Official Statistics and the Contemporary Politics of Indigeneity

Abstract

Critical scholarship on colonisation tells us that official statistics have reflected the perspectives of the colonisers. However, the colonised, in asserting ‘Indigenous rights,’ have begun to use official statistics to advocate policies that will relieve the continuing structural injustice that is colonisation's legacy. This paper examines Aboriginal and Maori intellectuals' efforts to quantify, using official statistics, the ‘unfinished business’ of settler colonial liberalism. Examining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioners' annual Reports, the paper argues that their quantitative comparisons of Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations highlighted the contested implications of ‘equality.’ Turning to New Zealand, the paper reviews two issues: the appropriate boundary of the ‘Māori population,’ and whether it is possible to measure Māori well-being according to Māori norms. The paper draws on the work of Andrew Sharp to make sense of the difficulties and opportunities that face Indigenous intellectuals in Australia and New Zealand when they operationalise ‘social justice’ in the terms of a comparative statistical archive. The paper argues that there are now two distinct idioms in which to represent the collective Indigenous presence within settler colonial nation-state—one signified by the concept ‘population,’ the other by the concept ‘people.’ The tensions between ‘population’ and ‘people,’ resonating with undecided issues about the claims of Indigenous citizenship upon a liberal policy, are a feature of contemporary Indigenous political discourse.

Notes

¹This claim is not true. As early as 1827, the New South Wales Governor was informed that Aborigines were not a mass but a series of territorial units called ‘tribes.’ See ‘Report from Archdeacon Scott to His Excellency Governor Darling &c,&c,&c’ 1 August 1827, Historical Records of Australia Series 1, volume 14, 54–64.

²A detailed account of this change in the Census will appear in Rowse and Smith forthcoming.

³The three Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commisioners have been: Mick Dodson (responsible for reports 1993–98): William Jonas (reports 1999–2003); and Tom Calma (reports from 2004–).

⁴In 1996, Statistics New Zealand officers Len Cook and Cyril Mako celebrated these recently developed collaborations. They mentioned the support given by Statistics New Zealand in developing the survey design used by the Te Hoe Nuku Roa Project ‘and in turn the Te Hoe Nuku Roa team have advanced an understanding of better practice in surveying Maori, benefiting the 1996 Census, the Te Taura Whiri I Te Reo Maori survey, and the disability survey. Statistics New Zealand worked in partnership with Te Taura whiri I te Reo Maori and Te Puni Kokiri to develop a bilingual census form for the 1996 Census. The same organisations worked as a partnership in the Te Taura Whiri I Te Reo Maori survey of Maori language’ (Cook and Mako 1996, 75).

⁵Here I give Chapple's argument in its more extreme form. His alternative was that the non-sole Maori could be divided into two randomly composed halves: one half would be included as Maori, the other as non-Maori (Chapple 2000, 103).

⁶Having made that suggestion, Chapple then went one step further, suggesting not a revised Maori/non-Maori boundary but the abandonment of such a binary altogether: ‘… the policy issue may need to be viewed primarily at a sub-cultural and socio-economic level rather than the coarse ethno-cultural level of Maori/non-Maori binaries’ (Chapple 2000, 115).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tim Rowse

Tim Rowse's most recent book (with Murray Goot) is Divided Nation? Indigenous Affairs and the Imagined Public (Melbourne University Press 2007). With Len Smith, he is completing a historical study of official statistics about Indigenous people in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, from which this paper is drawn. This project is funded by Australia Research Council DP0665866.