The success of the Close The Gap Campaign for Indigenous Health Equality, an Indigenous-led initiative involving a coalition of 40 or so concerned organisations, is reflected in the commitment by the Rudd Government in 2008 to the campaign's Statement of Intent and its adoption of 'closing the gap' as the government's flagship Indigenous policy framework.

The Prime Minister's commitment to narrow the 17-year gap between the life expectancy of Indigenous Australians and that of the total population, and to report annually on progress, echoes similar promises made over the 40 years since the referendum gave the Federal Government a national responsibility for Indigenous health. The paper reviews the policy background to this commitment, and examines estimates of Indigenous life expectancy over the period, in order to establish the validity of the estimates, and the likelihood of reduction given past trends.

This paper is part of a longer project about the history of Indigenous population statistics in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. In the contemporary use of official statistics by Indigenous and non-Indigenous policy intellectuals, a particular understanding of social justice has emerged. Public discussion highlights the population binary 'Indigenous/non-Indigenous' and finds unjust the 'gap' between Indigenous and non-Indigenous values of certain socio-economic variables. I will answer two questions: