This paper presents an analysis of Indigenous employment trends in Australia from 1981 to 2021, using nine iterations of 5-yearly Census data. It offers the most consistent long-term estimates available and situates these trends within broader shifts in the Australian labour market. Three key findings emerge. First, the overall increase in Indigenous employment over the 40-year period is primarily driven by the substantial rise in employment among Indigenous women, accounting for over 93% of the total growth. Second, employment rates for Indigenous men have remained largely stagnant, highlighting persistent structural barriers. Third, geographic and educational disparities continue to constrain Indigenous labour market participation, particularly in remote areas. From a long-term perspective, existing data sources offer valuable insights into employment trends and provide a foundational platform for understanding systemic patterns over time. At the same time, this long-term view invites critical reflection on the evolving nature of data collection and interpretation, particularly in relation to complex, identity-based variables. Recognizing both the contributions and limitations of current datasets underscores the importance of developing innovative, culturally responsive methodologies that can more accurately capture the multifaceted drivers of employment. This includes attending to dynamic factors such as the increasing visibility and self-determination of Indigenous identity, which may influence statistical representations and policy responses in nuanced ways.

A key factor that affects the efficiency of investments in human capital is whether people are employed in jobs in which their skills (education) match those required by the job. This paper provides the first longitudinal analysis of educational mismatch among Indigenous Australians in comparison with their non-Indigenous counterparts. Employed Indigenous Australians are substantially more likely to be under-educated and less likely to be over-educated or well-matched than non-Indigenous workers. Over-educated Indigenous workers transition more readily into well-matched or under-educated positions than their non-Indigenous counterparts. Over ten years, income growth was highest for well-matched workers, followed by the under-educated, with the over-educated experiencing the smallest gains. Indigenous workers who were under-educated or well-matched achieved substantially larger income increases over five and ten years than comparable non-Indigenous workers. The higher under-education rate among Indigenous employees may reflect affirmative action policies promoting workers beyond typical educational requirements, or employment practices that value the cultural knowledge and competencies of Indigenous people not captured by formal education credentials.

Indigenous employment has attracted an increasing focus in recent decades from policy-makers, in the context of the gap between national rates of Indigenous and non-Indigenous employment. Non-Indigenous businesses are implementing a series of workplace and recruitment policies to enhance their rates of Indigenous employment, yet there is limited research demonstrating the impact of these policies. This paper uses primary survey data from a representative sample of Australian-based non-Indigenous-owned businesses to detail how Indigenous-focused workplace and recruitment practices are associated with Indigenous employment and retention. Descriptive analysis reveals that businesses with a workforce with 3.8% or more Indigenous employees (3.8% being the most recent Indigenous population proportion estimate) are more likely to maintain a series of Indigenous-specific workplace and recruitment practices, including celebrating NAIDOC, having a Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP), and cultural competency training, compared to businesses with fewer than 3.8% Indigenous employees. Businesses with higher Indigenous employee retention rates similarly demonstrate a higher likelihood to maintain these policies; however, the clearest delineation for businesses with 3.8% or more Indigenous employment and high Indigenous staff retention, is the presence of Indigenous management within these businesses. Revealingly, probit regression models demonstrate that Indigenous manager/s in a business are associated with a 50-60% higher probability of maintaining an Indigenous employment rate of 3.8% or above and an 11-16% lower probability of having poor Indigenous staff retention. Therefore, this paper reveals the importance of having Indigenous people in positions of organisational influence within non-Indigenous organisations, more so than implementing isolated workplace strategies.

