This chapter has attempted to illustrate that technical details do matter in poverty measurement because there is an implicit equivalence scale underlying Australia’s welfare system. The choice of an appropriate equivalence scale(s) for Indigenous Australians needs to be scrutinised and researched so that Indigenous poverty and disadvantage can be addressed adequately.

Where to for future research? The RADL offers exciting potential for research, especially given the more useful continuous income data and financial stress indicators. For my part, I have not published much serious econometric research on predictors of income using the 1994 NATSISS because the grouped nature of that data obscured too much information (one possible exception was some incidental analysis that was conducted to test sensitivity of other analysis in Borland & Hunter 2000). The addition of continuous income data on the RADL for the 2002 NATSISS means that more conventional labour market analysis of Indigenous wages is warranted.

Another potential area for research is that the simultaneous collection of GSS and NATSISS data offers the opportunity to examine the nature of Indigenous disadvantage vis-à-vis other Australians. It would be particularly interesting to pool the NATSISS and GSS data, but that could only be done within the confines of the ABS. One important impediment to the power of any such analysis is that there does not appear to be an Indigenous identifier on the GSS RADL, which means it is not possible to directly calculate non-Indigenous estimates. The inability to compare Indigenous estimates from the NATSISS to non-Indigenous estimates in the GSS is a major weakness of the set-up of the GSS CURF and severely circumscribes the usefulness of both data sets for policy-makers.