The federal government spends a lot of money trying to "close the gap"
between indigenous Australians and the rest of us. Actually, we've been
spending a lot for years without making much headway. So what should we
do?
I suspect there are people within Treasury and Finance who think
the answer's obvious: if the spending ain't working, give it the chop.
Didn't you know we have a deficit problem?
But the gap between us
is so wide in so many respects - life expectancy, health, income,
employment, victimisation, incarceration and education - we couldn't in
all conscience abandon our efforts to reduce it.
So I have a
radical suggestion: why don't the people in charge of the government
moneybags get off their backsides and put a hell of a lot more effort
into ensuring taxpayers' funds are spent more effectively? Instead of
wringing their hands, why don't they bring a bit of science to bear?
Last
week Dr Rebecca Reeve, a senior research fellow of the Centre for
Health Economics Research and Evaluation at the University of
Technology, Sydney, outlined to a meeting of the Economic Society the
results of her research evaluating the policies aimed at closing the
gap.
She used econometric tools to analyse several surveys
conducted by the Bureau of Statistics, noting that the nature of
indigenous disadvantage and the best solutions to it may depend on where
people are located.
It may surprise you that indigenous
disadvantage isn't limited to people living in remote areas. And the
majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders don't live in remote
areas. Indeed, more live in NSW than other states or territories. Of
those who do, 43 per cent live in major cities and another third live in
inner regional areas. Reeve's studies focused on people in the major
cities of NSW.
She found that rates of poverty were much higher
for indigenous people, home ownership was lower, significantly fewer had
completed year 12 and rates of employment were lower. The proportions
reporting their health to be poor or fair were at least double those for
other people. And the proportion who had been victims of assault was a
lot higher.
Although indigenous people make up only about 3 per
cent of the NSW population, they accounted for 23 per cent of prisoners.
Young people are 26 times more likely to be in juvenile detention.
That's
the gap. Reeve used sophisticated regression analysis to identify the
key drivers of those gaps. She found that having been at school beyond
year 10 made you more likely to be employed, as did participating in
more than four types of social activity.
Being a lone parent, being a married female with children or being disabled made you significantly less likely to be employed.
The
most significant predictors of having been a victim of physical or
threatened violence in the past year were being disabled or having
suffered stress from drug or alcohol use.
In this context,
"disabled" means having a health problem lasting six months or more.
Reeve found that by far the most significant predictor of being disabled
was having been a victim of assault.
By far the most powerful
predictor of being in jail was having been charged with some offence as a
child. And by far the most powerful predictor of having been charged as
a child was being male.
What these findings demonstrate is the
interdependence of the various aspects of indigenous disadvantage.
Problems such as involvement with the criminal justice system, long-term
ill-health, victimisation and not having a job are all connected.
In
a way, this is good news. It means targeting areas that are expected to
reduce one or more of these problems should also mean improvements in
other problems.
For instance, Reeve finds that an extra year of
education should improve someone's employment prospects directly, but
also improve them indirectly by reducing the likelihood of the person
being in jail.
And get this one: her findings suggest that
reducing drug and alcohol problems should reduce victimisation, which
should reduce long-term health problems, which should increase
employment, which should increase income.
The downside, however,
is that failure to generate improvements in the key drivers of
disadvantage will hinder progress in many areas.
The Council of
Australian Governments' national indigenous reform agreement recognises
the significance of interdependency: an improvement in one building
block is reliant on improvements in other building blocks.
But
though the COAG reform agenda aligns with Reeve's econometric evidence,
the "close-the-gap report card" finds that targets have not been
achieved in many areas. And in some areas gaps are widening.
A separate
study by Reeve and colleagues on factors driving the gap in rates of
diabetes also finds that, although programs are targeting the right
areas, there's been no reduction in the high prevalence of diabetes
among indigenous people.
I'd be surprised if Treasury and Finance
have shown any interest in learning from Reeve's research. The
usefulness of that research in showing "what works and what doesn't"
seems to have been limited by the lack of detail in the existing
official surveys it relied upon.
If we're to become better
informed about why all the money we're spending isn't delivering better
value we probably need to undertake more detailed, even purpose-built
surveys, including longitudinal surveys that make it easier to
distinguish between cause and effect.
But as we were reminded this
week with all the problems the bureau has had with its jobs survey,
successive governments have been reducing our statistical effort, not
increasing it.
If Treasury and Finance warned the Abbott government that
extracting yet more "efficiency dividends" from government agencies has
become counterproductive - making government spending more wasteful in
the name of making it less wasteful - there's been no whisper of it.
Reminds me of one of my father's sayings: too busy chopping wood to sharpen the axe.
