In Adelaide, South Australia in 2008, the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health (CRCAH), in conjunction with Flinders University and the Australian American Fulbright Commission, helped to stage the Fulbright Symposium 2008 – Healthy People, Prosperous Country. This event brought together some of the world's leading experts on social determinants of health with a broad range of Aboriginal health workers, health bureaucrats, academics and students to investigate the disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous health outcomes in Australia.

One of the Keynote speakers was Professor Sir Michael Marmot, Director of the International Institute for Society and Health and MRC Research Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London. Sir Michael also Chaired the World Health Organisation's (WHO) Commission on Social Determinants of Health.

Along with other leading scholars from Australia and around the world, Sir Michael expressed great optimism that the alarming disparities in health world-wide can be solved if the right policies are adopted by governments and the political will exists within each nation to do so. The major achievement of the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health was to start a global movement whose advocates profess that health equity can be achieved within a generation.

In Australia this has resulted in a grass roots campaign to Close The Gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous life expectancy. Acting on the recommendations of the 2005 Social Justice Report by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner for the Australian Human Rights Commission, Tom Calma, Aboriginal health organisations acting in partnership with other groups and individuals in the community mounted a public campaign demanding action on Indigenous health.

In March 2008 the Close The Gap coalition presented the Australian Government with a plan to address the Indigenous health crisis. It gained bipartisan support from the Parliament and became a key document shaping government policy. In November of that year the Government committed $1.6 billion to improving Indigenous health.

While this represents a major public health initiative directly targeting Indigenous health, Aboriginal leaders are wary of government interventions that do not involve the direct participation of communities in the development and delivery of policies and programs designed to improve their health outcomes.

This website contains the views and opinions of a broad range of people who participated in the 2008 Fulbright Symposium where some of the best minds in the world came together to assess the problems faced by a society that has already agreed that action needs to be taken to reduce health inequity. The question now is how do we do it?