AUSTRALIA MINORITY PROFILE
Profile
Aboriginal peoples have lived in Australia for at least 50,000 years and probably longer; they currently represent around 3 per cent of the population. The largest population concentrations are in urban areas, but Aboriginal peoples achieve numerical dominance in the more remote northern and central areas of Australia. In the south-east of Australia many Aboriginal populations and languages have declined or disappeared, whereas in the north and west a number of languages have more than 10,000 speakers.
Although Aboriginal communities in the south and east are more likely to be involved in the wider social and economic environment, they are no less likely to perceive themselves as Aboriginal than those who are more physically remote from large urban areas, and live in more exclusive communities.
Approximately one per cent of Australia’s indigenous population report affiliation with Australian Aboriginal traditional religions, with the number rising to six per cent in more remote areas.
In the last four decades the Aboriginal population has grown steadily. That growth has been a result of higher birth rates, reduced infant mortality and growing identification of indigenous people in official counts.
Historical context
Before the European invasion and settlement, Aboriginal peoples were migratory, often over long distances, and were primarily dependent on some combination of hunting, gathering and fishing. Social organization was complex, closely and intricately linked to the land and related to beliefs concerning the spiritual world. After 1788 such lifestyles began to change as Aboriginal peoples were displaced from land, wars were fought, women were raped and new diseases resulted in high death rates. The actual extent of direct European impact has been a topic of considerable recent contention in what has been styled the ‘history wars’. During the nineteenth century most of the south-eastern tribes, especially in Tasmania, were fragmented and marginalized. In inland areas violent attacks on Aborigines continued until the interwar years.
The Aboriginal population declined from perhaps a million people in 1778 to no more than about 70,000 in the 1930s. It was hitherto assumed (the belief in ‘Social Darwinism’) that the Aboriginal population would eventually die out and the most enlightened government policies sought merely to ‘smooth the dying pillow’ of the indigenous population. Nevertheless population numbers grew. Aboriginal peoples took up employment in cattle stations and in urban areas, and official policy increasingly moved towards one of assimilation. Health, education and other services were slowly extended into remote areas. However, so-called ‘half-castes’ (i.e. persons of mixed ancestry), who were regarded by whites as quite different from ‘full-bloods’, were driven into white institutions by legislation preventing them remaining on reserves. So-called ‘full-blooded’ Aboriginal people were to be dispersed.
Forcible separation of families
One of the most harmful elements of the new approach was the separation of children from parents when parents, for one reason or another, but often without foundation, were regarded as unsuitable and inadequate. Such children were often permanently separated from their families, including other siblings, brought up on mission stations and by foster parents, and denied access to knowledge of their own Aboriginality, let alone knowledge of Aboriginal languages and traditions. In 1995 the federal government mounted a Commission of Inquiry to examine the possibility of compensation for Aboriginal people who had been victimized and harmed in this way, but the ensuing Liberal coalition government ended any notion of reconciliation and compensation, and conservative commentators have mounted a fierce polemical campaign against the notion of the ‘stolen generation’ (indigenous children separated from their families by welfare workers, missionaries and government officials).
By the 1940s Aboriginal rights activists had formed their own organizations, such as the Australian Aborigines’ League and Aborigines’ Progressive Association, to campaign for improved status and better access to employment and services. The wartime employment of Aboriginal people had changed their perceptions of status and equality, as some were paid wages and shared the same accommodation and canteen facilities as whites. However, they had no legal status (and Aboriginal dispute settlement procedures were not recognized), no political status (being without the vote and denied citizenship) and were excluded from censuses, while assimilation policies denied them a separate identity. Many Aboriginal people, displaced from their land, with limited education and inadequate employment, were an impoverished and destitute population. Discrimination was rife in every context.
Assimilation policies
As late as 1951 the federal and state governments officially adopted assimilation as the main objective for all facets of Aboriginal affairs, but strategies varied between governments, partly because of differences in political composition. In 1967 it was decided that the federal government should legislate for all Aboriginal peoples, though states could also enact laws. For the first time, Aboriginal people were counted in censuses, and during the 1960s many discriminatory laws were repealed; Aboriginal people gained entitlement to state benefits and the right to vote. More attention was given to appropriate health and education policies, as their living conditions, health status and life expectancy were significantly below those of other Australians.
