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Indigenous population growth: have we had it wrong all this time?

By Joe Lane - posted Tuesday, 19 January 2016


By tracking back, even if it's a bit rough and ready, we can get a better idea also of the size of birth-groups, including those of the 'underlying population', and from this, we can derive a more accurate sense of the growth in the Indigenous birth-rate over the forty years from 1971 to 2011. According to these calculations,

* the 1971 birth cohort, those aged 0 to 4 years, numbers not 18,783 but closer to 39,500, even assuming low levels of mortality;

* from this, one can surmise that the increase in the Indigenous birth-rate over the past forty years has averaged barely 1.4 % each year, from 39,500 births in the 1971 Census to 67,414 in the 2011 Census;

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* and the total population at the 1971 Census was around 300,000-320,000, not 106,290;

* in other words, the Indigenous population was always much greater than assumed, and has risen by only two-thirds in forty years, not five times – only about 1.5 % each year on average. And the birth-rate has risen, on average, about 1.3-1.4 % per year, not 3.25 %.

But could it be just a matter of better counting ? If so, where - in remote areas or in the cities ? Paradoxically, perhaps this applies less to people in remote areas, who are usually already recorded, documented, registered, catalogued, tracked up hill and down dale, by a horde of government and agency functionaries. But in the towns and cities, where people have been living under the radar for generations, is it possible that there have always been many more Indigenous people than any officials realised ? In other words, 'under-count' and re-identification – the 'underlying population' - may be closely related: they may be measuring more or less the same populations. After all, the most rapid population growth, according to the raw figures, has been in urban areas, most certainly not in remote arras.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics seems to take all the Indigenous Census data for granted, as well as the rapid growth figures that they seem to demonstrate between 1971 and 2011. On that basis, the ABS predicts massive population rises by 2026 when, it declares, the Indigenous population will rise to 945,000. Would that that were so. But these figures above suggest a more sobering figure of somewhere between 650,000 and 690,000 in 2026 – provided that there are no more bursts of 're-identification', and that, as is likely, the birth-rate stays as low as 1 % p.a., lower than the Australian-born birth-rate as a whole. After all, from the second Table, by the time of the 2011 Census, the increase in birth-numbers had risen only by about 0.6 % per year since 1996.

If these figures are at all accurate, then there may not have been much increase since 1971 in the proportion of the Australian population which is Indigenous, or of Indigenous descent, or which had the discretion to identify as Indigenous: perhaps the Indigenous population has made up roughly 2.5 – 2.7 per cent of the total Australian population ever since the 1971 Census. And with such a low birth-rate, that share may actually be declining, population growth strongly bolstered by more people living longer, with lower mortality rates, rather than more babies being born. However, the Indigenous proportion of the Australian-born population may be rising slightly, given the healthy levels of immigration.

But other surprising factors need to be noted:

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* populations of school-age children seem to be rising in line with total population growth, making up about 21-23 % across the Censuses; but the numbers of Indigenous children completing Year 12 may have quadrupled since the turn of the century;

* while the population – certainly the Indigenous university-age population – may be rising at not much more than one per cent per year, annual increases in Indigenous commencements at universities has averaged seven per cent over the past ten years. [See: https://www.education.gov.au/student-data]. In the same time, the most relevant Census age-groups, those aged 20 to 29, have not really grown at all.

Another factor may explain the huge fluctuations in recorded population from one Census to the next, and most likely to encourage changes in the motivation to identify: under Labor governments, populations boomed from one Census to the next (in 1976, 1986, 1996 and 2011), by as much as a quarter in five years; but population growth, especially in younger age-groups, was much slower – and even negative – when Coalition governments were in power. In fact, almost a half of the supposed population growth recorded from the 1996 Census to the 2011 Census, was accounted for in the age-groups over 40: about 70,000 out of a total increase of around 160,000.

The upshot of all of this is that Censuses may be unreliable bases on which to make long-distance predictions about Indigenous population growth, or birth-rate growth. Those of us who have been expecting continued rapid Indigenous population growth may be badly disappointed.

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About the Author

Joe Lane is an independent researcher with a long-standing passion for Indigenous involvement at universities and its potential for liberation. Originally from Sydney, he worked in Indigenous tertiary support systems from 1981 until the mid-90s and gained lifelong inspiration from his late wife Maria, a noted leader in SA Indigenous education.

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