What Goes Unmeasured Is Ignored

by Ross Gittins - Sydney Morning Herald

Have the economic bean counters anything to contribute on the question of the abuse of indigenous children? As it happens, yes they do. The Productivity Commission has recently published a report, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage.

And late last week the chairman of the commission, Gary Banks, outlined the report's findings to an international conference in Istanbul in gruesome detail. Just as the indigenous community is facing up to these unpleasant issues, so our Government is revealing to the world the extent of our negligence.

Banks quoted various "headline statistics", starting with the fact that the life expectancy of indigenous people is 17 years lower than for Australians overall.

This is at least double the life expectancy gaps for the indigenous populations of New Zealand, Canada and the United States. In those countries the gap has narrowed significantly over time, but it hasn't in Australia.

A big part of our gap is explained by high infant mortality. Mortality rates for indigenous babies remain three times greater than for all Australian babies, as against about twice the difference in those other countries.

"There are also major gaps in virtually all children's health-related indicators, with the death rate for indigenous children from 'external causes and preventable disease', for example, being five times as high as for other Australian children," Banks confessed.

As indigenous people become adults, their health worsens. The incidence of kidney disease is 10 times higher than for other Australians; the incidence of diabetes is three times higher.

Indigenous students are only half as likely to complete high school. Their lower levels of achievement in reading, writing and numeracy are evident by year three. From this - plus other factors - follow a rate of participation in the labour force that's 22 percentage points lower and a rate of unemployment that's three times higher.

Indigenous Australians are greatly overrepresented in the criminal justice system, as both offenders and victims. Indigenous adults are 13 times more likely to be imprisoned and juveniles are 23 times more likely to be in detention.

And the reported incidence of suicide is up to three times greater for indigenous people.

With all the focus on the Northern Territory - where the Federal Government has the constitutional power to intervene - it's useful to put the indigenous population in geographical context.

Thirty per cent of indigenous people live in major cities (compared with two-thirds of the non-indigenous population), whereas 23 per cent live in the outer regions (compared with 10 per cent), 9 per cent in remote areas (1 per cent) and 18 per cent in very remote areas (1 per cent)

Out of sight, out of mind. Banks explained to his foreign audience that "in a country the size of Australia, remote really does mean remote: some Aboriginal outstations are several hours' drive from the closest small settlement and even relatively large communities can be cut off for weeks at a time during the wet season". He confessed to "a history of conflict and dispossession, loss of traditional roles, failed assimilation and passive welfare".

This leading spokesman for the economic hardheads came down in favour of a "holistic approach", noting that disadvantage not only has various dimensions, it has multiple causes.

Educational performance, for instance, is shaped by a range of influences from the earliest years of life. Many indigenous children have chronic ear infections when they first start school, which physically limit their capacity for learning.

Domestic violence or substance abuse at home will clearly have a major bearing on a child's school attendance and performance. And if children are not performing adequately by year three, they are much less likely to cope in subsequent years.

"This illustrates that poor educational performance, and all that flows from that, cannot be wholly laid at the door of education authorities. Responsibility for doing better needs to cross portfolios and to be at least partly borne by indigenous people themselves.

"In this sense, the report does not promote a blame game. It suggests that answers cannot be left to particular service providers to find their own. A whole of government approach, with community support, is needed," he said.

By the same token, improvements in some areas can have effects that are pervasive. For example, it's well established that overcrowding in housing contributes to adverse health outcomes as well as domestic violence, substance abuse and school performance. "It is thus an obvious target for policy action," Banks said.

Actually, the report contains no recommendations for action. Its focus is on collecting and publishing much better statistics on indigenous disadvantage.

It wants to get below the aforementioned headline statistics to develop detailed indicators of the key drivers of disadvantage in seven strategic areas, which it arrived at after consultations with indigenous organisations, communities and leaders. The key drivers include early childhood development, early school engagement, substance use, functional families, effective health systems and economic participation.

Trust the economists to be obsessed with bean-counting. How nerdish can you get? What a report to come out with at a time when people are calling for an end to all the reporting, planning and talking. Just do it.

But I'm happy to defend the bean counters. Unless we imagine we can move in, fix the problem and get out in six months, there's an important role for better information about the extent and dimensions of the problem and indicators of whether and where matters are getting better or worse.

I've been an economic journalist long enough to know the power of measurement. What gets measured gets reported and worried about; what goes unmeasured gets ignored.

When you collect and make readily available good statistics, you inform the public, provide ammunition for activists and oppositions, equip bureaucrats with the data they need to develop good policy, make it possible to set targets and give governments early feedback on the success or failure of those policies.

Assuming we're now going to get fair dinkum about removing disadvantage, we'll need all the data we can get. To imagine otherwise is, at best, naive.