Aboriginal economic development

Since 1788 and the European colonisation of Australia, the continental population has grown rapidly and national income has increased, making Australia one of the world's rich or developed nations. Yet history shows that national wealth creation has been predicated on the alienation of land and resources from the continent's prior inhabitants, Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders, or Indigenous Australians: the growth of national wealth has largely excluded this section of the population. Somewhat surprisingly, while Aboriginal poverty was fairly evident throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is only since the 1971 Census of Population and Housing that this could be statistically documented. This is because the Constitution specifically excluded the aboriginal natives of Australia from the fiveyearly census count; it was only in the 1967 referendum that this discriminatory provision (s127) was deleted.