However, Aboriginal people were sometimes employed for very low wages and housed inadequately, especially in rural areas. Even when Aboriginal people could gain employment, they often faced discrimination in working conditions and wages. In Queensland and other regions, Aboriginal stockmen and other workers were paid low wages, with the money often held – and retained – in government controlled funds. Today, Aboriginal communities with the support of the Australian trade union movement are mounting a ‘stolen wages’ campaign to seek recompense.
In 1966 Aboriginal stockmen at Gurindji (Wave Hill) went on strike against their exploitation by the multinational Vestey Corporation, a strike which focused widespread attention on the circumstances of the Aboriginal population and marked the start of the contemporary land rights movement. There was more radical opposition to the existing system as Aborigines gained higher educational levels and parts of white society supported human rights issues, as in the Freedom Ride of 1965 which took a group of students to a number of New South Wales towns notorious for their racist practices. Two different kinds of issues were influential in the 1960s. One was civil rights: the rights of Aboriginal people to attend white schools, own property, buy land, drink in hotels and generally to integrate in white society. The other was a revival of cultural identity and thus land rights. Though the two issues were away from and towards white society, because Aboriginal peoples suffered both the denial of civil rights and a separate identity, they were intertwined.
Government and legal steps forward
The 1970s marked a turning point in Aboriginal control of their internal affairs, following the conservative Liberal and Country Party government rejection of land rights and the establishment of an Aboriginal tent embassy outside Parliament House in Canberra. The Australian Labour government, elected in 1972, promised changes, created a National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC) and set up the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, but left much unaccomplished. Throughout the 1970s, a central feature of the Aboriginal rights movement was the creation of self-managed and self-determining institutions, such as Aboriginal legal services and Aboriginal health services – institutions that are under threat today due to lack of funding and pressure for ‘mainstreaming’ by conservative governments.
An important development was the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, enacted by the Liberal government in 1976, which handed over former reserve land in the Northern Territory to be held in trust by Aboriginal Land Councils: the Central and Northern Land Councils. Other land councils were formed in the 1980s. The Act provided the basis for some degree of long-term security and economic development for the Aboriginal population in the Northern Territory. During the 1970s other states sought to develop similar legislation, notably in South Australia, where the Pitjantjatjara people gained ownership of much of their land. However, conservative states, notably Queensland (which has the largest Aboriginal population in Australia), were reluctant to grant rights to Aboriginal peoples and mining interests were also often opposed. In Queensland, before it was repealed, the Aboriginal and Islanders Act 1971 prevented Aboriginal people from living or visiting reserves of their choice and forced them to work for below minimum wages.
The Aboriginal Development Commission was set up in 1980 and brought together various government-sponsored bureaus of land acquisition and economic enterprise which gave the Aboriginal commissioners powers to act without direct ministerial interference. However, relationships within the National Aboriginal Conference (the successor to the NACC) began to deteriorate, and pressures from some state governments and the Australian Mining Industry Council drove the federal government further away from the minimum demands of Aboriginal pressure groups (which now included the land councils and Aboriginal legal services) which centred on the implementation of a policy of national uniform land rights. There was considerable dismay when the Labour government abandoned the proposal in 1986. However, the land councils, housing associations, cooperatives and many other organizations indicated that regional management was almost entirely in Aboriginal hands. At a national level the failure of national land rights proposals emphasized that Aborigines had little more power than before; they had achieved considerable self-management but not self-determination.
The second half of the 1980s was marked by a number of institutional changes. In 1988, the bicentennial year, some 30,000 Aboriginal activists and their non-indigenous supporters marched through Sydney to protest against the invasion and subsequent displacement and discrimination. The Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, promised to negotiate a treaty between Aboriginal peoples and the Australian government, but the promise was never kept, and was effectively superseded by Mabo legislation and, to a lesser extent, debate over the existence of an early treaty in Tasmania. In the same year the Department of Aboriginal Affairs was replaced by a new structure, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ Commission (ATSIC), which enabled greater indigenous participation and was intended to draw together the executive, advisory and policy-making functions of many government and non-government Aboriginal organizations. Elections for membership of the ATSIC were held in constituencies of indigenous people across Australia.
