media > press releases > archives

Press Releases: Archives: Article 5

Health Focus/Australia: Prescription to Improve Indigenous Health - Major Policy Rethinks

By Bob Burton

CANBERRA, Dec 1 (IPS) - Australia's indigenous peoples are now enjoying a bigger health budget than ever before, but health activists and experts say the generous infusion of federal funds is not enough to cure a myriad of ills brought about by centuries of abuse and neglect.

Indeed, they say that Canberra needs to rethink much of its policies - health and otherwise - regarding Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders if it is serious about seeing the country's indigenous peoples as physically fit as the rest of the population.

Indigenous organisations are already stepping up efforts to get state governments to change their policies and improve health standards in their areas. In some cases, indigenous groups are making a bid to co- ordinate health services in their respective communities so that more money would actually go to health care instead of to the state coffers.

One group that is trying that is the Jawoyn Association in the Northern Territory. Its health care co-ordinator, Irene Fisher, explains, ''The Northern Territory Health Department takes a 50 percent cut on health funding as on costs, so we thought, let's cut out that middle person and we might have a little bit more funding for services. The same applies to housing.''

Experts say indigenous Australians need every health cent that comes their way. Says Fran Baum, the national president of the Public Health Alliance: ''The simple fact is that indigenous Australians die on average 20 years earlier than non-indigenous Australians. We are dealing with a population that is traumatised with dispossession and all that.''

Baum and Fisher will be among the participants in the People's Health Assembly that will take place in Bangladesh next week. The meeting, which will focus on grassroots health initiatives, is expected to attract more than 1,000 activists and non governmental organisation (NGO) workers from all over the world.

According to Baum, Australia has much to learn from other countries, especially when it comes to dealing with indigenous peoples. She remarks, ''Australia really hasn't made much progress in the health area that other countries such as Canada and the United States have. On a global basis, Australia is an international disgrace.''

Aborigines may well be the major thorn in Australia's conscience. Before the first Europeans landed on the continent in the late 18th century, Aborigines numbered some 300,000. Today, the combined total count of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders is about 386,000 or two percent of the entire Australian population of 19 million.

Historians say Australia's indigenous people were treated almost like animals by the white settlers, who took over their lands and practically wiped them out in some areas. Up until the mid-20th century, Aborigines barely had access to basic services. And up until 1967, they did not even enjoy full citizenship rights.

In recent years, the federal government has made it a point to try to rectify many of the injustices done to Australia's indigenous population.

For instance, Senator John Herron, who is the Commonwealth Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Affairs, has pointed to increases in funding for indigenous Australians. He says, ''Since 1996-97, government expenditure on indigenous health has increased by more than 50 percent in real terms.''

For fiscal year 2000, in fact, the Office of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Services has been allotted 200 million Australian dollars (105 million dollars). This is in keeping with the promise made by Canberra last year of a 100-million-Australian dollar (52 million dollars) increase in indigenous health spending spread over four years.

But in one press conference earlier this year here in Canberra, Gustav Nossal, chair of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, said it was time to ''explode the myth that tonnes of money have been thrown at Aboriginal health with no good effect''.

He said that the government spent the equivalent of 57 US cents on health per indigenous Australian compared to 53 cents for each ''mainstream Australian''.

But, he argued, ''given a health status at least three times worse, this eight percent differential is actually tiny, and when one factors in remoteness - it costs more to do almost anything in a remote community - the difference disappears altogether''.

Fisher more than agrees that the remote locations of many Aboriginal communities have proved a health hazard simply because medical help is often hours away. She says such communities are now suffering from high death rates.

''One issue was providing assistance with travel for ill community members. Government policy is if it's over 200 km to a hospital, they can get patient travel,'' she says. ''But our communities are just under that distance. There is no public transport and a taxi into Katherine township costs about 120 Australian dollars, so people have no way of getting there. It's ludicrous.''

It has not helped that many Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders are in poor health, which experts say can be traced partly to their being at a socio-economic disadvantage.

According to the Aborigine and Torres Strait Islanders Commission (ATSIC), the unemployment rate among indigenous Australians is 26 percent, compared to eight percent among the non-indigenous population. Indigenous incomes are also approximately two-thirds of the Australian average.

Data from ATSIC also show that 6.2 percent of indigenous households include more than one family compared to 1.1 percent of other Australian households. Sixty-four percent of indigenous Australians also live in rentals, while nationwide, the share of the population who are not homeowners is 24 percent.

Experts say low incomes obviously affect the quality of food and could well decide the frequency of visits to doctors. Overcrowded homes, meanwhile, can hardly promote good health.

As it is, indigenous Australians are three times more likely to die in infancy than the rest of the population, according to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mortality Study released a few months ago.

The study also says that half of the indigenous population will die before they reach the age of 50, adding that the major causes of mortality among Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders are circulatory and respiratory disease, diabetes, cancer and injury.

Olga Havnen, programme officer of the non governmental Hollows Foundation faults government health officials for failing in ''many of the fundamentals of health''.

She says, ''What you have got is a bit of a revolving door - people will come in with a particular disease or problem to be patched up and then sent back to the same sort of environment, which contribute to their ill health to start with.''

Havnen adds, ''If they don't address the unmet housing needs, if they don't address the inadequate infrastructure such as drinking water and access to food in many of these communities, there will be little improvement in health standards.''

Others, though, say that one bit of good news has been the rise in the number of Aboriginal community-controlled health centres. As of last count, there were 122 of these across Australia.

''For the health of our peoples to improve, Aboriginal health must be in Aboriginal hands,'' says Pat Anderson, executive secretary of the Aboriginal Medical Services Alliance of the Northern Territory. ''Until our right to run our own health services under our own control is recognised in principle and supported in practice by Australian non-Aboriginal government, our health will not improve.'' (END/IPS/ap-he/bb/ccb/00)