Some Labour Market Measurement Issues for Indigenous Australians

The collection of the National Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Social Survey (NATSISS) in 2002 provides a valuable new source of data on Indigenous labour force status. Apart from the 1994 NATSIS until now the only useful data available to assess the labour market circumstances of Indigenous Australians are the five yearly Census collections. NATSISS improves on the Census in three ways: one, it identifies CDEP scheme employment; two, for the first time, analysis of labour market issues is possible in very remote areas of Australia; and three, it contains information on a wide range of somewhat unusual social, demographic, cultural and economic variables, such as health status, speaking an Aboriginal' language, having used an employment service and access to transport. Even so, no data set is perfect and NATSISS suffers from not having any information on a very important variable for an understanding of economic success or failure, the length of labour market experience. By comparing wage and employment econometric estimations with those available in a more complete data set, HILDA, we are able to illustrate the significance of this omission.