Population counts represent the key output from each national census as they establish the base from which population estimates are subsequently derived and the levels at which population characteristics are established. Such information is vital in assessing change over time in social indicators and plays a key role in the assessment of policy impacts. A notable feature of successive Indigenous census counts has been their volatility and unpredictability with numbers invariably greater each time than change due to natural increase alone would suggest.

The CDEP scheme was developed as a response to the perceived social threat of sit-down money to Indigenous communities in the 1970s. Ironically, the scheme is now being criticised as being one of the main factors driving the social effects of prolonged welfare dependence. This paper updates the Office of Evaluation and Audit 1997 Report that evaluates the scheme.

The new Federal Government has identified as one of its priorities a 'closing of the gaps' in social and economic outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians with specific reference made to health/life expectancy, education participation and attainment, housing and employment. Previous CAEPR research has shown that the structural circumstances facing Indigenous populations are increasingly diverse and locationally dispersed and that this leads to variable constraints and opportunities for social and economic participation.

Laura Beacroft held an independent statutory position with the Australian government for the last 5 years, regulating many key Indigenous corporations, including those connected to native title and also most of those in remote Australia. She shepherded in comprehensive and modern legislation for this sector (Corporations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Act 2006, which received tripartite support from Parliament and is being progressively implemented around Australia.

The community engagement strategy for the Cape York Welfare Reform trials was designed to represent communities and individuals under consultation strictly in terms of seven pre-determined 'community dysfunctions' only. They were: the abuse and neglect of children; alcohol abuse; drug abuse; petrol sniffing; problem gambling; poor school attendance; and dysfunctional housing tenancy arrangements. However, much of the research conducted on the ground in Aurukun suggests community members do not define themselves or their immediate families in terms of 'social-norms deficit'.

At the core of alcohol control policies in Australia-and indeed in any country with a system of licensing-lies a key conflict. This is the conflict between the interest of the state in reducing alcohol-related problems on the one hand, and its interest in enjoying the economic benefits produced by the alcohol beverage industry on the other. When an Indigenous corporation buys into premises licensed to sell alcohol, it is faced with a similar conflict and a moral hazard: good sales may mean more alcohol-related harms for which others largely bear the cost.

Olga Havnen has held senior positions with both the government and non-government sectors, including the Northern Territory Department of the Chief Minister, the Central and Northern Land Councils, and as Indigenous program manager with The Fred Hollows Foundation. Olga has recently taken up a newly-created position with Australian Red Cross as Head of Indigenous Strategy Development.

Please note: This seminar is available in both Streaming Audio and MP3 formats.

Analysts of Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) census data have commonly observed that the census enumeration in remote Indigenous regions of Australia underestimates the actual number of Indigenous people. Such underestimations of remote population groups have dire consequences not only for appropriate service delivery in such extreme regions, but also contribute to a misguided public perception that the population in remote Indigenous regions is declining. Clearly a better approach to undertaking census counts is needed in remote Australia.

Aboriginal People in the tropical savannah of the Northern Territory (NT) own 170,000 sq km of land including 85% of the coastline. Land and sea country have great cultural, economic and social significance to Aboriginal people, underpinning their culture and society. Aboriginal landowners continue to be reliant on the natural environment for both spiritual and physical well-being. Creation ancestors form part of a living landscape and practices such as hunting, foraging, burning, caring for sacred sites and ceremony have an important place in contemporary Aboriginal life.

his seminar will provide a perspective on the Intervention from one of the largest Indigenous townships in the NT through the eyes of two doctoral research scholars who were researching in the community as the Intervention broke. The paper analyses the initial reactions of both the people of the region and their local organisations, as well as detailing their interactions with the Northern Territory Emergency Response Taskforce and other government agencies during the first month of the Intervention.

One of the defining characteristics of Indigenous policy during the Howard era was the emerging influence of conservative think tanks, and in particular, the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership (CYIPL). While this development mirrors other policy settings, there are some unique features of the ideologies espoused by CIS and CYIPL. Both appear to have a religious quest to transform Indigenous societies.

