Peter Boyle
You will probably never meet Ken (not his real name). He's off to work at two o'clock each morning, a driver of a street-sweeping vehicle in a fast-gentrifying capital city suburb. He's been cleaning streets for 10 years. But it is not just the ungodly hour he goes to work: as an Indigenous Australian man, Ken has a 34-37% chance of dying before the age of 55. So your chances of bridging those famous six degrees of separation are significantly narrowed.
Against the odds I've got to meet Ken, and his radically poorer life chances fuels my fury against this system.
While most Australians enjoy amongst the highest standard of health and life expectancy in the world, the aid group Oxfam has revealed that Indigenous health in this country is comparable to that in some of the poorest countries in the world. And it is way below that of Indigenous people in New Zealand and Canada.
Just under half a million Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people suffer an average life expectancy 17-18 years less than other Australians, and 10 years less than the Maori and Canadian First Nations people.
Life expectancy at birth is estimated at 59 years for Indigenous men and 65 years for Indigenous women, compared to 77 years for non-Indigenous men and 82 years for non-Indigenous women, according to Oxfam's
special Commonwealth Games briefing paper (see
).
This is comparable top the life expectancy that applied to
non-Indigenous Australians 100 years ago and to current life expectancy figures in poor countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Guyana.
The infant mortality rate of Indigenous Australians is comparable to countries like Zambia and Sri Lanka. At 11.4 per 1000 it is far worse than the infant mortality rate of Maori (6.8 per 1000) and Canadian First Nations people (8.6 per 1000).
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner Tom Calma states bluntly that the lack of progress in Indigenous health cannot be explained as a result of there not being any answers to the problems faced by Indigenous people. He says it is a matter of taking the necessary steps to implement what are universally agreed solutions.
Death rates for Maori and indigenous Canadians dropped by 30% in the 1970s, and the Oxfam report argues that the same or better could have been done in Australia with the following measures:
1. Governments must provide resources to Indigenous health at a level that matches the dire need. The Australian Medical Association estimates that Indigenous primary health care is underfunded by at least $400 million a year.
2. Governments must support Indigenous control and participation in the planning, management and delivery of health programs and services. The experience in Australia, Canada and NZ confirms this.
3. Governments must support and enable a holistic approach to health, recognising the impact that broader social and economic factors have on health. People with low socioeconomic status have higher rates of death from all causes but issues such as community esteem and dignity, justice, racism and discrimination all have additional negative health impacts. Thus equally poor non-Indigenous Australians have 16 years'
greater life expectancy than Indigenous Australians.
Australia's shameful record on Indigenous health is so bad that many people, including some who are on the frontline, dealing with the day-to-day nightmare, despair of change. But an even broader layer of people sympathetic to the cause of Indigenous Australia face a barrage of government-supported propaganda that says public services have failed, and that therefore the solution lies in never-quite-articulated-in-any-detail corporate-Indigenous "community" deals.
A handful of well-known Indigenous political figures, including Noel Pearson and Australian Labor Party national president Warren Mundine, are lavished with media attention for their serial comments endorsing this reactionary pro-corporate approach.
Meanwhile, the grim toll in death and suffering continues to be exacted on this most-oppressed 2.4% of the population.
But there are some success stories that point to the real solutions at hand.
For instance, in the Tiwi Islands a 1990s trial in primary renal health care delivered significant improvements in the community's health, and saved up to $3.1 million on dialysis over three years.
Think about the measly $400 million-a-year Indigenous health shortfall next time you hear about the$2.5 billion annual subsidy to private health insurance companies. Last year the federal government budget was $13.6 billion in surplus.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, March 22, 2006.
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