Editorial: Stark
numbers on black deaths
16dec04
NEW figures on life
expectancy from the Australian Bureau of Statistics highlight the
practical, as against symbolic, problems facing Aborigines.
The ABS
estimates the life expectancy for Aboriginal men born between 1996 and
2001 at 59.4 years, and for Aboriginal women at 64.8 years. For the
general population the numbers are 77.8 years and 82.8 years respectively
– despite decades of welfarism and symbolic victories aplenty, Aborigines
continue to die 20 years earlier than other Australians. And the
statistics on infant mortality are more depressing. In Western Australia,
where a mutual obligation contract stressing care and hygiene of children
in the remote Mulan community has aroused controversy, an Aboriginal baby
is three times as likely to die as a white baby.
In recent years no category of Aboriginal mortality has been more
prominently canvassed by white activists than deaths in custody. The
Australian Institute of Criminology estimates an average of 6.3 Aborigines
died in prison annually between 1980 and 1998. But a pocket calculator
applied to mortality rates in an earlier publication by the ABS can begin
to reveal what is really killing Aborigines. In 1998-2000, nearly 2500
Aborigines died who would have lived if the rate of cardiovascular disease
was the same for blacks as for other Australians. A further 1200 or so
Aborigines who died in those two years would still be alive if rates of
death from external causes were the same as for non-Aborigines. Included
in external causes are the extraordinarily high rates of death by murder
among Aborigines. This is part of the pattern of lives scarred by violence
that ALP vice-president Warren Mundine referred to this week when he
described Aboriginal men flogging their wives with sticks.
None of this suggests we should turn a blind eye while young Aboriginal
men die in prison. None of it suggests we should condone the kind of
systemic racism of which the West Australian public housing authority was
accused yesterday by the state's Equal Opportunity Commission. And none of
it suggests there is anything wrong in Tasmanian Premier Paul Lennon's
plan to apologise to the stolen generation. But while sorry days, bridge
walks and a focus on white racism have done no demonstrable harm, they
have done no demonstrable good. The sea change that is sweeping across
this debate, symbolised by the new compact between Noel Pearson and Pat
Dodson that was first reported in The Weekend Australian, is the
result of the recognition that policies based on welfarism and rights have
not helped Aborigines and it is time to give new policies based on mutual
obligation and responsibilities a try. While there are those who have
labelled approaches such as the Mulan contract "racist", indigenous policy
should not be based on name-calling or moral posturing. It should be based
on a rational assessment of what is really killing Aborigines – and a
determination to do something about it.
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