Notwithstanding the above comments, there is no doubt that the 2002 NATSISS is already playing a role in broadly assessing Indigenous policy and practice.

The key task as defined by the SCRGSP is to identify indicators that are of relevance to all governments and Indigenous stakeholders and that can demonstrate the impact of program and policy interventions. In its overview, the SCRGSP (2005: xix) notes that its first report (2003) relied heavily on 2001 Census data, while the 2005 report has relied largely on 2002 NATSISS results.

The SCRGSP is quite cautious in its use of 2002 NATSISS information, suggesting that:

Nevertheless, the SCRGSP uses 1994 NATSIS and 2002 NATSISS information to make some broad observations about what has improved and what has not, although also basing much of its analysis on administrative data.

While this reporting of available information is instructive at a discursive level, it is very unclear how it demonstrates the impacts of program and policy interventions. Indeed, rigorous evaluations of specific policies targeting Indigenous Australians do not appear in the SCRGSP report and are largely missing in Indigenous policy discussions. It is generally recognised that interventions cannot be evaluated by comparing broad undifferentiated social indicator outcomes over time: programs and policies have to be evaluated at the micro target group community or regional level and there is little independent analysis of this kind in Australia today.

At one level, this statistical development is ironic given the government’s recent focus on targeted regional COAG trial sites, SRAs and planned Regional Partnership Agreements, none of which have clearly defined evaluation mechanisms and associated data requirements. A notable exception here is the research undertaken at the Thamurrurr COAG trial site by Taylor (2004b) and Taylor and Stanley (2005) to gather baseline information that might inform evaluation. However, the intensity of research effort required to glean information at this level of disaggregation is instructive of the overall problem to which we are alluding—this research is expensive and not readily replicable.

At another level, this is symptomatic of the demise of a legally sanctioned (Indigenous) authorising environment for statistical collection and dissemination at regional levels, a role fulfilled until recently by ATSIC. The availability of ABS published outputs for ATSIC regions, co-signed by the Chair of the ATSIC Board and the Australian Statistician, was path-breaking (ABS 1995, 1996a). Unfortunately, this exercise in geographic disaggregation has not been repeated for the 2002 NATSISS.

In light of the ABS’s own formal evaluation of the 1994 NATSIS, this last observation is significant. Among the key issues highlighted were the appropriateness of output mediums and the accessibility of results to Australia’s Indigenous people and their organisations (Sarossy 1996). Findings on these matters raised the importance of regional level reporting and recommended that the dissemination strategy for any future survey should ensure that the results are readily available to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations. To ensure this, it recommended that the ABS consider delivering basic statistical training in the interpretation of results to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities (Sarossy 1996: 192). This is now implicit in the ABS Indigenous Community Engagement Strategy implemented in 2004 (see Webster, Rogers & Black, this volume).

To the extent that such recommendations are deemed to be still relevant, and with the demise of the ATSIC regional structure, the question has to be raised about what geographic scale of reporting is now appropriate. And with whom will the ABS engage in order to enhance the use of NATSISS information by Indigenous communities and organisations? Accessibility of survey data has been enhanced for academic and other researchers via the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee (AVCC) agreement on data access and by the introduction of the Remote Access Data Laboratory (RADL). However, this enhancement is unlikely to benefit most Indigenous stakeholders, given the technical capabilities required and the fact that access to the CURF costs $8000 for non-AVCC authorised users.