Indigenous data from the ABS Labour Force Survey: what can they tell us?

This paper critically evaluates Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) annual estimates of Indigenous labour force status for the period 1994-2000 based on the Labour Force Survey (LFS). The purpose is to assess the usefulness of the estimates for policy evaluation. The evaluation involved an examination of the estimates in the context of previous attempts to benchmark the position of Indigenous people in relation to the labour market, an assessment of the LFS methodology and a calculation of the standard errors associated with the annual movement in the estimates. The evaluation questions whether the positive results of the estimates suggest the emergence of an improvement in the position of Indigenous people in the labour market, whether they reflect the success of the Indigenous Employment Policy (IEP), and whether they result from macroeconomic or microeconomic change. The evaluation concludes that the LFS experimental estimates are of limited value for policy analysis. They confirm existing understandings of recent labour force trends but are unreliable due to high standard errors. Movements of annual rates are statistically insignificant in all but the last two years, thus preventing the establishment of long-term trends. The significant decline in unemployment rates since 1998 reflects trends in Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme employment in which administrative changes to the scheme are likely to have raised overall employment levels over the same period. The prospect that recent decline in Indigenous unemployment has formed part of the general labour market trend appears unlikely. The implementation of IEP appears to have taken place too recently to have had any bearing on this result. The proposal by the ABS to augment the Indigenous sample in the LFS by providing annualised estimates would require complex transformations of LFS data that are likely to effect the reliability of the final estimates. Show less