Ahh! Statistics and data, don't you just love em.

Change one little itsy bit of data, and it changes the whole game.

Some groups, such as our politicians and another unmentionable group have been past masters at this.

Joe, I have been concerned about the interpretation of statistics in regard indigenous people for many years. Given the huge increase in the number of fair skinned, urban dwelling people identifying as indigenous, we have to accept that the data is now seriously flawed.
How can you accept that health outcomes from such widely disparate economic and geographic groups can be lumped together, then averaged out and expect the result to be truly representative.
I would like to see the health figures for people living in remote areas, both indigenous and white, and used as a comparison against people living in urban/large town settings.
I would also like to see a comparison between indigenous and non indigenous health outcomes, based on socioeconomic factors. I would say that the results might surprise a lot of people.

There are also problems with the quality and availability of data. For example, deaths of Aboriginal people are not always recorded:

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/2A715635CFE929A8CA257943000CEFDF?opendocument

Data accuracy is improving in many ways, but this can create other problems – do changes in statistics over time represent improving or deteriorating quality of life, or simply better information?

Multimodal distributions are a useful tool for "social justice" rent-seekers of all stripes.

The disadvantage or systemic problems faced by those at the lower end are used to advocate for special treatments and funding that those at the upper end are, by virtue of already having better resources, able to leverage to their own advantage. In order for that situation to continue, which is obviously desirable if you are one of the beneficiaries at the upper end, it is important to ensure a couple of things, which the author has touched on. The conditions of those at the bottom must remain obviously below par and the multimodal nature of distribution of advantantage across the population must be minimised by averaging selectively.

Saul Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals, made this point decades ago and George Lakoff had a good popular treatment in his book Framing the Debate.

I'll leave it to the readers to think about some examples of such an approach within our modern Western societies. They're not hard to find. Look for any long-persistent situation of social disadvantage as a first step.

Hi Big Nana,

Yes, there are such huge differences between the conditions of life for people in remote settlements, and for people in cities, especially if they are working (in which case, their stats are not much different from those applying to other working Australians).

By lumping apples and oranges together, not only are funding and policy measures dissipated, but - much worse - the impression is given that stats relating to Aboriginal people are bad by virtue of the people being Aboriginal. No, the stats are bad because people 'choose' (or are forced by circumstances to 'choose') patterns of living which are destructive, regardless of what group they are associated with, NOT because of Aboriginality - that must be the most damaging and life-destroying 'analysis' possible (Christ save us from 'good intentions'): what alternatives does it leave people if they come to believe that their predicament is an inevitable consequence of who they are, and that therefore there is little they can do ?

The US psychologist Bernard Weiner has been working for decades on the proposition that we, all of us, make choices in relation to success or failure, in terms of whether or not we think factors affecting us are changeable (i.e. not innate), and manageable (i.e. not luck, or beyond our control), or not. Ultimately, he suggests, our outcomes depend on our efforts (putting it all very baldly). Check him out: look up 'Attribution Theory' on Wikipedia. Brilliant.

Life is, of course, incredibly hard for some people, and a breeze for others. But it should never, never, be impossible.

[I'm chewing over those other issues.]

Joe

Hi Big Nana,

You touch on a very, very sensitive subject, but one that will have to be confronted sooner rather than later. Yes, a high proportion of 'southern' or urban Indigenous people are pretty pale, often indistinguishable from Anglo-Australians, let alone so many non-White migrants. But technically, by choice, Indigenous.

Inter-marriage is necessarily high in urban areas, probably 90 % now, even 95 %. So many Indigenous people have not only an non-Indigenous parent, but three out of four non-Indigenous grandparents. Ray Martin has one Indigenous great-great-grandparent out of sixteen, and there are people claiming Indigenous status - and some of the perks that might go with it - who are even less Indigenous. But we're getting into dangerous, Andrew-Bolt, territory there.

But people know it. I recall an anguished conversation a friend had with me forty-odd years ago - like me, he had married an Indigenous woman; they had had two beautiful kids, blond and blue-eyed. At what point, he agonised, do people become something as well as, or even other than, Aboriginal ?

On the other hand, people are usually raised by their mother, and if a mother is Indigenous, children imbibe that status and outlook - after all, until recently, most Indigenous people knew only their Indigenous relations. My wife certainly didn't know anybody else but Aboriginal relations, uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, grandfather, etc., who passed through her small country town, staying overnight or a few days in a very crowded house, so there would have frankly been no other family or deep social links but Aboriginal.

But not so young Indigenous people these days, born and bred in the cities for two or three generations now. Culture ? Apart from knowing their Aboriginal relations, and a few words, laboriously learnt, and that bloody silly kangaroo dance, not much Aboriginal culture - and after all, for God's sake, people are in the city, mixing with other kids in the city, with all the modern conveniences and inconveniences of city life. They're city kids.

So yes: when ? Every new generation will test that question.

Joe

The whole program is fake as we know but the premise of "First Contact" was flawed, most if not all White Australians have met Aboriginals and a lot of us are related to them, we just don't realise it or don't know.
Looking at my old school photos there are quite a few little kids with streaky dark blonde hair, olive skin and Aboriginal features but nobody ever called them "Abos" or treated them differently.
There is also a large extended family of Aboriginals in town to whom I'm distantly related through intermarriage about 100 years ago and I'm sure a great many Whites would discover similar relationships if they looked into their family tree.

