Table of Contents
In 2003, the Productivity Commission report Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2003 demonstrated that Australia now has an extensive (though not time-deep) statistical archive through which we can compare Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. The report points to twelve ‘headline indicators’, and seven ‘strategic areas for action’, and it operationalises the ‘strategic areas for action’ in terms of thirty variables on which Indigenous and non-Indigenous can be compared. [1]
It has not always been possible to make such a wide battery of Indigenous/non-Indigenous comparisons (nor Indigenous/Australia comparisons). In this paper I will trace the steps that Australian governments have taken to recognise an entity that we call the ‘Indigenous population’ and to state its characteristics in comparative, quantitative terms.
My story is a frankly teleological one, in two senses. First, in looking at the steps taken I will pay particular attention to the steps that led towards what we have now. Second, I will nominate a turning point or watershed: the period 1966–76. In this moment, Australian governments ceased to manage the statistical archive in one way and began to manage it in a new way.
What happened between 1966 and 1976? The 1966 Census was the first Australian census in which the Statistician was prepared to claim ‘virtually complete’ enumeration of the Aboriginal population; [2] as I will show below, the first comparisons of ‘Aboriginal’ with Australia, in respect of education and occupation, were enabled by the 1966 Census. However, 1966 was also the last Australian census to make the distinction between ‘full blood’ Aborigines and Aborigines of mixed descent. So 1966 was not the beginning of comparisons over time.
At first sight, we could understand the repeal, by referendum, of s.127 of the Australian Constitution as a step towards the reformed statistical archive that we now use. However, the referendum was not clearly such a progressive step, for two reasons. One is that, notwithstanding the words of s.127 (‘in reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted’), all governments had long been collecting data on their Indigenous populations, as they conceived them. The second is that it was open to statistical authorities to interpret the repeal of s.127 as mandating the merging of the enumerated Aborigine with the total population. That is, the repeal of s.127 could be interpreted as a mandate to include, without distinguishing, Indigenous Australians. The argument to continue to distinguish Indigenous Australians, and to distinguish them in new ways, had to be made independently of, and even in the face of, the inclusive rhetoric of the 1967 referendum campaign.
In 1971, in a reform that was not evidently related to the repeal of s.127, the census introduced a new classification question that gave respondents the opportunity to identify themselves and their household members as ‘Aboriginal’ or as ‘Torres Strait Islander’. In 1976 we had the second census using this revised question, so 1976 marks the beginning of the possibility of systematic comparison over time of Indigenous with ‘all Australia’, and Aboriginal with Torres Strait Islander.
I should emphasise the word ‘beginning’, for in 1976 there was still much to be done to reform those parts of the statistical archive that are supplied by organisations, such as hospitals, that service Indigenous Australians. Borrie complained in 1975 that it was still:
…extraordinarily difficult to persuade all the relevant authorities that Aborigines should be distinguished so that separate statistics can be maintained. Nor, as yet, is there any agreement on how the Aboriginal population is to be defined in the collection of statistics for series other than the census…[S]ome officials have argued that it would be offensive or discriminatory to ask people if they were Aborigines, or even to ask their race (Borrie 1975: 460–1). [3]
Notwithstanding Borrie’s sense of the difficulties of further reform in Australia’s Indigenous statistics, I think that we can see the years 1966 to 1976 as a turning point. The old way that prevailed from the late nineteenth century to 1966 had used the discredited terms of racial science. Under this old way it had been difficult, if not impossible, to compare the Indigenous population with the non-Indigenous population (or with ‘all Australians’, which is much the same thing). The new era has two features: ethnic identities (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) have replaced racial distinctions; and there are now more socioeconomic and biomedical variables for making distinctions within the Indigenous population. These two features of the reformed statistical archive combine to make it possible to compare, across many variables, certain policy-relevant trends in the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. Those comparisons have become the basis of an idea of social justice that is new, or newly prominent, in Australian public life: ‘practical reconciliation’.