The Mabo judgment
The treaty had failed to materialize, and the federal government’s Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation had produced no recommendations, when in 1992 the Mabo Judgment of the Australian High Court was passed. The court, following initial submissions by Eddie Mabo, a Torres Strait Islander, recognized that the people of Murray Island, in Torres Strait, held and continued to hold Native Title to their land. The court therefore extinguished the old notion of terra nullius, that the land was empty and without owners until European settlement. In 1993 the federal government accepted the implications of the Mabo Judgement for the whole of Australia, in the Native Title Act, and thus recognized the continued existence of Native Title for all areas of Crown land held by the states and the Commonwealth, where it had not been specifically extinguished. Tribunals were established in all states to determine the eligibility of Native Title claims. The act confirmed the potential to settle difficult cases by negotiation and created a land acquisition fund to meet the needs of dispossessed indigenous peoples who would not otherwise be able to claim Native Title (though financial assistance proved difficult to obtain). The Federal Native Title Act met particular resistance in Western Australia where it was perceived by the conservative State government as having the potential to restrict mining companies from operating in a large proportion of the state. The Mabo decision thus influenced debate on state rights. It has also led to some new agreements between Aboriginal peoples and mining companies. Initially Native Title has been the source of both cohesion and dispute as the opportunity of gaining title has opened up both expectations of the return of country and also tensions and wounds around connections to country, family histories and community relationships. In late 2006 the Federal Court recognised native title over land in the city of Perth, the first time that native title has been recognised over a metropolitan area. The decision was unexpected, since a similar court hearing in 2002 had rejected Yorta Yorta claims to land on the New South Wales-Victorian border on the grounds that the Aboriginal population had not maintained unbroken contact with the land. The Perth decision was strongly welcomed by the local Noongar community and by Aborigines elsewhere, but was greeted with considerable concern but politicians from the two main parties. In every way the Native Title Act is central to the process of reconciliation between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and other Australians.
The Howard years
The Australian government under John Howard, rejected measures it dubbed ‘symbolic reconciliation’ – negotiations on a treaty with Aboriginal Australia, further action on the recommendations of the Royal Commission into deaths in custody, and an apology for the ‘stolen generation’ (indigenous children separated from their families by welfare workers, missionaries and government officials). Instead, it is moving on ‘practical reconciliation’, by dismantling Aboriginal-run institutions and ‘mainstreaming’ specialist services (previously run by and for indigenous Australians) into government departments. A 2005 Senate Committee on the Administration of Indigenous Affairs expressed concern that specialist organizational and cultural knowledge developed by self-managed organizations will be lost if funding for indigenous programmes is folded into Australian government agencies. However some Aboriginal leaders, notably Noel Pearson, also spoke out on the need to address social issues and remove welfare dependency. Mutual responsibility, employment and private home ownership have been seen as key themes in shifting the extent and considerable opportunity cost of welfare dependency.
Indigenous community leaders also lobbied for government action on the ongoing social and health crisis, including an epidemic of petrol sniffing in rural communities and significant violence against indigenous women and children. A 2001 study on violence in Aboriginal communities by the National Crime Prevention Programme estimated that the rate of deaths from family violence in indigenous communities is 10.8 times higher than for the non-indigenous population. Faced with significant failures in the criminal justice system, there has been increased emphasis in recent years on restorative justice mechanisms for addressing criminal behaviour in indigenous communities, and women are heading key community initiatives for youth employment and community reconciliation.
In October 2006 somewhat unexpectedly the Tasmanian state government announced a government apology and A$4 million compensation scheme for members of the ‘stolen generation’: those wrongfully removed by welfare agencies between approximately the 1930s and the 1950s. The package intended to remove a key barrier to reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Tasmanians. While Tasmania is both the smallest state and has the smallest Aboriginal population, the move was strongly supported by Aboriginal groups throughout the country as a model for reconciliation and a means of revitalisation of debate and action on reconciliation.
Current issues
On every index of human needs Aboriginal peoples still fare worse than other Australians. Aboriginal life expectancy is still around a decade lower than that of other Australians, and infant mortality rates remain much higher than those of non-Aboriginal Australians. Diseases which are largely absent from other populations, such as trachoma and leprosy, continue to exist, and diabetes and renal disease reach high levels. Malnutrition is not unusual. Alcoholism is pervasive in both urban and rural communities.
Aboriginal housing conditions are poor, especially in rural areas, where there is also inadequate access to water supplies, health and education services. Education levels are below average, and there are disproportionately fewer high school and university graduates. Levels of unemployment are often very high, in small towns and remote communities where a combination of discrimination, lack of employment opportunities and sometimes an unwillingness or inability to work have led to a demoralized population. Most Aboriginal people who are employed are in lower skilled jobs.
