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News from Australia: we're probably not going to have a Constitutionally-enshrined "Voice" for Aboriginals.
Background: there was a statement by a bunch of Aboriginal groups a while back that they wanted a constitutionally-enshrined advocate in the governmental system*, along with a couple of other things. Opposition leader Anthony Albanese, of the Australian Labor Party, included this in his platform for the 2022 election, which he won**, and we're a bit under a month from a referendum***.
New information: support started high, and certainly the Usual Suspects want a Yes vote. But support has now crashed to the point that it's considered highly unlikely to pass.
Up until now I'd been thinking "well, maybe the US people are right about SJ having peaked in the USA, but that's cold comfort to me", but this has given me some real hope that it's peaking here as well.
*NB: Aboriginals can vote and run for office, and are slightly overrepresented in Parliament compared to the general population.
**Labor is our centre-left party; the other major parties are the Liberals (city-based centre-right), the Nationals (small-town conservatives, in a semi-permanent coalition with the Liberals), the Greens (historically a "hippie" party, and they still do hold basically all the stereotypical "hippie" positions, though they've gone majorly SJ of late), One Nation (alt-rightists since before it was cool) and the United Australia Party (alt-rightists since after it was cool, because an alt-right billionaire had too big an ego to support the existing alt-right party). I actually wound up voting Labor; the Liberals had gotten too comfortable in government to the point that they refused to discuss a bunch of what they were doing, which I consider a threat to democracy, the Greens want to ban One Nation and the UAP, which I consider a much larger threat to democracy, I live in a city so the Nationals weren't on my HoR ballot, the UAP is a bad joke, and while I preferred One Nation's stance on this particular policy (i.e. "get the fuck out of here with your reverse racism") I preferred the rest of Labor's platform to the rest of One Nation's by more.
***Our constitutional amendment procedure - a majority of citizens and a majority of citizens in at least four of the six states must agree to the amendment. Like most other Australian votes, it's mandatory.
Is identification as indigenous as lax in Australia as it is in the US? I saw this article on the "first indigenous female surgeon" in Australia awhile back and it made me wonder exactly what they consider indigenous over there.
It's unclear.
In practice, the dominant line is that you don't need to prove Aboriginality, and that it's deeply racist to start quizzing people about their ancestors. Past that, there is a three-part test - 1) be of Aboriginal descent, 2) identify as Aboriginal, 3) be accepted as Aboriginal by your community. But all three criteria there are extremely questionable and sometimes tautological.
We often hear a comparison with New Zealand, but a key difference is that the Maoris in New Zealand have their own de facto government and leadership structure. At the time the British arrived in New Zealand, there was a reasonable degree of social organisation among Maoris. They weren't all united, but there were leaders who could be negotiated with, and who for their part recognised the need to come together and organise a leader who could negotiate on their behalf with the British crown. Moreover, today there are Maori authorities who are able to self-police. This is important because there are specific political rights attached to being Maori. I understand that Native American tribes are similar in the US - they have their own recognised governing authorities and they can be very strict about who counts as a tribal member, including policing false claims.
There is no recognised pan-Aboriginal authority in Australia, and 'traditional leaders' is an extremely woolly category. At the time of colonisation, there were no Aboriginal nations, but rather there were hundreds upon hundreds of extremely fragmented language and tribal groups, with minimal political organisation. It is not like the Maori or the Iroquois. So Aboriginal leadership needs to be confected.
Part of the issue is that, well, to over-generalise for a moment, you have two broad camps of Aboriginal people in Australia. The first is in remote communities, especially in the NT or in bits of rural Queensland or WA. These people are usually of almost exclusively Aboriginal descent, they're politically voiceless, and they often suffer crushing poverty and have other terrible outcomes. The second, however, are in the major cities. This group is almost entirely mixed-race, often with less indigenous background than European, and their life outcomes tend to be comparable to that of the general Australian population. Many just pass as Anglo, often because that is in fact the majority of their ancestry. This person, say, looks indistinguishable from any other Anglo woman. (The Palawa are an interesting example because they're an ethnic group that exist exclusively as mixed-race. There are zero fully Palawa people left.) Not all are like that, but you can still see an obvious gap between people like this (very striking if you compare her to her mother) or this and, say, these people or this.
The second, urban group, however, has a much stronger political voice and is significantly more outspoken. People in the second group are sometimes very good at leveraging the first group's very real issues into activism for Aboriginal people in general, and because they're the better-educated, more politically-engaged group, they tend to capture the lion's share of benefits for Aboriginal people.
But this leads to claims like e.g. "two people born in the same hospital on the same day, one is ATSI and the other isn't, and the ATSI person has ten years less life expectancy" - statistics that only work by virtue of grouping people with average life expectancy in a category with people with terrible life expectancy. There's a two-step like this that can be done whenever necessary, because the category 'Aboriginal people' is too broad in practice to usefully group people.
