Proximity to Labour Markets: Revisiting Indigenous Employment Through an Analysis of Census Place of Work Data

One of the six targets as part of the current ‘Closing the Gap’ agenda is to halve the gap in employment outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a decade (by 2018). Much of the focus around meeting this target has been the availability of jobs in remote Australia. However, given that the majority of the Indigenous population lives in cities and regional Australia where employment gaps are still quite high, most of the additional jobs required to meet CoAG’s target will need to be found in our major cities and large regional towns. Across Australia, there are important labour demand issues resulting from uneven geographic access to labour markets. Utilising place of work and place of usual residence data from the 2006 Census, the analysis presented in this paper considers the proximity of Indigenous Australians to various urban labour markets and the likely impact on entrenching Indigenous socioeconomic disadvantage.