Poverty alleviation in remote Indigenous Australia

While Australia is one of the world’s richest countries in both absolute and per capita terms, many of its Indigenous peoples live in poverty. This chapter elucidates some avenues for addressing poverty in remote Indigenous Australia via appropriate pro-poor growth strategies. The chapter also engages robustly with the dominant Indigenous policy approach in Australia that somewhat myopically promulgates a view that Indigenous economic development can only be achieved via mainstreaming, a term that refers to orthodox engagement with the market either through sale of labour or through the operation of commercial business. This chapter challenges this dominant view by focusing on small outstation or homeland communities, which symbolize a form of remote living that fundamentally challenges the government’s mainstreaming vision for Indigenous Australians. The alternative approach that is proposed here is a First World form of a livelihoods approach. We argue that such an approach might be more successful than mainstreaming, in both economic and cultural terms, in addressing Indigenous poverty. This approach, referred to as “the hybrid economy model”, emphasizes that the customary or non-market sector has a crucially important role to play in association with private and public sectors in addressing Indigenous poverty in Australia. In line with this we argue for a more holistic and inclusive policy approach to outstations.