The Aboriginal prison population and number of deaths in custody per head of population is still much higher than for the population as a whole. This situation has been exacerbated by the increasing use of draconian measures such as paperless arrest powers that have seen Aborigines targeted disproportionately for arrest and detention, often for minor offenses such as drunkenness. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, indigenous imprisonment rates increased by 51.5 per cent between 2000 and 2010. Though they make up only around 3 per cent of the overall population, indigenous Australians comprise 27 per cent of the country’s prison population. This is even higher in some regions, with Aboriginal youth making up 98 per cent of detained juveniles in the Northern Territory. Incarceration of indigenous young people is a particular issue; they are 24 times more likely to be behind bars than other Australians of their age group.
In recent years, a number of well publicized cases have highlighted the ongoing concern over Aboriginal deaths in custody: the death of Kumanjayi Langdon, a Warlpiri elder, who died in May 2015 alone in a Darwin police cell, after being locked up under the paperless arrest laws, and the initiation of a Coronial Inquest into the death of a young Aboriginal woman, Ms Dhu, in August 2014. Dhu died in agony from untreated septicaemia after being incarcerated in South Hedland police station for not paying around AU$3,500 worth of fines.
Aboriginal Australians have a long and unhappy experience of urbanization – forcibly taken from their lands at the time of the notorious policies of assimilation, Aboriginal Australians have experienced the worst of all aspects of urbanization: from the mid-nineteenth century they were isolated from their culture and traditions, introduced to alcohol and drugs, and not given access to decent jobs or education. The consequences of this history of forced displacement to urban settlements is still seen today, with high rates of alcoholism and drug dependence among Aboriginal youth and poor health compared to non-Aboriginal Australians across a wide range of health outcomes, including diabetes, maternal nutrition, heart disease and various lifestyle-related health problems.
These challenges remain to this day. Urban Aboriginal people are still often forced to choose between homelessness or overcrowded, low-income accommodation. Urban areas often lack the benefits of traditional healthy lifestyles, such as indigenous foods and medicines, with unhealthier alternatives such as processed foods and drinks taking their place. Indigenous peoples can also face more exposure in urban settings to infectious diseases and environmental pollution, including exposure to sexually transmitted diseases, particularly for indigenous women.
Updated November 2017
Profile
Australia’s South Sea Islanders mostly around Mackay in north Queensland. Their exact numbers are uncertain, though estimates range from around 10,000 to 15,000-20,000 and even 30,000 – 60,000. The 2011 Census identified just over 4,000 South Sea Islander responses.
Historical context
Between 1863 and 1904 more than 55,000 Melanesians (then known as Kanakas) were recruited, mainly from the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and Solomon Islands, to work in the cane fields of Queensland. After the end of the contract labour system most returned, but more than 2,000 remained in Australia, many around Mackay in north Queensland.
Descendants of these Melanesian migrants, who suffered less institutional discrimination than their parents, gained housing from the Aboriginal and Islander Advancement Corporation in the 1960s, but access to education was inadequate and South Sea Islanders became one of the poorest groups in Australia. Although white Australians regarded them as Aborigines, they were not eligible for the benefits given to Aboriginal peoples unless they denied their South Sea Islander origins, and do not have land rights like other indigenous Australians.
In 1977 a Royal Commission into Human Relationships recommended that they be given access to the same benefits that were available to Aborigines. By the 1990s, the 11,000 South Sea Islanders were disadvantaged in terms of such basic needs as home ownership, health, education and employment; the unemployment rate was 28.5 per cent, two and a half times the national average, and few were employed in skilled occupations. South Sea Islanders continued to experience the outcome of a history of exploitation and racial discrimination similar to that of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, but were unrecognized as a distinct group. A 1992 Inquiry by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission recommended that they be formally recognized as a distinct disadvantaged group, and that schemes comparable with those available to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples be made available to them. In 1994 the government accepted these recommendations and South Sea Islanders began to move towards a new future. While their cultural distinctiveness is recognised they have increasingly become absorbed into the wider community.
This recognition came later in Queensland, and it was only in July 2000 that the Queensland government formally recognised South Sea Islanders as a distinct ethnic and cultural group and acknowledged their contribution to Queensland’s development. The government also recognised the discrimination, injustice, disadvantage and prejudice experienced by Australian South Sea Islanders throughout history and the significant disadvantage the community still faces today.
