Reliability of Indigenous Employment Estimates

Abstract

Since 1971, the main vehicle for establishing a measure of the labour force status of Indigenous Australians has been the five-yearly Census. For the total population, census data are complemented by inter-censal estimates of labour force status derived from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Labour Force Survey (LFS) first instituted in 1964. This long-standing commitment to data gathering reflects the importance of employment, unemployment, and labour force participation rates as key national indicators of social and economic wellbeing. To the extent that Indigenous people have formed part of the sample for the LFS and have participated in the process, they have always been included in the ensuing statistical profile. However, it was not until 1994, in the March survey round, that a question was added to enable the separate identification of Indigenous people within the sample. This practice has subsequently been repeated annually in each February survey. Thus, for one month in each of the past six years, the ABS has gathered statistics that provide for the calculation of Indigenous labour force status, although they have only recently released these data as official, albeit experimental, estimates (ABS, 2000). From the perspective of policy evaluation, considerable interest surrounds these latest available official measures of Indigenous economic status. As annual estimates, they offer the possibility of establishing trends in labour force status that are more aligned — at least more so than are census data — with identifiable policy shifts and macroeconomic shocks. The time series charted from the sequence of survey results is also suggestive, at least at face value, of a sizeable decline in the Indigenous unemployment rate since the mid 1990s, and a current upward trend in employment levels. These apparently positive results are potentially significant indications for policy and raise a number of pertinent questions. They suggest, perhaps, that improvement is at long last emerging. They possibly reflect the success of the Indigenous Employment Policy. They may be a consequence of macroeconomic, or of microeconomic change. Previous research has found little if any link between macroeconomic change and Indigenous labour force status (Altman and Daly, 1993) — do the results of the LFS suggest otherwise? It appears that policy-makers are already responding to this new source of data. For example, in its final submission to the Commonwealth Grants