The target to improve life expectancy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people by 2031 is not on track to be met, data from the ninth Closing the Gap report tabled to parliament on Tuesday shows.
The target to halve the gap in child mortality by 2018 is also not on track, despite longer-term improvements in child mortality rates between 1998 and 2015. Just one of the seven Closing the Gap targets – halving the gap in year 12 attainment by 2020 – is on track to be met.
The government’s Closing the Gap strategy aims to reduce disadvantage among Indigenous people, who sufferer from lower life expectancy, higher child mortality, lower educational achievement and poorer employment outcomes than non-Indigenous Australians.
But the latest report shows that while over the longer term the Indigenous mortality rate declined by 15% between 1998 and 2015 due to less deaths from circulatory diseases, the Indigenous mortality rate from cancer is rising and the overall mortality gap is widening.
And although the Indigenous child mortality rate declined significantly by 33% between 1998 to 2015, there was no statistically significant decline between 2008 and 2015, the report found.
However, the report also said there had been improvements in access to antenatal care for Indigenous mothers and the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mothers smoking during pregnancy had significantly declined. A lower proportion of babies are being born with a low birthweight. If there was continued improvement over the next year, there was some hope the 2018 childhood mortality target may still be met, the report said.
“Any increase in the number of deaths is always of concern and reminds us that there is no room for complacency about this target,” the report said.
“Further gains will be achieved by addressing the leading causes of Indigenous child death including conditions originating in the perinatal period (42% of Indigenous child deaths) such as birth trauma, foetal growth disorders, complications of pregnancy, and respiratory and cardiovascular disorders; sudden and ill-defined deaths such as sudden infant death syndrome (18%) and injury (13% of 0-4 year-old deaths and 54% of deaths for those aged 1-4 years).”
Between 2011 and 2015, 610 Indigenous children aged between zero and four years died. Of those, 500 were infant deaths of children less than one year old. The Northern Territory had the highest Indigenous child mortality rate, at 333 per 100,000, and the largest gap.
The target to halve the gap in reading and numeracy for Indigenous students by 2018 is also not on track, the report shows, despite significant improvements in the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students at or above the national minimum standard between 2008 and 2016.
“The four areas with significant improvement were years 3 and 5 reading, and years 5 and 9 numeracy,” the report found. “Nationally the proportion of Indigenous 20-24 year-olds who had achieved year 12 or equivalent increased from 45.4% in 2008 to 61.5% in 2014-15. Over the same period, the rates for non-Indigenous attainment did not change significantly. This means the target to halve the gap in year 12 attainment by 2020 is on track.”
The target to halve the gap in employment by 2018 is also not on track, the report found, though there has been a significant increase in Indigenous female employment over the longer term.
In his introduction to the report, the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said “while we celebrate the successes we cannot shy away from the stark reality that we are not seeing sufficient national progress on the Closing the Gap targets”.
“While many successes are being achieved locally, as a nation, we are only on track to meet one of the seven Closing the Gap targets this year,” he said. “Although we are not on track to meet the ambitious targets we have set, we must stay the course.”
High rates of suicide and disproportionately high rates of incarceration among our First Australians were issues that all governments, in partnership with community, need to work tirelessly to resolve, he said.
A professor of public health with RMIT university and a mission-born Aboriginal woman who grew up on Darkingjung country, Auntie Kerrie Doyle, said the findings revealed that Aboriginal Australians were “still suffering the burden of colonisation”.
“We always knew that achieving change within a generation would be impossible because it takes generations to repair the damage that has occurred over generations,” she said.
“I work with the World Health Organisation on their global burden of disease report and some countries like Ethiopia are doing really well in meeting targets to improve health, while Australia is struggling to get some really basic things right when it comes to Indigenous people.
“We still have the burden of colonisation, we still have people without access to water, we still have too many people living in poverty.”
This was leading to high rates of depression and suicide among Aboriginal people, Doyle said.
“Their communities are so fractured, a lot of people have been moved off country, and these people are having a really hard time. When you are depressed, you don’t eat well, you don’t go to to the doctor, you don’t go to the hospital. It is a huge issue.”
She praised those people running health initiatives that had led to significant improvements, including Dr Tom Calma’s work with the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation to tackle Indigenous smoking, and the work of the Fred Hollows Foundation to help provide eye care to Indigenous Australians and to train a local workforce in Indigenous eye care.
“There are really great things happening,” Doyle said. “And all the best initiatives are community-driven and community-led.”