Current issues
There is a need for not only recognition of the Australian South Sea Islanders as a distinct cultural group but a real need to start implementing some positive changes to assist South Sea Islanders in employment, services and other areas. Since federal recognition in 1994 and Queensland recognition in 2000 there has been minimal change, and community workers are seeking funds allocated to allow ‘area specific’ Australian South Sea Islander (ASSI) agencies to hire community development workers to work specifically with South Sea Islanders. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services have serviced South Sea Islanders in some areas for many years, but South Sea islanders are seeking government resources to meet their needs and allow them to have appropriate service without prejudice.
A key concern of South Sea Islanders are the stolen wages of ancestors. Evidence suggests that the wages of approximately 15,000 men who died while working as indentured labourers in the sugar cane fields were not paid to their families; the amount would be the equivalent of AU$40 million today.
Over the past decade, there have also been efforts to establish links with relatives in Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Solomon Islands.
Updated November 2017
Profile
The Melanesian Torres Strait Islanders have lived in the islands north of Queensland for at least 10,000 years and are closely related to the nearby Papuan people of Papua New Guinea. There is some mobility between the two areas. The Torres Strait Islanders have two main Melanesian languages (and a pidgin English) and is increasingly concentrated in the urban centre of Thursday Island (within the Torres Strait). In the twentieth century there was considerable migration to the Cape York peninsula on the mainland and to the large urban centres of Cairns, Townsville and Brisbane.
Historical context
Because of their marginal location Torres Strait Islanders largely escaped the early excesses of European invasion and settlement until well into the nineteenth century, when a pearling and trading economy began to develop.
In 1982 Eddie Mabo and four other Meriam people of the Murray Islands in Torres Strait sought to confirm their traditional land rights in the High Court. They claimed continuous enjoyment of their land rights to Murray Island (Mer) and thus that these rights had not been extinguished by the annexure of the islands by the Queensland government in 1879. The case took ten years, during which time Eddie Mabo and three other plaintiffs died, but in 1992 the High Court upheld the claim. There has been growing pressure for increased self-determination and, in the late 1980s; there was pressure for self-government (along the lines of that in the Cook Islands) because of what was perceived as neglect by the federal and Queensland state governments. Greater powers were subsequently devolved to the Island Councils, and there are now eighteen of these, and to the Torres Strait Regional Authority that was established in 1994. The TSRA has 20 representatives and is responsible for a range of economic and cultural issues. The establishment of the TSRA has reduced demands for substantially greater autonomy.
Current issues
The contemporary economy is based on fishing, but much of the population is dependent on welfare services. There is some contemporary concern over island flooding. Islanders have experienced discrimination and inadequate access to employment and services. Land issues have posed problems in the Torres Strait. The Australian government is concerned over drug, people and gun smuggling through the Torres Strait between Australia and Papua New Guinea.
Updated November 2017
ABOUT AUSTRALIA
Main minority or indigenous communities: Aboriginal peoples, Torres Strait Islanders and South Sea Islanders.
Main languages: Aboriginal languages (about 150), English
Main religions: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism.
Indigenous peoples include Aboriginal peoples, Torres Strait Islanders and South Sea Islanders. According to the 2016 census, the indigenous population of Australia was 649,171 people, or 2.8 per cent of the total Australian population. Of these, 91 per cent are of Aboriginal origin only and 5 per cent were reported to be of Torres Strait Islander origin, with an additional 4.1 per cent identifying as being of both origins. Estimates for Australia’s South Sea Islanders community vary widely, though most estimates are in the range of 15,000 – 20,000.
Australia’s history has been strongly shaped by migration, beginning with the arrival of British settlers 200 years ago, but more recently expanding, since the end of the Second World War, to encompass widespread migration from southern Europe, in particular Greece, Italy and Yugoslavia. Over the past two decades immigration to Australia has further diversified, with substantial migration from Asia further changing the population composition. According to the 2016 census, 49 per cent of the population was either first- or second-generation Australian.
The historic indigenous populations – the Aboriginal and the Torres Strait Islander peoples – are more evenly distributed and, despite being 2.8 per cent of the total population, represent over 25 per cent of the population in the Northern Territory.
