They deserve every hope – Photo, Gerry Georgatos

Nearly half the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population living below the Henderson Poverty Line are living half-lives. There are terrible lies told that life expectancy is significantly improving and the gap on this front is closing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. But in 2014, half of Western Australia’s Aboriginal male deaths were aged less than 50 years. There is a sell that the life expectancy gap for those born today has closed to 10.6 years less between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and the rest of the Australian population. But this is a ‘target – ‘estimation’.

With more Australians than ever before ticking the box to proudly acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage the collectivised tally of Australians with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander blood is skewing the averages and medians, masking the grim realities faced by Aboriginal and Torres Islanders who have always lived as Aboriginal and Torres Islanders, the majority in poverty. If we disaggregate standalone to them we find that much has not improved and also that much has got worse.

For many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders much has improved and today there is access to opportunity for many more than ever before. But the grim realities should not be denied otherwise how are we to ensure the ways forward for the most vulnerable and those deprived? The more west and north we journey across this continent the worse it gets on all fronts for the majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Tragically, the more ‘Black’ someone is, the less likely their lot has been improved, the less likely they are availed to opportunities to improve their lot.

Forty per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders live as the poorest Australians – the majority well below the Henderson Poverty Line. It is from these poorest that occurs nearly the whole Aboriginal and Torres Strait suicide toll and similarly so with incarceration and the child removals. In my unofficial datasets of the last five years of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander suicides I have come across, 93 per cent were of individuals living below the Poverty Line.

Similarly, those are who live half-lives, who die less than 50 years of age, they are more than likely to have lived below the Poverty Line, and likely that they always identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, that their parents and grandparents lived acute poverty, shanties, the missions and reserves.

I have estimated that nationally one in 9 of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have been to gaol – one in 6 when it comes to the Northern Territory and Western Australia. If we are to disaggregate to the 40 per cent living below the Poverty Line I estimate that one in 5 has been to gaol.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) one in 19 of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths is a suicide – an abominable tragedy, a humanitarian crisis. If we are to disaggregate to the 40 per cent living below the Poverty Line I estimate that one in 10 deaths is registered as a suicide.

I estimate that 99 per cent of the 16,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children removed from families lived below the Poverty Line. In this relative affluent nation bundled together with the overwhelming smack of White Privilege, poverty is not just a tribulation but a crime. It is to be feared, threatening every emotion that should have led to the sense of happiness.

One in three of the nation’s child suicides are of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children – as young as eight years old. Nearly all these children lived below the Poverty Line, the majority in dirt-poor poverty – the nation should weep.

It is the 40 per cent living below the Poverty Line that the majority of assistance should be tailor made for and targeted to.

The life expectancy gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and the rest of the population remains more than two decades wide and not 10.6 years. For the 40 per cent living below the Poverty Line the life expectancy gap is widest. In 2013, the ABS published revised estimates of life expectancy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. The ABS estimated that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander males born in 2010 to 2012 could expect to live 69.1 years of age – 10.6 years less than the rest of the Australian male population. For females they can expect to live to 73.7 years, 9.5 years less. But we have learned that what we hope for does not necessarily eventuate; that adjustable indicators or targets are not always met. We have seen the majority of the Closing the Gap targets as failed every year since inception despite the assistance of the collectivised data with hundreds of thousands of Australians proudly ticking the box with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage coupled with their relative high standard of living and in sync with the Australian life expectancy. So how many years are the 40 per cent living? In the least on average, half-lives.

The grim reality is that even overall for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, they are dying on average more than 20 years less than the rest of the population. Let us drop the 10.6 years less presumption. If we do not say it as it is what hope do we have to galvanise improvement in the living conditions and wellbeing of the most affected? The present generation that is doing it tough should not be sold out, nor generations unborn.

The median age at death in 2014 for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander males born in NSW was 57.7 years. This is as high as it got. That is more than 20 years less than NSW’s non-Aboriginal males. It was worst in Western Australia, where the median age of life was 49.9 years for males and 60 years for females; respectively 28 years and 24.5 years less than non-Aboriginal males and females.