Agreement making, especially through Indigenous Land Use Agreements, is an increasingly important aspect of native title practice. Major mining agreements in particular are typically highly complex legally-driven documents which focus on meeting or reconciling the various parties' perceived aspirations and interests within a risk management framework. However, comparatively little attention is given to agreements' necessarily intercultural character, and their roles in social and cultural as well as economic transformation.

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: 

Writing about literacy in the remote Aboriginal context rarely considers anthropological aspects such as whether literacy has been incorporated into social practice, and how we understand change, transmission and transformation in the evolving social practices and cultural conceptions of reading and writing across the generations in the remote world. In this seminar Jerry Schwab and Inge Kral suggest that, in addition to schooling, everyday social practice is critical to literacy acquisition, maintenance and development in remote contexts.

There is growing recognition that a 'development' approach to Indigenous communities could be useful, in contrast to (or to complement) a service delivery approach to Indigenous Affairs. But what does a development approach mean? There are many different ideas about what 'development' is and how it is achieved, and hence many different approaches to 'development'. This seminar will canvass some approaches to 'development' common in the international arena and critically explore how they are being articulated in Indigenous Australia, explicitly or implicitly.

The recent passing away of a significant number of senior Aboriginal artists has raised concern about the future of Aboriginal art. This, together with reports of a market flooded with second-rate work and a lingering anxiety that the popularity of Aboriginal art may have run its course animates my research on the inter-generational shift in the production and market for Aboriginal art.

The NTER intervention is to be reviewed one year on, as promised by the ALP in the lead up to the election. According to the original terms of the emergency intervention, the one year anniversary also marks the end of the proposed 'stabilisation' phase (although all intervention measures have not yet reached all prescribed communities) and the point of transition to the 'normalisation' phase.

Indigenous people in North America have been mapping aspects of their land and resources for many years. Many First Nations communities in Canada have done this type of mapping which is known by various names such as 'cultural mapping', 'land use and occupancy mapping' or 'tenure mapping'. In the hands of Indigenous groups these maps play a powerful role in negotiations, in the courtroom and in natural resource planning.

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.

The Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme has been subject to major criticism in recent years for being part of, or little better than, Aboriginal welfare dependence. In the first half of this seminar I will defend CDEP from its critics, by both recounting its origins and elaborating on some of its strengths; most notably its flexibility and support for Indigenous community-based organisations, particularly in remote areas. I will argue that CDEP is a remote Australian policy treasure, but that despite this labeling CDEP does have some weaknesses.

There are about 170,000 Inuit, living mostly in Canada (50,000), Greenland (50,000), Denmark (8,000), Russia (1,700), Alaska (44,000) and other parts of the USA (13,000). Their homeland spreads from Greenland across the Arctic stretches of northern America and over the Bering Strait to the eastern tip of Russia. They are a nation living within four nations. Their history is unique as they have survived and prospered for over 4,000 years in one of the harshest and most unforgiving environments on Earth.

Since late 2006 CAEPR has worked on a collaborative research project with the Bardi Jawi Rangers based on the northern tip of the Dampier Peninsula in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia. This research was commissioned by the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance (NAILMSA) as part of its NHT-funded Dugong and Marine Turtle Project and was also supported by the Kimberley Land Council (KLC) as a major project partner.

The Canadian territory of Nunavut ('Our land' in Inuktitut) was created on April 1, 1999, after the 1993 Nunavut Land Claims Agreement (NLCA) resulted in the division of the Northwest Territories and the creation of a 13th jurisdiction at the provincial/territorial level. 85 per cent of Nunavut's population of 30,000 are Inuit, making Nunavut an example of 'effective self-government through public government.' While the population may be small, Nunavut makes up 20% of Canada - an area the size of Western Europe.

