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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (17 February) . . Page.. 233 ..
MS TUCKER (continuing):
Mr Speaker, I suggest that this obsession with benchmarking is actually quite insulting when you see that it results in a 'doing well' report card for indigenous hospital separations. If, as a community, we believe that indigenous people in the community should have health experience equal to that of other people in the community, then why do we not set a goal and measure our progress against that? We will not continue to just look at how we compare across Australia, particularly in light of the fact that, across Australia, as I have just said, it is absolutely shameful.
On other key indicators of health in the report, including suicide rates, infant mortality, life expectancy and health risk factors, the Government provided no detail about how indigenous people compare to the broader ACT community. These figures should be in the report and should provide the basis for well-thought out, finely targeted and well-funded health care programs addressing indigenous disadvantage in health, but they are absent from the report.
And yet the ACT does have interesting statistics, which would inform public policy, available within its own bureaucracy. For example, in its document health series No. 13 "Health Indicators in the ACT", published in January 1998, it reports:
Although indigenous persons in the ACT are more likely than their interstate counterparts to stay on at school longer, be employed at a greater rate particularly in the public sector and have a higher income, they were still likely to die at a much greater rate than the rest of the ACT population. Indigenous females in particular have a huge mortality differential.
Another report produced by the ACT Government "The Health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People in the ACT", from June 1997, shows that Aboriginal standardised mortality ratios for women are very high for 1993-94, and equal to those for Aboriginal women in the Northern Territory. What the State of the Territory Report does not tell us is some of the statistics published in the Welfare of Australia's "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People", 1999, produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
One of the interesting statistics is "Estimated State and Territory Government Expenditures on Health Services, 1995-96". According to those figures, the ACT spent $659 per indigenous person, compared to $869 per non-indigenous person, on health services. The ACT was the only state to spend less on health services for indigenous people than for non-indigenous people. Even Victoria, which has only 0.5 per cent of its population identifying as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, spent almost double the amount on health services for indigenous people that it spent for non-indigenous people. While the report provides the qualifier that expenditure in some jurisdictions is greater because these governments are servicing remote communities, these figures are nevertheless interesting.
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