed the consequences for labour force status of the persistently youthful Indigenous age profile (Altman & Gaminiratne 1994; Gray & Tesfaghiorghis 1991; Taylor & Altman 1997; Taylor & Hunter 1998). The most recent of these estimated that over the 10-year period from 1996 to 2006 an extra 25 000 Indigenous people would need to be employed just to maintain the Indigenous labour force status at its 1996 level (an employment rate of 39 per cent and an unemployment rate of 26 per cent). The anticipated crisis for public policy that this figure signalled was based on an estimation that only 21 000 additional jobs were likely to be created over this period, leading to worsening labour force status.

Significant changes have occurred in labour market conditions for Indigenous people since 1996, especially in regard to the supply of CDEP work. It is timely, therefore, to review these estimates. Accordingly, this paper has four aims: to estimate the future supply of CDEP scheme positions against the background of population growth and growth in non-CDEP jobs; to assess this against anticipated demand for CDEP; to estimate the consequences of these parameters for future Indigenous labour force status; and to examine the consequences of projected employment and population growth for the achievement of parity in labour force status.