I wish to make two major points about Indigenous employment. Firstly, Indigenous mainstream employment is extremely low. Secondly, if CDEP is set aside, there is no evidence that across-the–board employment prospects are improving. These employment outcomes are extremely worrying and disappointing. Despite large amounts of public expenditure to improve Indigenous employment levels, and despite very significant improvements in Indigenous school attendance and education levels, there has been very little employment growth outside the CDEP scheme. In this dimension, our policies seem to have failed spectacularly.

The parlous state of Indigenous employment is illustrated in Table 11.1, which presents various estimates of the employment/population ratios for adult Indigenous Australians taken from a range of publications. The employment ratios listed in the first set of data are taken from the census and presented by Hunter & Taylor (2004). In 1991 the Indigenous employment–population ratio for adult males, aged 15 to 64 years, and including CDEP employment, was 37.6 per cent. Just over one in three Aborigines had a job. By 2001 the employment ratio has lifted to 40.4 per cent. This is an improvement but the employment rate is still very low. Altman, Biddle & Hunter (2005) take the data back to 1971 and the employment–population ratio of 2001 is clearly lower than thirty years earlier.

Sources: Taylor & Hunter (1998), Hunter, Kinfu & Taylor (2003), Altman, Biddle & Hunter (2005), Gregory (own calculations)

The second set of data uses a concept I call mainstream employment. Mainstream employment excludes CDEP from the employment data. These employment estimates suggest that in 1991 the employment–population ratio was 32.9 per cent and by 2001 it had fallen to 29.5 per cent. It is worth spending some time emphasising how low this number is. Suppose you were to undertake an Australia-wide survey and the first question posed of the respondent is ‘Are you an Indigenous Australian?’. If the answer is yes, you could bet that the respondent was not employed in the mainstream economy and you would be right 7 times out of 10. Perhaps even more importantly, over the last three decades, Indigenous employment (net of CDEP) has moved backwards. The various policy initiatives—primarily additional Indigenous education expenditure, increased Indigenous access to welfare support and extensive Indigenous employment programs—have been associated with no net employment gains relative to population growth.

To construct the third set of data, I subtract from the mainstream employment–population ratio my estimates of the number of Indigenous adults in a sub-group that I call the Indigenous elite. I define the elite as those Indigenous people who report employment income that places them in the top 30 per cent of the Australia-wide employment income distribution. The number of Aboriginals who are in this category has grown over the last few decades and it is one area of great success. There has been good progress here and there is now a significant, but still very small, group of Aboriginals who do well in the mainstream economy, although most of this group are associated with various Indigenous economic and political activities. It is important to subtract these successful individuals from the employment data because I want to emphasise what has been happening to the non-elite. For non-elite Indigenous people, the employment–population ratio was 28.4 per cent in 1991 and it has now fallen to 19.6 per cent. So, after removing the small employment increase of those with high incomes, 80 per cent of the remaining Aboriginals do not have employment in the mainstream economy. This is an appallingly low figure.

Finally, in the last data set presented in Table 11.1, I list estimates of those employed full-time and those employed in the private sector. Both of these categories of employment have fallen.