Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd conceded yesterday that there had been slow progress on improving the lives of Aborigines, two years since delivering a historic apology for past abuses.
Submitting his second annual Closing the Gap report to parliament, Rudd said change was a “slow path” requiring action from Aboriginal people and the wider community, not just the government.
More Aborigines were in work and school, but on the key target of halving the gulf in life expectancy, the center-left Rudd accepted too little had been done.
“There’s evidence to suggest that some progress may have been made,” Rudd told parliament. “But the progress is clearly too slow.”
The latest data showed Aboriginal men died 11.5 years sooner than their non-Aboriginal counterparts, while for women the gap was 9.7 years.
Aboriginal children were twice as likely to die before the age of five than children in the broader Australian community, which Rudd said was a “shameful statistic.”
“For all parents, it is shocking and confronting,” he said.
Though the child mortality rate was declining, Rudd said action was required to accelerate the trend and meet the goal of halving the gap for Aboriginal children by 2018.
Rudd said notable progress had been made in building and repairing homes in Aboriginal communities, and more children were enrolling in early childhood education, with some improvements in literacy and numeracy.
More Aborigines were working, though Rudd said there remained a 21 percentage point gap in the employment rate.
Poor health was still a problem, he said, with treatable chronic disease accounting for two-thirds of premature Aboriginal deaths.
While the government had an important role in “restoring social norms,” Rudd said Aboriginal Australians had to take greater individual responsibility for change.
“Today I am asking indigenous leaders — in families, in communities and across the nation — to step up and take responsibility for restoring strong social norms in their own communities.
Aborigines, Australia’s original inhabitants with cultures stretching back many thousands of years, are believed to have numbered around 1 million at the time of white settlement, but there are now just 470,000 out of a population of 21 million.
Rudd delivered a historic apology in February 2008 for past mistreatment after British settlers arrived in Sydney Cove in 1788.
But he has maintained the controversial “intervention” policy of the previous conservative government, which restricted welfare payments and banned alcohol in dozens of desert townships, condemned as discriminatory by a UN envoy.
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