I would not be surprised if there's a similar gap like this in the US, with a distinction you can draw between Native Americans on reservations and Native Americans who are more integrated with the rest of society?
This was my impression too, but recently I was looking at the NAPLAN results* and I was surprised at how poorly Indigenous students** actually did. For every test I looked at, Indigenous major city students did significantly worse than even Non-Indigenous very remote (for both Indigenous and Non-Indigenous the percentage "passing" decreases from major city to regional and further again to remote). More specifically the below percentages include students who were "Strong" or "Exceeding" (and excludes students in the other categories of "Developing", "Needs additional support" and "Exempt").
Year 3 (approx 8.5 years old) Numeracy scores
Indigenous major city - 37.3%
Non-Indigenous very remote - 50.3%
All the other grades and subjects showed similar results, e.g.
Year 9 (approx 14.5 years old) Reading scores
Indigenous major city - 35.3%
Non-Indigenous very remote - 50%
Unrelated to this thread, another possibly surprising result from NAPLAN is that students with a language background other than English (LBOTE) (either the student or parents/carers speak a language other than English at home) do better than non-LBOTE on every single test at every grade level, including English/Language arts (e.g. 71% vs 56.5% in grade 3 spelling). Based on Australian demographics, many LBOTE students would have Asian ancestry.
In less surprising news, boys did better than girls at numeracy (e.g. 67% vs 62.1% in grade 3), girls did better than boys at English/Language arts (e.g. 71.4% vs 62.4% in grade 3 reading), major city kids did better than very remote kids (e.g. 69.5 vs 50.3% in grade 3 numeracy for non-Indigenous), and kids with at least one parent who have a bachelor did MUCH better than kids where the highest level either parent had achieved was grade 11 (e.g. 79.6% vs 31% in grade 3 numeracy).
*NAPLAN is "a series of tests focused on basic skills that are administered to Australian students in year 3, 5, 7 and 9." On that page, click "Achievement by subgroup" then the "Comparison by" dropdown on the right to get to "Indigeneity by ABS remoteness"
** Defined by NAPLAN as "one who identifies as being of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander origin", therefore presumably including the mixed-race city dwellers.
Ah, good call. Thanks for looking up the data and keeping me honest.
I'm not particularly surprised by LBOTE results - statistically most LBOTEs are likely to be immigrants or first-generation children of immigrants, which is a group that's going to be selected slightly more for talent. I'm not sure I'd attribute it mostly to Asian background, or at least, certainly not East Asian background. These are NSW figures from 2021, and on page 4 they have a chart of non-English native languages. The biggest single one is actually Arabic, and Indian languages are overall more common than Chinese languages. I don't know whether you included Indian when you said 'Asian', but certainly for me, when I hear 'Asian' I think Chinese or East Asian, and those are very different cultural spheres. At any rate, the LBOTE/non-LBOTE gap is quite small and equalises or reverses in a few domains, so I'm not too stressed about it. Immigrants usually do slightly better on most metrics just from selection effects, and Australia's immigration process prioritises the skilled and successful.
On Aboriginals specifically... so the regions do worse than the cities on every metric. I can't see how to cross-reference indigenous status with urban or regional status on the website, but I suppose I can get an inkling of it by comparing NT indigenous figures (which will be mostly regional) with ACT figures (which will be urban). The NT indig-non-indig gap is significantly larger than the ACT gap on every metric, often twice as large, which seems consonant with the idea that regional Aboriginal people are significantly worse off than urban Aboriginals - though even urban Aboriginals are still doing worse than urban non-indigenous people.
So I accept correction on the claim that the urban indigenous cohort generally have similar outcomes to comparable non-indigenous people. They are generally better-off that indigenous people in the regions (as this summary notes, p. 8-9), but still lagging behind non-Aboriginal people.
You're probably right that selecting immigrants who are skilled is a better explanation for LBOTE doing better than non-LBOTE.
Yep, it's hard to navigate and I stumble upon it accidentally from https://www.acara.edu.au/reporting/national-report-on-schooling-in-australia/naplan-national-results the bubble "Achievement by subgroup" then the "Comparison by" dropdown on the right to get to "Indigeneity by ABS remoteness". Definitely remote are significantly worse off than urban Aboriginals.
Percent strong or exceeding for Year 9 reading:
Indigenous major city - 35.3%
Indigenous inner regional - 29.9%
Indigenous outer regional - 25.1%
Indigenous remote - 15.7%
Indigenous very remote - 8.5%
Non-Indigenous major city - 68.3%
Non-Indigenous inner regional - 57.2%
Non-Indigenous outer regional - 55.3%
Non-Indigenous remote - 55.7%
Non-Indigenous very remote - 50%
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