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Notes -
...erm, aren't we talking about Aboriginal people?
Israel does get plenty of criticism for its approach here, obviously, and it doesn't seem relevant to Australia. I think the better comparison would be to other self-described indigenous peoples. Certainly during the Voice campaign we heard a lot of people talking about Maoris and Native Americans and Canadian First Nations.
Honestly something that struck me on doing very basic research into other countries' Indigeous persons was that the Australian Aboriginal's life expectancy gap with the median was about the same size as it is for the Maoris and First Nations people. Despite the latter two having the 'benefits' of deeper recognition in their countries.
Really? Amerinds seem a lot better off than I’d expect aborigines to be, based on how I’ve heard them described.
Well, let's take some specific metrics. Let's compare Australian Aboriginals, Maoris, American Indians, and Canadian First Nations relative to the surrounding culture, on a few different metrics.
Hypothesis: if the claim that the Voice and recognition would help to close the gap is true, the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous people should be significantly worse in Australia than in the other three nations.
Life expectancy:
(sticking with pre-covid figures if possible)
Aboriginals: 71.6 years male, 75.6 years female. Compare to 81.3 years male and 85.4 years female for non-indigenous, for an average gap of around 10 years.
Maoris: 73.0 years male, 77.1 years female. Compare to 80.3 years male and 83.9 years female for non-Maori (same link), for an average gap of around 6-7 years.
American Indians: I'm having a harder time finding a clear result here. This page gives 73.1 years for Indians, versus 79.1 years overall average, though it's not by gender. However, it could be more complicated, and America is the largest and most diverse nation, so I'm more cautious here. Pages like this suggest it might be more complicated. Still, let's ballpark it around 6 years.
Canadian First Nations: 72.5 years male, 77.7 years female. Compare to 81 years male, 85 years female for non-indigenous, for an everage gap of around 8-9 years.
Conclusion: Aboriginals do have the worst figures here, so count that as circumstantial evidence in favour of treaties and recognition. That said I would like to see a lot more evidence around causation.
Income:
(I'm not going to stress about currency conversions here, or weekly versus yearly income, because what matters for us here is the indigenous:non-indigenous ratio)
Aboriginals: Average weekly household income is $1507 AUD according to the ABS (compared to anything from 1358 through 2061 in general)), but equivalised, AIHW says $830 AUD, compared to $1080 for non-indigenous. I'm just going to estimate that Aboriginals are making approximately 77% what non-Aboriginals make.
Maoris: This site tells us that in 2013 the median income for Maoris was 78.9% of the national median, which I'm happy to just accept.
American Indians: Wiki has us covered here: $56,990 USD yearly median household income for Indians in 2021, versus 76,330 for the whole population. This translates to Amerian Indians making about 75% as much as non-Indians.
Canadian First Nations: Per page 32 here, average indigenous income in Canada is around 66% that of non-indigenous people.
Conclusion: I don't see any correlation here. Aboriginals are the 2nd-best-off of these groups, and the gap between Aboriginals, Maoris, and American Indians seems well within margin of error to me. The real surprise for me here is Canada, which I didn't think was that much worse.
I was going to make a pass on education as well, but that's proving harder to find figures for.
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