Submitted by Paul Daley on
After a dramatic decline post-1788 invasion, Tuesday’s census will mark a significant resurgence in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population
There was a time, far more recently than many Australians would care to admit, that this country’s policymakers and anthropologists believed they were witnessing the vanishment of the continent’s Indigenous people.
The Tasmanian Aboriginal people had already (wrongly) been declared extinct with the passing of Truganini in 1876.
Related: Census 2016: Labor urges all Australians to include their names
... if rates of fertility, paternity and mortality continue as they have been, then the Indigenous population is projected to grow from around 670,000 in 2011 to around 1,060,000 by 2031. While this population growth isn’t as fast as was observed between 2006 and 2011 (because no identification or enumeration change was incorporated into the projections), it is still projected that the Indigenous population will grow from around 3.0 per cent of the total population in 2011 to 3.8 per cent by 2031.
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