For readers to better understand the use of median age I remind that median age is different to average age. In relation to deaths, the ages of everyone who died in that year would be added and divided by the total number of deaths. However to understand the extensiveness of people who died young the median age is a profound indicator. With the median there are an equal number of people either side of the median age. So if the median age for Western Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander males was 49.9, then we know that 50 per cent died younger than 49.9 years. It is relatively indisputable that the majority, if not just about everyone, were from the 40 per cent below the Poverty Line.

There is no disputing the cold hard facts of the average and median ages at death. Queensland’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders median age at death in 2014 was 57.4 for males, 62.4 for females, and for South Australia, 56.5 for males and 60.5 for females, and in the Northern Territory 53.4 for males and 57.5 for females. Overall, in 2014, the median age of death for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander males was 55.4 and for females it was 61.5. Therefore, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are not living on average 10.6 years less as the majority of Australians mistakenly believe but more than 20 years less. Certainly, it is dramatically worse for the 40 per cent living below the Poverty Line.

If we keep on selling a narrative of significant positive changes when indeed this is not the case we risk making elevated risk groups invisible, we risk a presumption of trending to positive changes when in fact we have masked the data, the averages, the medians, the grim realities – the masking and the failure to disaggregate is discriminating against those who are the 40 per cent – they are being left behind. For years the Closing the Gap effort was being sold as ‘closing’ when in fact it was not closing. For the 40 per cent living below the Poverty Line the gap has widened – and also divided people.

In the desperation for good news tales, even if half-truths, in either the misguided or diabolical notion these may inspire hope and from the flicker of hope we may extract a dividend of social change agency, instead we are thwarted. The 40 per cent are living half-lives and the majority are dirt-poor, are accumulating stressors and tipping points, are filling the gaols, are fated from broken lives to ruined lives, are not being supported and are therefore being sold out.

The significant increase in identifying as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander has led to a population count of 730,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders – to nearly three per cent of the national population – an increase of 21 per cent over a five year period according to Census data.

For a decade, I have argued that disaggregation – for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander trends (and migrant trends too) is a must-do. Only last year, the United Nations tabled a report effectively describing the failure to disaggregate and then to highlight the disaggregation as a human rights violation.

The United Nations High Commission on February 25, 2015 argued “leave no-one behind”.

“There has been a recurrent call for data disaggregation, (and) as part of the disaggregated statistics they will be key to support tailored and evidence-based policy formulation.”

“It is clear that the greater level of disaggregation will pose a number of challenges to official statistics, and thus, discussion on this topic is timely and resonates with the discussion on the ‘Data Revolution’.”

The report criticised the data sources for the Millennium Development Goal as “designed primarily to produce national averages that tend to mask disparities and exclude population groups that may be among the poorest of the poor or the most vulnerable and marginalised.” The report argues that from a “human rights perspective” this should not be allowed. It argues that without disaggregation there is discrimination.

“Data must also enable us to reach the neediest, and find out whether they are receiving essential services. This means that data gathered will need to be disaggregated by gender, geography, income, disability, and other categories, to make sure that no group is being left behind.”

“No goal or target should be considered met until it is met for all groups that are affected, particularly the lowest quintiles of the national income distribution, ensuring that we leave no one behind.”

“No one should be invisible.”

We must deal into the grim realities and target them. The Australian people are divided in their view of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, in their view of newly arrived migrants. They are sold good news stories disproportionate to the grim realities and overwhelming odds, and then they are sold averages and numbers and trends that are aggregations and therefore have made invisible for instance the 40 per cent that I have often referred to in this piece. Stereotypes are soaked through Australian society of the failure of many, of those who are effectively invisible, to grasp opportunity.

In 1971 there were no doctors who identified as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. Today there are more than 200 and with more than 300 on the way. Some are from within the 40 per cent but the majority – possibly 90 per cent – are not.

According to the ABS, the national incarceration rate rests at 191 Australian adults per 100,000 adults. However, Western Australia’s incarceration of Aboriginal adult males is 3,686 per 100,000, the world’s 2^nd highest just behind that of the Black American adult males jailing rate. Nearly all of Aboriginal adult males gaoled in Western Australia are individuals living below the Poverty Line.

Our souls bleed and the nation should know.