Previous research demonstrates that businesses that are Indigenous-owned are far more likely to employ Indigenous people than non-Indigenous-owned businesses (Hunter, 2015, The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 26, 631). The majority of the literature on Indigenous employment uses a deficit discourse, describing factors that prevent or exclude Indigenous people from non-Indigenous-owned organisations. There is markedly less literature using a strength-based approach, detailing how Indigenous-owned businesses create workplaces without barriers to Indigenous employment. Through 32 semistructured interviews with Indigenous business owners, managers, and Indigenous employees of Indigenous-owned businesses, this paper provides insights into how participants' businesses create workplaces that are more supportive of, and conducive to, Indigenous employment. This paper finds that Indigenous approaches to governance inform an organisational level of cultural competence, which creates tailored and specific practices that support better Indigenous employment outcomes. This resonates with the concept of Indigenous ways of "knowing, being, and doing," and how this framework encompasses participants' approaches to business operations. In the light of increasing public and private policy commitments to improve Indigenous employment outcomes, it is imperative that the Indigenous business sector's best practice inform said policies, given its successes. However, inherent in these findings are broader discussions into more systemic and societal issues that go beyond workplace policy.

The Economics and the Dreamtime was a landmark in Australian Economic History where Noel Butlin elevated awareness of the central importance of Indigenous economic history. It was a sprawling inter-disciplinary work that used economic tools to understand Indigenous society before first contact and in the early colonial period. This article revisits that book to provide a critical evaluation of the major contributions of Butlin's research on Indigenous Australians. His primary contribution was to make Indigenous people more visible in the Australian economy in the early colonial period. He created a unique backcasting methodology that allowed Indigenous population to be estimated in the first six decades of the colony based on depopulation from disease, resource loss and frontier violence. I argue that the two main shortcomings of Butlin's research is that his method used colonial estimates of the population and that the population estimates are not sufficiently geographically differentiated. The main criticism of Butlin's research in the literature is that it is too speculative. However, his methodological innovation allows considerable transparency in the assumptions used and can create a range of plausible estimates that give us a sense of the unreliability of the existing population estimates. Alternative methodologies based on estimating population densities in 1788 from anthropological evidence are historically point estimates, which do not provide a sense of how uncertain the estimates might be. The way forward for this debate is to combine Butlin's demographic backcast methodology with population density estimates that take into account the selective mortality from disease and frontier violence. Finally, in order to create a truly Australian Economic History, it is necessary to also augment the methodology to incorporate Indigenous perspectives into the analysis and to utilise a local geography that acknowledges the diversity of Indigenous Australia.

Indigenous-owned businesses in Australia are strong employers of Indigenous people, maintaining rates of Indigenous employment that are not seen across the breadth of the Australian economy. Despite an increasing focus from governments and private organisations to improve rates of Indigenous employment, there is limited evidence to suggest that substantial improvements are being made. Despite acknowledgement from government of the crucial role played by Indigenous employers in creating Indigenous employment, there has been little focus on what may be learned from the Indigenous business sector in informing public and private Indigenous workplace and recruitment policies. Given the significantly strong levels of Indigenous employment in Indigenous-owned businesses, it is important to interrogate the extent to which this employment differs from that in non-Indigenous businesses and the potential explanations for such divergence. Using data from Supply Nation (2,291 Indigenous-owned businesses) and a survey of 680 non-Indigenous businesses, this paper finds that Indigenous businesses employ Indigenous people at a rate 12 times higher than non-Indigenous businesses. Regression analyses and Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions reveal that these divergent employment outcomes cannot be explained by the broad characteristics of the two sectors (such as industry, location, or profit status). These findings help confirm that the unique workplace practices of Indigenous businesses may explain their strong Indigenous employment and, therefore, provide the template for all Australian businesses to be better employers of Indigenous people.

Indigenous employment is a critical policy area in Australia, with businesses adopting targeted workplace and recruitment practices to increase their levels of Indigenous employment. However, non-Indigenous-owned Australian businesses are still struggling to meet their Indigenous employment targets, and the national gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous employment rates remains wide. Despite the increased popularity of Indigenous-specific workplace and recruitment policies, there is a lack of research that aims to determine their associations with Indigenous employment. This paper addresses this gap by surveying 680 non-Indigenous-owned Australian businesses, detailing the uptake of various Indigenous-focused workplace and recruitment practices and their associations with Indigenous employment. The study finds that there is limited uptake of policies and practices such as Reconciliation Action Plans, cultural competency training, and Indigenous employment strategies, and some scepticism from respondents about their efficacy. OLS and negative binomial estimations could not demonstrate consistent associations between the implementation of these policies and Indigenous employment. However, the paper finds a significant association between the presence of Indigenous people in management positions within non-Indigenous-owned businesses and higher rates of Indigenous employment. This finding is consistent with previous research, which suggests that Indigenous-led approaches lead to improved Indigenous employment outcomes.