Since the colonization of Australia began in the eighteenth century, its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have suffered generations of violence and marginalization. Indigenous Australians remain in situations of extreme disadvantage compared to non-indigenous Australians across a range of human rights and development indicators, including health, education and income.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians continue to experience lower levels of access to health services than the general population: 2015-17 data shows that, while there the gap has narrowed slightly, indigenous life expectancy for males (71.6 years) and females (75.6 years) is still 8.6 and 7.8 years lower respectively than their non-indigenous counterparts. They are more likely to be hospitalized for most diseases and conditions; to experience disability and reduced quality of life due to ill health; and to die at younger ages than other Australians. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples also suffer a higher burden of emotional distress and possible mental illness than that experienced by the wider community. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women also experience poorer health across all areas compared with non-indigenous women.
One challenge in terms of service access and development is the geographical seclusion of many rural indigenous communities. While the country as a whole is highly urbanized, with almost 90 per cent of Australians now living in urban areas, the proportion is significantly lower among the indigenous population; over 20 per cent are still based in areas classified as remote or very remote, compared to less than 2 per cent of the non-indigenous population. Many of these isolated communities, particularly in the Northern Territory, struggle with higher levels of child mortality, poor living standards and lack of access to essential services such as health care. These issues are compounded by a lack of culturally appropriate programmes and limited opportunities for bilingual education, with a large proportion of indigenous children in more remote areas of the country barely able to read or write. Though some remote indigenous communities face significant challenges, the announcement in November 2014 by the Western Australia state government that as many as 150 of its 274 Aboriginal communities would be shut down sparked widespread outrage among Aboriginal Australians and rights activists. Amnesty International noted that the plan to evict traditional owners from their homes would cause considerable trauma to the communities and that for them migration to larger urban centres would present an even higher risk of substance abuse, crime and other issues.
These and other policies have exacerbated problems such as cultural dislocation, poverty and exclusion, resulting in a heavy toll on mental health. In Australia, suicide rates among indigenous youth have reached epidemic levels and are among the highest in the world, a phenomenon reportedly not seen even a generation ago. According to the Australian Department of Health, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and girls, the highest suicide rate was for ages 20–24, 21.8 deaths per 100,000, five times the non-indigenous female rate for that age group. The severity of the situation was highlighted by reports that at least 62 indigenous people, including 15 children, had died as a result of suicide between January and mid-May 2019, prompting campaigners to call for more effective government interventions.
In the Northern Territory, since the commencement of the so-called Northern Territory Intervention in 2006, considerable resources have been allocated to the task of extending the reach of mainstream forms of policing and governance. However, this approach has eroded indigenous communities and led to elevated rates of incarceration. Indeed, indigenous peoples make up about 30 per cent of the Territory’s residents but more than 80 per cent of its prison population. Of particular concern in this regard is the use of paperless arrest powers in the Northern Territory following the passing in 2014 of Section 133AB of the Police Administration Act (NT), allowing the police to detain a person in custody for up to four hours without a warrant if they suspect that person has committed, or is about to commit, an ‘infringement notice offence’. Indigenous community leaders and other advocates have expressed concerns that these expanded powers are having a disproportionate impact on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Northern Territory, perpetuating the disproportionate levels of indigenous people in custody for minor offences, such as drunkenness, swearing or making too much noise. These problems are evident across the country, with 2018 government data showing a 45 per cent rise in the incarceration rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples since 2008: indigenous men and women are 15 and 21 times more likely respectively to be incarcerated than their non-indigenous counterparts. Comprising 2 per cent of the population in total, indigenous Australians nevertheless make up 28 per cent of the adult prison population.
The outbreak of a series of devastating wildfires during 2018 and early 2019 in Australia, amidst record-breaking temperatures, has highlighted the significant risks posed by climate change. While posing a threat to all Australians, the impacts are already impacting disproportionately on the country’s indigenous populations. For instance, with the disapperance of vast sections of the Great Barrier Reef to large-scale bleaching, coastal indigenous communities who depend on the reef for its natural resources and to uphold cultural, spiritual and social values are already contending with profound loss. Intense heatwaves have also devastated various forms of wildlife. Following the deaths of millions of fish in the Murray-Darling River basin in three massive kill events in early 2019 as a result of drought and water mismanagement, hundreds of Aborigine activists demonstrated in March, calling for greater indigenous involvement in managing the river system. Local Aboriginal community members emphasized that what had happened was not only an ecological disaster but a profound cultural one as well.
