The comparative economic status of Torres Strait Islanders in Torres Strait and mainland Australia

A large proportion of Torres Strait Islanders live on the Australian mainland, away from Torres Strait. This has created two different social and economic environments for the population. In the Strait and on the tip of Cape York, Islanders live mainly in small communities, have limited job opportunities and depend largely on employment creation schemes. By comparison, Islanders on the mainland are dispersed throughout the general population in urban centres and have access to a range of employment and other opportunities. This paper compares the economic status of Islanders in these two settings with that of all Australians. Employment and unemployment statistics indicate that the labour force status of Islanders in the Strait is superior to that of Islanders on the mainland. However, it is known that this is largely due to the employment effects of the CDEP scheme. If CDEP scheme participants in the Strait are discounted from census employment statistics then it can be concluded that Islanders on the mainland have a higher economic status than those living in the Strait. Islanders in the Strait also have small average incomes and low educational status compared with Islanders living elsewhere. Overall, Islanders on the mainland occupy a position of intermediate economic status between their counterparts in the Strait and that of Australians in general. This ranking of economic status implies that the degree of effort made to enhance the economic position of Torres Strait Islanders generally must be doubled for those residing in the Torres Strait Regional Authority area. This paper considers the determinants of employment income for Indigenous Australians compared with non-Indigenous Australians. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression techniques are applied to 1991 Census data to consider the question: does the lower income of these Indigenous people reflect differences in their factor endowments (like education) rewarded in the labour market, or are they rewarded differently for the same set of endowments than are non-Indigenous Australians. The results show that the main source of lower incomes for Indigenous Australians was their smaller endowment of human capital characteristics. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of these results

How To Get Improvements On A Rented Farm

How to make improvements on rented farms is one of the most difficult problems face landlords and tenants. Some are working out their own solutions. But most of them are still looking for satisfactory ways and means for making improvements. About a third of the requests to the college for rental information concernt this problem

Keep Leases Up With New Farming Methods

Farming methods change rapidly. But farm leases based largely on custom change slowly. So if custom can\u27t keep up with the changes, we\u27ll have to work out new arrangements ourselves

Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism Linkage Map for Arabidopsis thaliana

We have constructed a restriction fragment length polymorphism linkage map for the nuclear genome of the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana. The map, containing 90 randomly distributed molecular markers, is physically very dense; >50% of the genome is within 1.9 centimorgans, or approx 270 kilobase pairs, of the mapped DNA fragments. The map was based on the meiotic segregation of markers in two different crosses. The restriction fragment length polymorphism linkage groups were integrated with the five classically mapped linkage groups by virtue of mapped mutations included in these crosses. Markers consist of both cloned Arabidopsis genes and random low-copy-number genomic DNA clones that are able to detect polymorphisms with the restriction enzymes EcoRI, Bgl II, and/or Xba I. These cloned markers can serve as starting points for chromosome walking, allowing for the isolation of Arabidopsis genes of known map location. The restriction fragment length polymorphism map also can associate clones of unknown gene function with mutant phenotypes, and vice versa

Patterns and trends in the spatial diffusion of the Torres Strait Islander population

Until World War 2, Torres Strait Islanders were restricted in their distribution to the Torres Strait. Since that time, migration to the Australian mainland has contributed to a significant redistribution with the majority of Torres Strait Islanders now resident in the major cities of eastern Australia. Despite the importance of migration in determining Torres Strait Islander involvement in the labour market, study of their population movement has been limited, and such analysis as does exist is unsystematic, spatially restricted and generally dated. This paper is therefore an attempt to draw from the literature what is known about the spatial diffusion of Torres Strait Islanders and to supplement this with the most recently available internal migration data from the 1986 Census. While it appears that the search for employment was an important stimulant for migration in the past, this is less so now, not least because Torres Strait Islanders now find themselves located predominantly in places where labour markets exist. No evidence is found from the 1986 Census to support the idea of sustained redistribution away from areas of long-standing settlement in north Queensland. This contrasts with distribution patterns based on preliminary counts of the 1991 Census and the extent to which this discrepancy is due to migration or census error raises a critical issue in the analysis of Islander population change