Indigenous employment has been the subject of numerous policies in Australia, with governments aiming to increase the workforce participation rate amongst Indigenous people in recent years. Indigenous-owned businesses, formally defined as businesses that are at least 50% Indigenous-owned, have been demonstrated in previous research to maintain substantially higher levels of proportional Indigenous employment than non-Indigenous businesses. This suggests that Indigenous-owned businesses maintain work environments that are more supportive of and conducive to Indigenous employment, meriting the influence of Indigenous-owned businesses' workplace practices in future Indigenous employment policy design. Using administrative data from two Indigenous business registries (Black Business Finder and Supply Nation), this paper provides an updated empirical analysis of the Indigenous business sector. This paper demonstrates that Indigenous-owned businesses of all sizes, industries, locations and profit statuses consistently average proportional Indigenous employment rates higher than the Indigenous proportional population. Of all the people employed in Supply Nation-listed businesses, over 35% are Indigenous. The potential impact of the Indigenous Procurement Policy is illustrated by differentials in the size of businesses and their capacity to employ Indigenous staff. This paper provides analysis of the Indigenous business sector that can inform future policy direction for both Indigenous employment and Indigenous business policies.

Business ownership provides Indigenous Australians with an opportunity to seek economic independence and greater self-determination. However, societal barriers created through systemic discrimination may limit the potential for Indigenous Australians to enter into business. While other research has alluded to the deleterious effect of a discriminatory environment on Indigenous business ownership, much of that research is qualitative and relies on the self-reported experiences of the phenomenon. This paper extends earlier quantitative research that explains lower local rates of business ownership among Indigenous people compared with other Australians using socioeconomic and demographic factors (Shirodkar and Hunter, 2019). Project Implicit developed and collected data from the Implicit Association Test that measures implicit biases against Indigenous Australians, arguably the root cause of systemic discrimination, collecting over 11,000 unique observations from Australians over a decade (Shirodkar, 2019). An ecological regression model of Indigenous business ownership finds that after accounting for other pertinent economic factors, higher rates of implicit bias in Australian regions has a statistically significant and negative relationship with Indigenous business ownership. The result suggests that the implicit biases of non-Indigenous Australians drives lower levels of Indigenous business ownership.

The medical and policy response to COVID-19 has focussed on the containment of the virus, including active surveillance, contact tracing, quarantine, and early strong social distancing efforts needed to limit transmission. The response to the virus has led to a substantial economic disruption. The net effect on the Australian economy has been a sharp decline in national economic activity, which is likely to be exacerbated by the inherent uncertainty of the health crisis and the ongoing need for further containment for a second wave of outbreaks. This ongoing uncertainty will amplify the economic uncertainty inherent in recessions. The global nature of the pandemic and the evolving geopolitical environment may affect international trade for a number of years.

The digital divide between Indigenous and other Australians describes the unequal access to information and communications technology (ICT) between these groups Historically, researchers have focused on acquiring new technology, but we argue that it is important to understand all the dynamics of digital usage, including the loss of access to ICT within a household For long-lived technology such as internet access, it is particularly important to consider that retention of access to the technology This paper conducts a longitudinal analysis of changes in internet usage for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian households using the Australian Census Longitudinal Dataset, 2006-2016 While earlier work analyses the digital divide in terms of 'diffusion' or adoption of ICT, this paper shows that the failure to retain internet access is also important in driving the digital divide The dynamics of the digital divide have important and ongoing implications for addressing broader socioeconomic disadvantages experienced by Indigenous Australians The COVID-19 pandemic underscores the urgency of policy addressing the digital divide, given the renewed momentum for remote learning and telecommuting © 2020 Hunter & Radoll

