Mike Dockery and Karl Hampton presented to the CBS Economics Research Workshop 2015 'Spatial Dynamics in Housing And Labour Markets' 12 and 13 March 2015 The Novotel Vines, Western Australia

1. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
mobility in central Australia:
A sneak preview of spatial dynamics
in remote communities
Mike Dockery, CRC for Remote Economic Participation
&
Karl Hampton, Ninti One.

2. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mobility
• From first engagement, mobility patterns seen
as ‘problematic’:
• Initially seen as random and unproductive
• The many policies to ‘civilise’ and ‘assimilate’ had
the deliberate aim of sedentisation
• Governor Macquarie (1816):
• “The natives (are exhorted) to relinquish their
wandering, idle and predatory habits of life and to
become industrious and useful members of a
community where they will find protection and
encouragement” (cited in Young and Doohan 1989)
2

3. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mobility
• To this day, mobility seen as inconsistent with
mainstream models of service delivery and
attempts to ‘Close the Gap’.
• Particularly in education, employment, housing and
health.
• Reinforced by geographic distribution
• One quarter live in areas classified by the ABS as
remote or very remote
• Compared to 1.7% of non-Indigenous Australians
3

4. Policy fluctuations
• ‘Protect and Uplift’ → Integration → Assimilation →
Self-determination
• Howard: ‘Practical reconciliation’ & the Northern
Territory Emergency Response
• Closing the Gap (Rudd/Gillard/Rudd) = assimilation?
• Current Abbott Government: continued emphasis on
‘mainstream’ socio-economic outcomes
• Indigenous Jobs and Training Review (the ‘Forrest Review’)
• Indigenous Advancement strategy:
 (i) Jobs, land and economy; (ii) Children and schooling;
(iii) Safety and wellbeing; (iv) Culture and capability; (v)
Remote Australia strategies
• Withdrawal of funding and rationalisation of remote
communities
4

5. Contemporary mobility:
key lessons from the literature
• The traditional drivers of kinship, culture and country
have proven to be extremely resilient
• “Attachment to place and community prevail, irrespective of a
history of changing government policies. There appears no
reason to expect that these attachments will change in the
foreseeable future.” (Memmott et al. 2006)
• “Even after 200 years of colonisation … involving radical
dispossession of Aboriginal groups and … severe curtailment
of their freedom to move around their country, nearly 70% …
recognised a homeland or traditional country” (Morhpy 2010)
5

6. Contemporary mobility:
key lessons from the literature
• Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
mobility is not ‘exogenous’ but is shaped by past and
current policies and events:
• policies of displacement
• policies relating to housing, transport, education and so on
significantly impact upon patterns of mobility
• health and incarceration
• Contemporary mobility must be understood in the
context of these impositions along with the enduring
and evolving aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Australians.
6

7. … but limited empirical evidence
• “…policy makers who contemplate the effects of
temporary mobility on the spatial pattern of demand for
services do so in an information vacuum.” (Taylor: 2006)
• Virtually all ‘representative’ studies based on Census data
• Known to undercount Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
peoples (eg. Alice Springs Town camps)
• Use of culturally inappropriate constructs
• Case study evidence – limited and dated
7

8. Theoretical perspectives on mobility
• Harris-Todaro model/neoclassical economics
• Gravity models
• Diversifying resource access across time and
space (McAllister et. al. 2009)
• Nomadism – moving into regions in resource-rich
times
• ABTSI mobility - Morphy’s (2010) three layered
model:
Sacred geography and associated settlements
Nodal individuals
Kinship networks
8

9. A reconceptualisation – a
wellbeing approach to mobility
Mobility is simply a means to accessing those
things that contribute to wellbeing and
avoiding things that contribute to illbeing
• Important in the context of minority groups and,
particularly, First Nations peoples:
• Aligns with policy objectives - objective of policy should be to
maximise wellbeing!
• Measures and constructs based around social norms, may be
inappropriate for groups of different cultures
• Statistical inferences (eg. gravity models) reflect choices of the
majority – mobility for a minority may appear invisible, anomalous
or dysfunctional
9

