Summary

This report provides a summary of fatal and non-fatal injury of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia due to unintentional land transport crashes over the 5-year period from 2010–11 to 2014–15. Due to data quality issues, Victoria, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory were excluded from analyses.

All transport injury

Transport-related injury was the second leading cause of fatal injury (23%) and the fourth leading cause of serious injury (8.2%) for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Over 95% of the fatal and non-fatal transport injury cases for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people involved land transport.

Land transport injury

Land transport crashes accounted for 19% of all fatal injury cases and 8% of all hospitalised injury cases for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The age-standardised rate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was 2.7 times the rate for non-Indigenous Australians for fatal cases and 1.3 times the rate for non-Indigenous Australians for serious injuries. Over 90% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land transport fatalities and about 66% of serious injury cases occurred in traffic.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were fatally or seriously injured in land transport crashes were less likely to have been drivers and more likely to have been passengers and pedestrians, compared with non-Indigenous Australians. Sixty-three per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people fatally injured in land transport crashes, and 39% of those seriously injured, were occupants of cars.

The age-standardised fatal injury rate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as car occupants was 3.1 times that of non-Indigenous Australians (driver 2.5 times; passenger 4.8 times) and the fatal injury rate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as pedestrians was 4.6 times that of non-Indigenous Australians. Equivalent ratios for serious injury were 1.2 (for car drivers), 2.5 (for passengers) and 2.9 (for pedestrians).

In general, age-standardised rates of fatal and serious land transport injury increased with the remoteness of the person’s usual residence from an urban centre.

Fatal injury rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were higher than those for non-Indigenous Australians for residents of all remoteness areas, while serious injury rates for non-Indigenous Australians were higher than those for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in all remoteness regions except Major cities.

Overall, age-standardised fatal and serious injury rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and for non-Indigenous Australians did not change significantly over the 5-year period from 2010–11 to 2014–15. However, there were statistically significant declines in fatal injury rates for non-Indigenous Australians injured as car passengers or as pedestrians over this period.