Options for benchmarking ABS population estimates for Indigenous communities in Queensland

Concerns have been expressed for some time by Indigenous community leaders, analysts, government agencies, and local service providers about the accuracy of census counts for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Queensland. Recent reclassification of these communities as Local Government Areas has heightened these concerns in the context of financial distributions and the related need for the ABS to develop small area population estimates. This paper examines the ABS methodology for estimating these populations, and benchmarks these against demographic information available from a range of administrative data. Potential deficiencies in ABS methodology are highlighted and a case is made for the use of administrative data in developing estimates for small populations.