Excerpt from The Conversation article Three charts on: the changing status of Indigenous Australians by Dr Nicholas Biddle and Francis Markham:
A new dataset has shed fresh light on the changing socioeconomic status of Indigenous Australians. It shows that what appears to be slow progress or steady outcomes for the whole population may be masking worsening results.
This stems from how the Indigenous population is counted in the census and in surveys, and how that identification might change over time.
In each survey or census, people are asked to indicate if they are of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander origin. If they move in or out of the group classified as Indigenous, then this can appear in the aggregate as if people’s life-chances are changing. Rather, this may be an artefact of the group’s changing composition.