Australia §

Demographic of Australia §

• 3.5 million older Australians in 2015 ¹
  • representing 1/7 people
  • 15.1% of the population in which this proportion has increased from 14.3% in 2012.

Health in Australia §

• 22% of people have a long term health condition ²

Disability in Australia §

• 1/6 of Australians have disability ²

  • 1/3 of the disabled have severe disability (1.4M)
  • 1/4 of the disabled is mental or behaviorally disabled
  • Why are there so many with disability?
    • Disability rates correlate with age, as Australia’s population grows older, like Japan, disability goes up
    • Although disability rates in Australia is going down for elders, they still are higher than younger people
  • How does this disability rate compare to Cambodia and the rest of the world?

• 4.4M with disability ³

  • Only 500k with National Disability Insurance Scheme
  • NDIS says it only supports those with severe disabilities

• The disabled is discriminated against

  • Unequal job opportunity: lower wage, not provide appropriate help in workplace for disability
  • High rate of arrest/imprisonment

Indigenous Groups §

• The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders of Australia
• Issues of
  • The Stolen Generation: white people stole aboriginal decendents in the intention of integrating them into white society in the 19-20th century ⁴
    • for them to work
    • thinking that as the aboriginal population was low, there was not way they could still exist in full blood aboriginals anyways
  • Lower quality of life in general

Discrimination §

• As of September 2019, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners represented 28% of the total adult prisoner population ⁵
• while accounting for 2% of the general adult population (3.3% of the total population).
• Reasons for over-representation in criminal system
  1. Socio-economic disadvantage, substance use disorder, homelessness and overcrowding, lack of education and physical and mental health issues
  2. Structural bias and discriminatory justice system: failure to know cultural differences. Not knowing the existance of laws which discriminate (directly/indirectly) against these groups.

Closing the Gap Strategy §

• Closing the Gap Strategy: created by the federal government in 2008 to improve the lives of indigenous peoples in these fields:

  • To close the life expectancy gap within a generation
  • To halve the gap in mortality rates for Indigenous children under five within a decade
  • To ensure access to early childhood education for all Indigenous four-year olds in remote communities within five years
  • To halve the gap in reading, writing and numeracy achievements for children within a decade
  • To halve the gap for Indigenous students in year 12 attainment rates by 2020
  • To halve the gap in employment outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a decade

• Effectiveness ⁶

  • Only 2 goals were on track to be met in 2020
  • It was set up to fail, it didn’t work with the group its trying it help, it was a top-down approach, managed by the bureaucrats
  • Closing the Gap is being reworked to involve aboriginals and Torres Islander Peoples to set the targets themselves rather than set it for them (2020)
    • If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day
    • Government says its changing, but its not.
  • How to make it succeed?
    • when it supports greater community control at a local level
    • puts more focus on strategies to build community resources for health and wellbeing

Refugees and asylum seekers in Australia §

• Australia is part of the Refugees Convention of the UN, meaning people who fit the definition of refugees ⁷

  • Must not be sent back to their country where their life and freedom will be threatened (principle of non-refoulment)
  • Must not send non-refugees to countries where their human rights are threatened
  • Must protect the human rights of them, with or without visa
    • Include rights to not be arbitrarily detained
  • Provide for needs of asylum seekers and refugees: torture and trauma counseling, access to family tracing services, access to legal and migration advice, interpreting and translation, health and mental health care, and access to education and recreational activities.

• Processing asylum seekers in Australia ⁷

  • If the person satisfies health, identity, and security requirements, they’ll be given a visa
  • Non-refugees who face human rights threats in their origin country, if they meet the complementary protection criteria (ICCPR, CAT, or CRC)
    • If a non-refugee is owed complementary protection, satisfies health, identity, and scurity requirements, they will be given visa
  • Those refused can:
    • seek independent merits review by Refugee Review Tribunal
      • or Administrative Appeal Tribunal.
    • Or ministerial intervention to allow to remain under humanitarian or compassionate grounds

References §

Footnotes §

1. Disability in Australia - Wikipedia ↩

2. People with disability in Australia, Prevalence of disability - Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (aihw.gov.au) ↩ ↩²

3. Concern millions of Australians with disability not on the NDIS have been ‘forgotten’ | ABC News - YouTube ↩

4. Stolen Generations - Wikipedia ↩

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Australians_and_crime ↩

6. Why isn’t Closing the Gap working? - From The Heart ↩

7. # 1 Asylum seekers and refugees ↩ ↩²