No excuses

Australian Indigenous people in general have life-spans on a par with some of the poorest countries in the world.

The average age of death for Queensland’s original peoples is 56 years, according to the 2006 Edition of Queensland’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Population, compared with the whole community’s average of 79 years (54 years for males compared with 76 and 58 years for females compared with 82).

The same general pattern has been seen across the country for a long time. The 2004 Senate Report on Poverty noted “life expectancy for Indigenous people is approximately 20 years less than … other Australians”. An Australian Bureau of Statistics report of 2005 says figures in this area are not entirely reliable, but their median lifespan for Indigenous males throughout the country was 59 compared with a non-Indigenous age of 77 years, the figure for women 65 and 83 years respectively.

In any case the difference is considerable, at least 18 years.

“Life expectancy” does not mean all members of a population live to that age. The Queensland report refers to it as a median, or average, of all the ages at which death occurs. Indigenous communities show a much higher infant and childhood death rate than non-Indigenous communities, so these fatalities, as well as those in old age, whatever the cause, contribute to the average life expectancy. This figure therefore reflects the general state of health, and also the state of the health services in the community.

The health and poverty profile of Australia’s Indigenous people is usually obscured from global attention because they are a very small proportion, less than 3 per cent, of the country’s total population. But a different picture becomes clear on examination of United Nations Human Development annual reports.

In the latest of these the Human Development league table shows Australia ranking number three, meaning it has, on the whole, the third highest standard of living in the world, measured by the Human Development Index. This includes a Long and Healthy Life, Knowledge, and a Decent Standard of Living, collections of many other research findings. There are 63 nations in the High Human Development bracket, the world’s richest countries, the first ten of them listed here.

The table shows how long, on average, a citizen in these countries can expect to live, and his or her comparative average “income”, or Gross Domestic Product per head, in US dollars.

In contrast, countries with average life expectancy figures similar to that of Australia’s Indigenous population, say between 50 and 65 years, are listed below. Again, the figure in the first column is the country’s position in the global league table of living standards, while in the fourth column, again, is the country’s average income, to compare, for instance, with Australia’s overall average of US$30,331 per head.

Countries with the HDI rank of 122 (Tajikistan) to 143 (Madagascar) are classed as Medium Human Development Countries, while those ranked 147 (Togo) to 163 (Benin) are Low Human Development Countries, along with a further 14 countries even worse off, down to the last, number 177.