Indigenous employment: a story of continuing growth

Recent reporting suggests that there has been no growth in Indigenous employment since the mid-2000s, or even that employment has decreased slightly. Such reports focus on changes in a measure of employment which includes Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) participants. However, when CDEP is excluded from the employment measure a very different picture emerges - one of a strong and sustained increase in non-CDEP employment since 1994. Failure to clearly focus on non-CDEP employment can lead to misleading conclusions about employment growth and the effectiveness of government policy aimed at increasing non-CDEP employment. This paper uses census data combined with CDEP administrative data to produce estimates of changes in non-CDEP employment for Indigenous Australian between 1996 and 2011.

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