Australia continues to attract international criticism for its harsh immigration and asylum policies, including mandatory detention, the turning back of boats with asylum seekers found at sea and the removal of asylum seekers to offshore processing centres in other countries, such as Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, where reports of human rights violations have been common. Independent investigations have highlighted evidence of sexual and physical assaults on children and adults, inhumane living conditions and deteriorating mental health among many detainees: between 2013 and early 2019, 12 people have died in detention in Manus Island and Nauru, including two suicides. At the same time, asylum seekers living in Australia had their housing and income support ended by the government in August 2018, leaving them even more vulnerable.
Some commentators have suggested that the harsh asylum policies, which enjoy wide popular support, are driven not only by border security but also by the legacy of exclusionary attitudes among white Australians towards non-Caucasian migrants as well as the indigenous population in general. Australia’s shifting demographic in recent decades as a result of migration, particularly from Asia and the Middle East, has been contested by a growing climate of intolerance towards ethnic and religious minorities. This has been exacerbated by a number of violent incidents as well as prevented attacks on Australian soil, including the deadly siege of a café in Melbourne by an Australian of Somali origin in June 2017 and the stabbing of three civilians, one fatally, in November 2018. Attacks such as these may have helped intensify already widespread feelings of Islamophobia among the general population, reflected in frequent incidents of hate crime against Muslims, particularly women.
Environment
The vast continent of Australia is geographically diverse and thinly populated, with most of the population concentrated in five main coastal cities. The population density is less than three per square km and is one of the lowest in the world. Much of the continent is drought-prone.
History
Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples represent the most ancient civilization in the world, extending back more than 50,000 years. Their ancestors were believed to have been the first people to cross an ocean and after reaching Australia settled across the country. Numbering hundreds of thousands by the time the first colonialists arrived, they sustained themselves through a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and maintained a close spiritual connection with their territory.
European colonization began in 1788 and resulted in the expropriation of Aboriginal land, warfare, massacres and disease, and declining population numbers. Though most of the original colonial population was British, the sources of migration became more diverse, especially in the second half of the twentieth century. There was significant Chinese migration in the mid-nineteenth century, but after 1901 the ‘White Australia policy’ virtually ended Asian migration for half a century.
After the war a migration programme was introduced. This resulted in the extraordinary diversification of Australian society. By the 1980s there were more than a hundred nationalities in Australia; many post-war migrants were from southern Europe and subsequently west and South-East Asia. By 2000, Chinese dialects had become the most commonly spoken non-English language. Originally, migrant communities were expected to assimilate with the majority population. However, by the mid-1970s, the policy of assimilation began to give way to a policy of multiculturalism, where all Australians had the right to express their cultural heritage (including language and religion) and to receive social justice in terms of equal treatment and opportunity (without barriers of race, ethnicity, culture, religion, language, gender or birthplace). Two decades later, the approach changed again, with restrictions placed on migration and government policy shifting towards selectivity, based on skills needed for economic development.
Australia’s economy was long based on the export of agricultural and mining products, but though these remained of considerable importance, they became less important than manufacturing and the service sector as a source of employment and economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s. This evolution contributed to urbanization and to the urban concentration of almost all migrants.
By contrast, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples generally remained in the rural areas or small towns. The history of the Aboriginal population of Australia has been painful, dominated for the most part by disease and genocide, displacement and dispossession, resistance, poverty and marginalization. Assimilation, and policies such as the ‘stolen children’ programme and opposition to Aboriginal languages, denied Aboriginal identity.
The election in 1996 of an independent and outspoken member of parliament, Pauline Hanson, openly opposed to Asian migration and to the funding of Aboriginal programmes, resulted in increased hostility and violence towards Asians in several cities. The collapse of her One Nation party a few years later largely ended these overt problems. But the right-wing government of John Howard adopted an agenda generally hostile to new immigrants and taken retrogressive steps with regard to recognizing Aboriginal rights. Under Howard’s government, multiculturalism came under some attack, following the government’s abolition of the principal multicultural agencies in the late 1990s, and reduction in funding for Aboriginal and women’s programmes, and dismissal of United Nations reports that were critical of such directions. There was also renewed pressure on migrants to conform to Australian social norms, with migrants being increasingly expected to learn English and subscribe to ‘Australian values’.