The intervention is the most expensive attempt to change the relationship between remote Aboriginal Australia and the white nation, launched with a budget of $1.5 billion dollars. The Commonwealth government sought to restructure community economies, undertake health check programs for children, increase school attendance, restrict alcohol sales and quarantine income. At the same time the Northern Territory government terminated community councils and began implementing shires, resulting in an absence of community governance.

This paper is a part of a larger ARC Linkage project, with the Telstra Foundation, that examines the immediate and longer-term impacts of selected Indigenous festivals on community wellbeing. In recent years wellbeing is a concept that has gained salience and urgency, indeed it has become standard currency in economic and political models of welfare and development. Concerns have been expressed about the indicators of wellbeing and the lack of recongnition that notions of health and wellbeing and socio-economic inclusion and exclusion are culturally constructed.

In this seminar I present some initial findings from a project entitled, 'The Social Context of Indigenous Poverty'. The research involved a series of interviews with Aboriginal people in urban and rural SE Australia on issues of poverty, social capital and social exclusion. In the paper I draw together Aboriginal perspectives on the meaning of poverty to reflect on the relevance of social capital concepts for understanding Aboriginal economic disadvantage.

Please note: This seminar is available in both Streaming Audio and MP3 formats.

We conduct a large-scale audit discrimination study in Australia, sending 5000 fake resumes to employers in response to online job advertisements. To denote ethnicity, we randomly changed names on the resumes, using them to denote Anglo-Saxon, Italian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, and Indigenous ethnicity. In all cases, we applied for entry-level jobs, and submitted a CV that showed that the candidate had attended high school in Australia.

Climate change will increasingly be impacting thousands of Indigenous Australians across northern Australia. But how much do we know about their exposure, sensitivity and capacity to adapt to these changes? This talk aims to tease out these questions and begin to identify what we do know about these issues, and importantly, what information we don’t yet have but which is vital to understand in order to strengthen resilience for these remote communities.

Since the 1970s the federal political response to conditions in many Aboriginal communities has escalated from one of concern to today's rhetoric of 'national emergency'. In the intervening decades, policy had been repeatedly reoriented, from self-determination to mainstreaming, and from reconciliation to intervention. The result has been successive and unambiguous policy failures.

In the Yolngu-matha languages of north-east Arnhem land, the character trait rendered in English as 'self-centered' or 'selfish' is translated by gurrutu-miriw, literally 'kin-lacking' - acting as if one had no kin. Kin-based obligations structure the Yolngu moral order: everyone is classified as kin, and how one ought to behave to others is framed in terms of one's kin relationship to them.

There can be no doubt that Noel Pearson is not only a national leader in policy development, he is also a controversial figure who manages to split the interested public, academia, journalists and politicians into candid supporters or staunch critics. To research such a polarising personality's work and personal background is particularly challenging.

Recent figures released by the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) demonstrate that Indigenous engagement with the forest sector tends to be constructed in terms of employment in mainstream timber production forestry. The Commonwealth Government’s National Indigenous Forestry Strategy is currently going down this path, with a focus on areas of employment and business development in production of timber and fibre.

In Australia Indigenous cultural tourism is presented as a treasure trove for economic, social, and cultural opportunities, praised as it is in policy documents, advertising campaigns, travel brochures, and, for instance, in the hospitable invitation of an Aboriginal tourism enterprise in north Australia to 'come share our culture'. The question I will especially address in this paper is: to whom does 'our' refer?

The Living Murray Initiative recognises that the aspirations, interests and contributions of Indigenous people are an integral component of contemporary natural resource management and aims to take into account the social, economic and spiritual objectives of Indigenous communities for each of the Murray’s icon sites. In order to do this, The Living Murray’s Indigenous Partnerships Project is developing and implementing a consultation process that will enable Indigenous communities to effectively participate in the discussion about cultural and environmental flows.

The two speakers presenting this public lecture will challenge some of the common beliefs that surround Indigenous Australians and the history of grog, by discussing the findings of the newly released publication First Taste: How Indigenous Australians Learned About Grog by Dr Maggie Brady (published by the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation). This publication will be released the morning before the lecture and is a series of six books.