The 17-year life expectancy gap between Aborigines and the rest of Australia will only be closed by finding "new ways of working" on the problem, World Vision says.
World Vision chief executive, the Reverend Tim Costello, presenting the Menzies Oration in Darwin on Tuesday, said the 17-year life expectancy gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians was "not just a health sector responsibility".
He said "new ways of working" were needed to fight the social factors that led to poor health.
"The government clearly has a leading role to play in eradicating poverty and disadvantage.
"Unlike in many developing nations, in Australia government has both the responsibility to respond and the capacity to do so."
Mr Costello said it was time for the Rudd government to strike a balance between the self-determination policies of the 1980s and 1990s and the interventionist approach of the Howard years.
"It seems that both approaches represent extreme swings of the pendulum.
"Surely it is time to bring the pendulum to rest at the point of balance between these two extremes."
A WHO International report released this year found children inherited vastly different life chances depending on where they were born, he said.
"Opportunities for a child to flourish are determined both by her day-to-day living conditions and by the structural arrangements that underpin these conditions," Mr Costello said.
Government programs aimed at improving socio-economic conditions focused on education and employment, but it was important not to overlook the issues of "home ownership, personal savings, community engagement and political representation", Mr Costello said.
"These dimensions generally sit beyond the mandate of health professionals, but unless we understand their effects, gains in indigenous health will be limited.
"It is time to move past the extremes of coercive and interventionist practice, of sticks without the carrots, of remote decision making with little consideration for local knowledge, let alone indigenous knowledge," he said.
