ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how claims about responsibility cohere with causal understandings of the health issues to address. It discusses responsibility for health raise a great many complex issues, which are often obscured in the careless use of the term. Debates about the relative responsibilities of governments, individuals and communities for health need to occur against a background of clear thinking about the complex notion of responsibility. It focuses here is on the severe health problems of Indigenous Australians. Using measures such as life expectancy, which lags behind the population average by almost two decades, Aboriginal Australians' health is by far the worst of all comparable indigenous populations, and, moreover, has failed to make the improvements seen in other indigenous groups. However, the complex nature of the very serious health problems facing Indigenous Australians, which are quite clearly related to social and economic disadvantage, means that many Shared Responsibility Agreements (SRAs), if not all, have some implication for health.
