No excuses

The vast difference in both life expectancy and “income” per head is very clear.

The category called Developing Countries, third behind High Development and Medium Development countries, have an average life expectancy of 65 years, nine years more than Aborigines and Islanders in Queensland, while Least Developed Countries show 52 years. Average life expectancy in South Asia is 64 years, in Sub-Saharan Africa 46 years. The average for all Low Income Countries, 59 years, is on a par with Australia’s Indigenous figure.

It is impossible to escape the conclusion the average duration of life for Australia’s Indigenous peoples is comparable to what is sometimes referred to as the Third World. And yet Aborigines and Islanders live in a country third on the rich list.

It is also impossible to avoid the conclusion it is poverty that is a prime cause of the high rates of sickness and other causes of death in Australia’s Indigenous communities. A conclusion well understood by many Australian doctors and the Australian Medical Association. But there was not one word about Indigenous health in the Federal Treasurer’s 2006 Budget speech.

Paul Farmer, Professor of Medicine at Harvard University, has run clinics for AIDS and other infectious diseases in USA, Haiti and Peru. In his book Infections and Inequalities he emphasised infectious diseases owe their existence and persistence as human killers most of all to poverty, which explained their prevalence in certain countries and communities.

“Studies compiled from the twelfth century onward”, he wrote, “show that the poor, quite simply, are sicker than the non-poor and that this is true in both rich and poor countries”.

Infectious diseases remain the world’s single most common cause of death and although the majority of deaths occur in the developing world, infectious diseases remain a major killer of America’s poor.

“Poverty and racism increase the likelihood of dire outcomes among the sick by restricting access to effective therapy or rendering it less effective if patients are malnourished or addicted”. Poverty also decreases the ability of patients to comply with lengthy treatment regimes, while “a growing body of data … reveals that income distribution is related to national mortality rates”.

The United Nations Human Development Report 2006 concludes: “The increasingly visible divides that separate the haves and the have-nots in rich countries have become a focal point for discontent. One of the central human development challenges in the decades ahead is to diminish the tolerance for extreme inequalities that have characterised globalisation since the early 1990s and to ensure that the rising tide of prosperity extends opportunities for the many, and not just the privileged few.”

Australia has no excuse; it is the third richest country in the world.