Hi Jay,

In the early days, once the first generation of Australian-born whites reached a mature age, organisations were set up, the Sydney Natives' Association, I think, and ultimately the Australian Natives' Association, formed in 1871, which were exclusively white and whose members called themselves Australian Natives. A local member of the Genealogical Society here found, to her surprise, that her great-grandfather had "Australian Native" on his death certificate. Aboriginal people were almost always referred to quite specifically as "Aboriginal Natives". It was an anti-British thing, local-born people smarting under the smug heel of some blow-in Pommy, sent out to rule over the colonials.

Of course, very many white people in Australia have now worked with, or for, Aboriginal people, or had fairly close relations with the odd family or individuals. That might come as a surprise to the Carlton St latte set, who have rarely had that experience, and so would be easily taken in by carefully-doctored programs like 'First Contact'.

In country towns, most whites would have gone to school with Aboriginal kids. Their fathers might have worked together. So there are very many white people (and other non-Aboriginal people) who have more concrete knowledge than would have been required to swallow the stuff on that program.

On averages: pretty much everything we know is a sort of aggregation or average of complex data. Yes, there are around 38,000 Indigenous university graduates, but two-thirds are women; 80 % or so are in the cities; the mix of study areas is much more towards Education, Nursing and the Social Sciences than the 'average' Australian graduate. While the 'average' graduate out there may have been in the work-force for twenty or thirty years, the 'average' Indigenous graduate has graduated only in the last fifteen years.

Averages conceal rather than reveal.

Joe

Joe,
Apologies, I edited my previous post on the fly and it doesn't make sense now.
Yes, exactly, I grew up in a small country town and my ancestors were among the first Whites to settle the district, if I recall the story correctly my great, great grandfather was widowed and his second wife whom he married when he was middle aged was Aboriginal and he had some kids with her, the descendants of those people, though related to the rest of my family now identify as Aboriginal rather than White.
I'm just pointing out that the way race relations are shown in these staged encounter groups is very much a black and white situation when in reality (in the southern states at least) Aboriginals and Whites lived side by side and were heavily intermarried and on friendly terms for the most part.
The other glaring issue is that only a minority of Aborigines live in places like Yuendemu or Wadeye, that those communities are purposely segregated and mostly closed to outsiders and have their own peculiar issues, as you've pointed out there's a wide variety of different experiences of growing up Aboriginal.

I reluctantly watched that show, because I knew it would be heavily staged and edited, and so it was. I have seen many communities and outstations but never one that looked like the Yolgnu one shown on the program. Obviously the cleaning crew had been in first and when I saw the toddler in a disposable nappy I laughed. Kids in outstations usually run around naked until they are toilet trained, at a minimum, sometimes longer. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with that, quite the reverse actually, but the show was dressed up for white consumption and to satisfy the cultural yearning of the large number of urban Indigenous. And why did no one ask how the children were being educated when they live in an outstation with only 20 people. They wouldn't qualify for a teacher, not enough kids, so obviously the kids either don't get educated or the outstation is close enough to the main community for the kids to travel into school daily. Hardly that isolated then. And how does SBS reconcile that pristine, utopian outstation with John Pilgers view of remote life?
Likewise the larger community. No sign of the inevitable card game, no stats on school attendance and it wasn't mentioned that although crowded houses are harder to keep clean, the disposable income is far greater than it would be in a typical nuclear family scenario. Even 5 adults in a house means over $1000 per week Income, then if you add Family Tax Benefit for the kids you are looking at thousands of dollars/ fortnight.
Sorry, but from my 40 plus years experience, that was fiction, and not very entertaining fiction either.

Hi Jay,

I'll stick my neck out and suggest that, up until the seventies, the 'lower classes', rural workers and the working class generally, often worked alongside Indigenous fellow workers - the first Indigenous generation after the war tended to inter-marry with working class people, very often NOT Anglo - Greeks, Italians, Yugoslavs, Indian-Fijians, Australian Chinese, Swedes, Maltese, 'Afghans', Japanese, Maori, Filipino.

Ironically, the Great Flowering of the intellectual class, under Whitlam, coincided with a decline in Indigenous access to working-class jobs, i.e. in the early to mid-seventies. And even as the intellectual/professional class was growing, it was still another generation before the Indigenous population followed suit: there were still only three thousand-odd Indigenous graduates in 1990, compared to 38,000 now. So the first generation of those rising professionals, now aged 40-60, had very little contact with Indigenous people, either as fellow-workers or as fellow-students. There is indeed a Gap between the Indigenous population and the experience of many professionals (except as indigent clients), let alone inter-marriage, which - I suspect - they would be horrified at the very thought of.

So the professional class, by its nature anti-government, is likely to believe the most outrageous assertions about the history of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. Since so many of them are in human services, i.e. the Welfare Industry, they tend to perceive Indigenous people as ONLY remote, welfare-oriented, and truly-ruly 'cultural' - to the point where, I suspect, they believe Indigeneity is innate, inescapable - pitiable, yes, but still they love it as authentic. Of course, little of it is.

Ergo: the new racists.

Joe

Typical use of data by governments plus many corporations. Look at the changes in CPI, UNEMPLOYMENT FIGURES, etc over a few decades. It is the old story "LIES, DAMM LIES AND STATISTICS"

Hi ALCAM,

Those statistics on Indigenous higher education participation are raw figures, derived from Indigenous students' self-reporting at universities. If anything, they may be an under-estimate of the real figures, since many Indigenous students don't tick the box.

But the bald figures do conceal, unless you look carefully, the facts that males are only half as likely to be participating, that some universities are doing a superb job and others a lousy job, and that the course selection is skewed away from STEP courses.

Joe