Macroeconomic shocks and the policy responses to those shocks have significant effects on Australia\u0027s economy. However, research into impacts of such shocks on the Indigenous labour force is limited. This paper explores how the [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 crisis is likely to affect Indigenous labour market outcomes in future. While this paper briefly examines the immediate consequences of the COVID-19 crisis for Indigenous economic outcomes, it discusses the likely longer-run consequences for Indigenous employment at some length. The sectoral concentration of Indigenous employment, the relatively high levels of casual employment and the relatively young age profile of the Indigenous population may increase Indigenous exposure to significant economic risks. Indigenous business disproportionately employ Indigenous workers, but such businesses are concentrated in small to medium enterprises that may be sensitive to recessionary conditions, especially if economic uncertainty leads to a more generalised financial crisis involving liquidity constraints. Recent history demonstrates that Indigenous employment rates have increased only gradually in the long period of macroeconomic growth leading up to the pandemic. Historical disadvantage, discrimination and geographical constraints are important drivers of the dynamics of Indigenous labour market disadvantage, that limit educational attainment and ability to find work. For those Indigenous people who secure employment, it can be difficult to retain employment.

This paper outlines the legal instruments and other measures used to support the protection of Indigenous Knowledge (IK), with a view to attributing market value to IK. These instruments are categorised as either enforceable instruments or voluntary protocols, standards and guides. Enforceable instruments have a clear connection to market value, typically being tradeable with a cost incurred to protect their attributable IK. While legal costs, patent prices and licence fees are private, it may be possible to gain access to summarised and de-identified data. Non-enforceable rights such as protocols, codes of conduct and certification may involve compensation or payments designed to protect IK. Price premiums may help to capture the market value of attributable IK, but require careful methodological consideration. A diverse range of instruments helps to provide choice to Indigenous Peoples and creates a system that may support the development of social and market norms that encourage the recognition and protection of IK.

This report provides an approach to the valuation of the potential market value of Indigenous knowledge (IK) including traditional knowledge and cultural expressions6 for IP Australia (IP Australia, 2018e; Janke & Sentina, 2018). The report has a particular focus on the current and potential future market value created through legislated protection measures including patent law, trade mark law, design legislation and plant breeder’s rights. These are the protective mechanisms, which do not include copyright law, that sit within IP Australia’s jurisdiction.The market value of IK is connected to, though not the same as, the market value of IP that protects that IK, just as the value of derivatives in the financial markets is connected to though not equal to the value of their respective underlying stocks. This insight is drawn from the observation that the value of technology is connected to, though separate in value from, the value of the IP that protects that technology

Although the environmental and economic impacts of drought have been widely studied, few large-scale studies have examined the broader social impacts of drought. To fill this knowledge gap, the Australian Institute of Family Studies undertook the Regional and Rural Families Survey in 2007, when a significant part of Australia was experiencing a severe drought. This paper analyses that survey to measure the extent to which drought affects a range of economic, health and social outcomes. Drought is found to have a substantial negative economic and health impact on farmers and others employed in the agricultural sector. There is some evidence that groups that are not employed in agriculture are adversely affected, with a widespread loss of services in drought-affected areas and some marginal labour market groups (e.g. carers) experiencing poor employment outcomes in a drought-affected local economy. Policymakers need to take these impacts into account in designing effective responses to future droughts.

iii Acknowledgments iv Acronyms iv Introduction 1 Measures of wellbeing 2 Paid employment 2 Equivalised household income 3 Psychological distress 3 Incarceration 3 Suicide 3 Trends in wellbeing 4 Employment rates 4 Median equivalised household income 5 Imprisonment rates 7 Psychological distress 8 Suicide rates 8 Concluding comments 10 Notes 11 References 12 Working Paper No. 116/2017 v vi Gray and Hunter Centre for Abor ig ina l Economic Pol icy Research