I looked up the bureau of statistics a couple of months ago to verify some comments made by an aboriginal representative : worst health, short life expectancy and high infant death rate. All of these areas have improved greatly over the last couple of years. Government funding is enormous. The other points were : worst school attendance and very high juvenile crime rate. Despite increased funding these two areas have not improved. This is unfortunate but not something more money can fix, families have to start taking responsibility, getting the kids to school and off the streets.
Indigenous higher education (for some reason now separate to regular education?) also receives large Govt funding and there is much opportunity for scholarships and almost free education. The availability and affordability of education for indigenous, couldnt possibly compare to that of any other country. If this too was taken advantage of, the handout and welfare for life culture could be gone for the next generations.

Hi Jodelie,

You have to keep in mind that there are nowadays two fairly distinct Indigenous populations - one work-oriented, usually urban; the other welfare-oriented, usually outer-suburban, rural and remote. They have starkly different statistics:

* my bet is that the working, urban population has health, education, crime, etc. statistics very similar to those of other working, urban Australians;

* all of the dreadful statistics that you read and hear about are pretty much confined to the welfare-oriented population: far sicker, more into crime (let's be honest), heavier smokers, more into violence and abuse, far more suicides and murders, and far shorter lives. In fact, their situation ids actually far, far worse than the aggregated statistics suggest, horrible as they may be. Reality is far more horribler.

Welfare is a bit like ice cream - we all might need a bit of it, but far too much of it kills, by suffocation.

Meanwhile, in the cities, we are now getting into the third generation of Indigenous university graduates. The hard-working people who left the missions and country towns soon after the War, who struggled to raise their kids and improve their opportunities, by moving to find work in the cities and larger towns, and whose kids in turn struggled through secondary school and onto better employment than their parents could find, have laid the ground for far better futures for their own children. Effort often pays off.

Let's get something straight: those urban people (the majority of Indigenous people, by the way, in spite of all the myths) don't owe their welfare-oriented 'cousins' a bloody thing. Rural and remote people may like staying dead in the water, there will always be some Government program or other that they can run to. But none of them can say they have never had a chance. Of course, they have, today, now, so no more excuses. They're not half-wits.

Joe