There are more than 1,500 remote First Nations communities and homelands around Australia, and about 670 of them have no mobile phone coverage. In research with 495 people from ten remote communities, we found 45.9% were “highly excluded” from increasingly important digital services and tools.
Digital inclusion for First Nations people is part of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. The agreement calls for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to have “access to information and services enabling participation in informed decision-making regarding their own lives”, and “equal levels of digital inclusion as other Australians by 2026”.