10. Reconceptualisating mobility:
A wellbeing approach
• Important in the context of minority groups and,
particularly, First Nations peoples:
• Example for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Australians
 Cultural drivers
 Constructs – ‘usual resident’, ‘visitor’, map boundaries.
• Exposes the prism through which Indigenous mobility is seen as
‘problematic’
 Focusses attention on needs of those people and the
contributing factors to their wellbeing that motivates their
mobility patterns.
10

11. The CRC-REP’s ‘Mobility Project’:
Objectives
• To enhance economic participation and livelihoods and
address disadvantage faced by Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islanders in remote Australia through:
• better understanding of the factors driving temporary mobility
• empirical estimates of the extent and patterns of temporary
mobility.
• Development of a computer-based model with capacity for
prediction and scenario planning
• Improved planning and decision-making by communities,
service providers, policy-makers and employers.
11

12. The ‘Mobility project’ - methodology
• Two stage sampling frame:
• Sample of 25 remote communities in which
residents would access Alice Springs as regional
service centre
 Stratified by language group, region, distance, population
• Sample of individuals aged 15+ within communities
• Stratified by gender and age according to 2011 Census
• Within-community sampling ratio declining by population
to give total of 1,500
• One ‘baseline’ survey with four quarterly follow-up
surveys to capture seasonal variation in mobility
• Ultimately a ‘convenience sample’ to some extent
12

13. 13

14. Survey development
• Focus groups
• Community
workshops (Ntaria &
Ltyentye Apurte)
• Piloting by ACRs and
further workshops
• Refinement of follow-
up surveys with ACR
feedback on initial
survey
14

15. Demographic characteristics: 751 respondents
to initial survey across 20 communities
• Relatively young, respondents disproportionately
female, two-thirds partnered
• An average 1.6 Aboriginal languages spoken, but as
many as 9. Warlpiri (35%) and Pitjantjatjara (28%) the
most commonly spoken
• Average adult occupancy of 4.4 adults per house
• Greater detail on household composition being collected in
follow-up surveys.
• 98.8% report living on their homelands!
15

16. Trips away from the community
to access services
• People felt things were generally available in their
community.
• Services people reported leave the community for
were:
• Shopping for food & groceries – average 9.6 times per year
• Other shopping – 9.0 times per year
• Banking - 3.0 times per year
• health - 2.2 times per year
• Once per year or less: visiting Centrelink, housing agencies, getting
cars serviced or repaired, looking for work of for education and
training.
16

17. Trips away from the community
to access services
• Mostly travel to Alice Springs (by design)
• Distances by road to Alice very from 85 kilometres for Ltyentye
Apurte to 883 kilometres for Lajamanu.
• Residents of Lajamanu mostly travel to Katherine.
• Overall, how often do you travel away from your
community to access services?
• Modal response: ‘Every couple of months’
• Mean response ≈ 19.5 times per year (or once every 2-3
weeks)
• For those who travel to Alice Springs, mean distance travelled
to access services is 852 kms per month
 Maximum = 15,000 kms per month.
• People generally happy to go: didn’t mind going (36%),
or felt good (47%) or very good (8%) about going.
17

18. Trips involving an overnight stay outside of the
community – activities undertaken
18

19. Trips involving an overnight stay
outside of the community
• For those who make those trips, they make
around 24 such trips per year.
• The main methods of travelling were:
 driving - 33%
 getting a lift with others - 29%
 and by bus - 24%
 Not all communities have a bus service
• On average, people reported staying away for 4.5
nights on each trip
• People mostly stayed with family.
19

20. Barriers to mobility
• Of persons aged 17 and over, only 41% held a current driver’s license.
20
Can you always get access to a vehicle if you need one?
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
Yes Most of the
time
Sometimes Not very
often
Only in an
emergency
No
Percent

21. Barriers to mobility
• 1 in 3 wanted to make a trip but couldn’t in the past 12 months.
21
What stops you travelling?
0 5 10 15 20 25 30
Children/kids
Family reasons
Busy working
No licensed driver
No safe vehicle
Culture
Can't get a ride
Not enough money
Per cent