At the start of the 2000s the Australian government launched a powerful attack on refugees – though numbers were never large – heralded by the dispatching of refugees from a sinking Indonesian vessel to specially constructed internment centres on Nauru and on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, in what became ironically known as the ‘Pacific solution’.
Some of these asylum-seekers were accepted by New Zealand, while others were slowly processed in Nauru. It was widely perceived that the government had managed to win the 2001 election because of its tough stance on refugees. The government subsequently declared in 2004, through the 1,000 mile wide maritime identification zone, that offshore islands, such as Christmas Island, were outside Australia’s official migration zone, an illegal declaration which took Australia even further away from United Nations conventions on human rights and refugee issues.
In recent years, tolerance towards minorities including Australia’s growing Middle Eastern and Asia populations has appeared to be in decline, with a number of high profile incidents of hate crimes and increasingly negative popular rhetoric.
Governance
Australia has a federal parliament of two elected houses and each state and territory has its own parliament. Other than Queensland, each state also has two elected houses. Politics is dominated by two parties: the Liberal Party, in coalition with the smaller National (formerly Country) Party, and the Australian Labour Party (ALP).
While there has been some improvement in recent years in the government’s efforts to address the serious inequalities in areas such as education, employment and health affecting Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations, progress has been slow. Furthermore, the introduction of the government’s controversial Indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS) in July 2014, consolidating 150 different programmes into five broad thematic areas and involving cuts of more than AU$500 million over the next five years, has generated considerable resentment among indigenous communities. In addition to reduced overall funding, significant portions of the new budget have gone to state departments, sporting clubs and other non-indigenous organizations, while some local indigenous organizations found that their funding had been halted.
Nevertheless, there have been some positive steps in government policy. In 2013 the Australian government unanimously passed legislation recognizing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities as the first inhabitants of Australia. This historic piece of legislation, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Recognition Act 2013, is the first law to officially recognize the status of indigenous peoples in Australia and directly refute in legislative terms the doctrine of terra nullius (‘empty land’) upon which Australia was founded – a legal fiction which long enabled the denial of indigenous people’s rights. The Act is an interim step on the path towards a possible referendum for constitutional change to officially acknowledge the indigenous population.
Australia’s indigenous population continues to face disproportionate levels of arrest, detention and incarceration – a reflection not only of their poverty and exclusion, but also discriminatory policing measures such as paperless arrest powers. For example, in Western Australia, where the incarceration rate for indigenous children is 52 times higher than the rate for non-indigenous children, a key contributing factor has been Criminal Code Act 1913 (WA), requiring magistrates to impose mandatory minimum sentences on young offenders in certain circumstances. Despite recommendations of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2012 to revise this practice, in 2014 the West Australian Legislative Assembly passed a bill extending the range of offences attracting a mandatory minimum sentence to include home burglaries.
A particularly controversial government policy is the projected closure of specific remote communities, particularly in Western Australia. In September 2014, indigenous affairs minister Nigel Scullion announced that agreements had been reached with a number of states to transfer responsibility from the federal government for service provision in remote indigenous communities. In November 2014, following this announcement, the Premier of Western Australia, Colin Barnett, flagged that up to 150 remote Aboriginal communities in Western Australia might be closed, claiming that the social and health problems in many remote communities meant that the state could not provide them with essential services and the number of these communities should be reduced. In May 2015, the premier released the government’s plan for the state’s 274 remote communities. While no specific details were provided on how decisions would be made, the premier noted he expected a ‘significant’ number would close.
Another significant development is the increasing hostility both in rhetoric and official policy towards refugees and asylum seekers. The issue of asylum seekers arriving by boat has monopolized Australian politics in recent years. Following a number of boat arrivals and numerous maritime tragedies involving loss of life at sea, in 2013 new legislative and policy arrangements were adopted which have made it even more difficult for people arriving by boat to seek asylum in Australia. These included the Regional Resettlement Arrangement brokered with the Papua New Guinea government. Known as the ‘PNG Solution’, it stipulated that asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat after July 2013 would be sent to the remote Papua New Guinea island of Manus for offshore processing. Furthermore, the agreement stipulated that even those found to have a refugee claim would be denied settlement in Australia, instead being resettled in Papua New Guinea. The government has also introduced a highly prescriptive ‘code of conduct’ for asylum seekers living in the community on bridging visas that, if breached, may result in reduced payments, visa cancellation, detention or losing access to services.