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Indigenous people at greater risk on the roads
ABORIGINALS and Torres Strait Islanders have a much greater chance of being killed or injured on the roads than any other Australians according to a report just published by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
Researchers analysed statistics from the Northern Territory, Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland and found Indigenous people from the four jurisdictions recorded three times the rate of fatalities and 1.4 times the rate of injuries than the rest of the community.
Measured by jurisdiction, the rate of fatalities in WA was four times the national rate for the rest of the community and the injury rate was 1.8 times above the national figure.
However, most of the report looks at the four jurisdictions as a whole where 60% of Australia's Indigenous people live. As the graph below shows, the pattern of Indigenous road fatalities does not follow the well-known trends in the general community. In the general community the risk of death on the roads peaks among 15-25 year olds - particularly for males. The death rate then declines until people reach their 60s.
In the Indigenous community there is an entirely different set of risk levels. Indigenous males between 35 and 39 are at the highest risk and among the young; it is the 15-19 year old males where the death rate is the highest. But as the study points out, for Indigenous males and females the fatal injury rate remains elevated through to middle age.
Another difference is where the crashes occur. Seventy-five percent of Indigenous fatalities are in outer regional, remote or very remote areas and so are 74% of the serious injuries. By contrast 69% of fatalities among non-Indigenous people occur in major cities or inner regional areas and so too do 69% of the serious injuries.