22. Labour market characteristics
• 36% reported that they were working for wages (13%
full-time, 24% part-time).
• Of those not working 45% were looking for work.
• ‘Implied’ unemployment rate of 44%, and participation rate of
65%
• Among those who were looking for work, by far the
most common barrier to finding work was ‘not many
jobs available here’
• health reasons and looking after children a distant second and
third, respectively.
• 71% in receipt of welfare
22

23. Labour market characteristics
• Very low educational attainment:
• Only 9% completed Year 12
• 41% reported holding a ‘certificate’ (but only 4% a
trade)
• Less than 1% hold a degree.
• Effects of limitations to mobility:
• Has driver’s license: 55% employed
• No driver’s license: 23% employed, UR ≈ 61%
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24. Low financial incentives to employment?
24
Money situation by labour force status
Notes: 1=’ I often run out of money before payday’; 2=’ I sometimes have to borrow or bookdown’;
3=’ I keep just enough money to get us through to the next pay’; 4=’ most weeks there is money
left over, which I spend’; 5=’ I save up sometimes’; 6=’ I always save’.
0.0
5.0
10.0
15.0
20.0
25.0
30.0
35.0
40.0
Employed FT Employed PT Unemployed NILF
1
2
3
4
5
6

25. 25
Probability of being in employment – logistic regression results
Variable Odds ratio p>Chi sq.
Male 1.05 0.812
Age:
15-24 years 0.48 0.002
25-44 years — —
45-54 years 0.83 0.462
55-64 years 0.27 0.002
65 and over 0.26 0.017
Married/partnered 0.97 0.875
Number of additional adults living
in household 0.88 0.003
Highest education level
Never went/primary school 0.25 0.000
Some high school but not Yr 12 0.50 0.000
Finished Yr 12/post-school cert. — —
Trade qualification or diploma 1.42 0.468
University degree or higher 1.41 0.725
Has a current license 3.37 0.000
Vehicle access [1-6] 1.04 0.486
Log distance to Alice Springs 0.63 0.000
Observations 724
Log Likelihood 190.51 0.000

26. Some tentative/preliminary conclusions
• Initial picture is of a population who have low levels of
formal educational attainment, low rates of employment,
a high incidence of welfare receipt, and who travel vast
differences.
• Many also faced significant barriers to travel.
• Shared housing with 4+ or considerably more adults in
addition to themselves and their partner is common
• Substantial distances are travelled to access basic
services, notably shopping for food and groceries.
• But people also relatively satisfied with the availability of
services in their community and are content to travel the
distances they do.
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27. Preliminary conclusions/Policy implications
• Confirmation of findings of the previous literature in
identifying kin, culture and country as key drivers of
temporary mobility.
• Facilitated by reciprocal network of accommodation along
kinship lines
• Much has been made of the problem of high mobility –
focus needs to shift to the limitations to mobility
• Not having a driver’s license associated with dramatic fall in
the likelihood of a person in a remote community having a job
 Issue identified in the Forrest Review
27

28. Policy implications
• Assimilation/rationalisation of remote communities
• Effective policy-making requires understanding how people
respond to incentives and disincentives
 In the context of mobility and spatial geography, need to view
mobility through a wellbeing prism to understand behaviour
• Aboriginal people in remote Australia will not sever
their connections to homelands, kinship networks and
cultural obligations
• These things are what their wellbeing is built around
• At best people will move to larger communities where
outcomes may be worse
 Loss of social support networks
 lack of jobs is the key issue
 + other barriers to employment
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29. Policy implications
• Models of service delivery/availability has a substantial
causal impact on mobility, and employment opportunity
falls off with remoteness
• the essence of distance is how it equates to costs – it is not
the physical space that matters.
• These ‘distances’ can be reduced:
• Public transport, sealing roads, telecommunications, vehicle
access etc.
• Further research
• Link between household occupancy and employment
outcomes
• Incorporation of more community level data
 Eg. whether serviced by the Bush Bus
 Cost benefit analyses
29

30. Project Partners
• Australian Bureau of Statistics
• Central Land Council
• Charles Darwin University
• Curtin University
• Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet
• Northern Territory Government
• Tangentyere Council
• University of South Australia
• Waltja Tjutangku Palyapayi
• Western Australian Government
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