Areas of improvement or stagnation
Karen Chester, Deputy Chair of the Productivity Commission says "In this years report, which is the 7th in our series of Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage; report we do identify some areas where there has been some really good progress. They are in the area of early childhood, health and some aspects of education and economic participation.
On the health and well-being side we see that life expectancy and mortality rates have improved and there has been a very big reduction in infant mortality and what we call potentially avoidable deaths'.
The report shows that mortality rates for children improved between 1998 and 2014, particularly for children under one year whose mortality rates more than halved (from 14 to 6 deaths per 1000 live births).
Karen Chester also says 'In education there has been very good improvements in year twelve and post school education outcomes which are very encouraging but there is an absence of improvement in school learning outcomes in things like NAPLAN'.
Improvements in education can be observed through increases in the proportion of 20-24 year old's completing year 12 or above (from 2008 to 2014-15) and the proportion of 20-64 year olds with or working towards post school qualifications (from 2002 to 2014-15)
"So, it is a bit of a mixed story on education. In terms of economic participation there have been really some very good improvements there", says Karen Chester.
The Deputy Chair of the Productivity Commission adds that there are areas where some form of stagnation has been observed.
The Rates of family and community violence were unchanged between 2002 and 2014-15 (around 22 per cent), and risky long-term alcohol use in 2014-15 was similar to 2002 (though lower than 2008).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OorRPXeSs8
Areas of alarming deterioration.
The report also finds that there are areas where conditions have worsened.
Karen Chester says “The two main areas where outcomes have seriously deteriorated are in justice and mental health. The National Indigenous imprisonment rate has increased over 77% in the last fifteen years. That is 13 time the rate for non-indigenous adults.”
According to the report the proportion of adults reporting high levels of psychological distress increased from 27 per cent in 2004-05 to 33 per cent in 2014-15, and hospitalisation for self-harm increased by 56 per cent over this period
The report finds that the adult imprisonment rate increased by 77 per cent between 2000 and 2015, and whilst the juvenile detention rate has decreased it is still 24 times the rate for non-Indigenous youth.
Substance abuse is also on the increase.
Lack of proper evaluation
The OID report is produced by the Productivity Commission for the Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians involved in its development. This report is a must read for those involved in policy making for Indigenous Communities at all levels of government, including Federal, State and Territories
Surprisingly from the latest OID report, it appears that there is an incredible lack of proper evaluation and review of programs to identify the ones that work and the ones that don’t work.
Karen Chester says “We know that there is 30 billion dollars spent on improving the well being of Indigenous Australians. And we know that there is over a 1000 specific projects. We could only find 34 case studies; thirty four programs or policies which had been properly evaluated.
And even out of the 34, only 22 show a clear threshold of what could be a sound evaluation and 24 of them show sustained improvement and 10 out of the 34 were kind of identified as promising'.
The Deputy Chair of the Productivity Commission concludes that “The relatively small number of case studies included reflects a lack of rigorously evaluated programs in the Indigenous policy area'.