John Taylor outlines current Australian social indicator frameworks, including issues of statistical accountability and the politics of statistics. He discusses aspects of representations of Indigenous culture in formal reporting frameworks, and observes that the development of indicators in cross-cultural settings will always involve a degree of reductionism and a process of translation. The Programme of Action announced for the United Nation’s Second International Decade on the World’s Indigenous Peoples sets out a framework of key objectives for achievements during the decade, and this paper deals with the implication for measures of well-being from an Australian perspective.