Beyond the Pale: Measures of Mobility in Postcolonial Australia

Authors

John Taylor

Abstract

Australian postcolonial demography, or ‘Indigenous demography’ as it has become colloquially labelled (Taylor 2009a), has emerged as a form of applied demography in support of attempts by the state to quantify and respond to the social and economic needs of Indigenous Australians as a separately identified homogenous group. In this way it forms part of a social justice agenda that gained impetus by the late 1960s by the calibration of Indigenous socioeconomic change relative to non-Indigenous outcomes as a device for policy formation (Rowse and Smith 2010: 100). This is presently articulated as a ‘Closing the Gaps’ strategy, with the aim being to bring about convergence in outcomes by shifting Indigenous indicators closer to those observed for the wider majority population.

Recommended Citation

Taylor, John, Beyond the Pale: Measures of Mobility in Postcolonial Australia, Law Text Culture, 15, 2011, 72-99.
Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol15/iss1/5