Breach of trust: the nation’s failure on child protection and domestic violence

 

 

And oftentimes excusing of a fault

Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse,

As patches set upon a little breach

Discredit more in hiding of the fault

Than did the fault before it was so patch’d.

King John, Act four, Scene two

 

In his 2009 weird fiction/crime novel, The City and the City, British author China Miéville sets his narrative in two geographically overlapping fictional European cities which jointly cooperate in ensuring that their citizens do not ‘see’ or acknowledge the institutions and residents of the other. An enigmatic supervisory organisation known as ‘The Breach’ maintains the separation, and ‘breachers’ (ie citizens who fail to maintain the mandatory degree of separation) are taken into custody and face an unspecified punishment and generally are never seen again.

I was reminded of Miéville’s novel when, while following an ongoing and as yet entirely unresolved political crisis in Western Australia, I decided to take a closer look at the status and underlying basis for the Closing the Gap target related to family violence and child protection as laid out on the Productivity Commission dashboard. These are two separate issues, but are clearly often related, and impact on the life circumstances and opportunities of those affected in synergistic ways.

According to the Dashboard (link here), target 13 is framed as follows:

Target13: By 2031, the rate of all forms of family violence and abuse against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children is reduced at least by 50%, as progress towards zero.

Nationally in 2018-19, 8.4% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander females aged 15 years and over experienced domestic physical or face-to-face threatened physical harm (figure CtG13.1).

There is no new data since the baseline year of 2018-19.

The data for the baseline was sourced from the ABS 2018-19 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health survey. A further survey, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey (NATSIHS) 2022–23 was conducted by the ABS between August 2022 and March 2024. For reasons I do not comprehend, this survey apparently didn’t collect data on family violence. The absence of regular data updates makes the notion that this target is being actively monitored by policymakers nonsensical.

The Dashboard entry for Target 13 does include a section on Supporting Indicators, which includes links to actual hospitalisation data for Indigenous women and children.  This allows us to at least get a sense of the scale and import of the issues facing women and children in relation to violence and family safety. Taking just the latest year available (2023-24), Indigenous women (aged 15yrs plus) were hospitalised due to domestic violence at a rate of 783/100,000, and Indigenous children at a rate of 43/100,000. In the NT (a rough proxy for remote regions), those two figures were 4041/100,000 and 143/100,000. In other words, NT Indigenous women’s hospitalisations were five times worse than the national Indigenous rate.

According to an AIHW webpage on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Performance Framework (link here):

First Nations females were 24 times as likely to be hospitalised for assault as non-Indigenous females between July 2021 and June 2023. The difference between the two populations was largest in Remote and very remote areas where First Nations females were 48 times as likely to be hospitalised due to assault as non-Indigenous females. [Note this is for assault generally, not by a domestic partner].

According to the Dashboard (link here), target 12 is framed as follows:

Target 12: By 2031, reduce the rate of overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children (0–17 years old) in out-of-home care by 45%

Nationally in 2025, the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children aged 0–17 years in out‑of‑home care was 52.2 per 1,000 children in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population (figure CtG12.1).

The 2025 rate is above the rate in 2024, and it is an increase from 47.3 per 1,000 children in 2019 (the baseline year).

Nationally, based on progress from the baseline, the target is worsening. This assessment is provided with a high level of confidence. 

The data underpinning Figure CtG 12.1 shows the non-Indigenous national rate as 4.5 per 1000 children in 2025, down from 5.1 per 1,000 children in 2019. In other words, the national Indigenous rate in 2025 is 11.6 times the national rate.

If you then dig deeper within the available disaggregations, there are high level summaries of the progress of each jurisdiction over the period 2019 (the baseline used) to 2025. In the NT, the rate for Indigenous children has been falling and was 29.5 per 1,000 in 2025. This is mirrored by a clear fall in non-Indigenous rates, from 3.0 in 2019 to 2.3 in 2025. The data suggests an across-the-board reluctance to remove children in the NT for reasons that are unclear. It is also unclear whether this is a jurisdictional policy issue, or a wider trend across remote regions generally.

In relation to child protection, there is a deeper conceptual problem which appears to have attracted no attention in public discussion around these issues. It is embedded within the Closing the Gap framework but also has a wider prevalence in ways of thinking about child protection generally, and within Indigenous contexts especially.

Identifying the rate of child removals as measured by data and/or trends in out of home care is an important indicator of a problem. It is akin to a doctor taking your temperature or blood pressure; it provides an indication of whether a problem of some kind exists. The data available nationally and across all jurisdictions makes clear that we do have a problem; but it doesn’t tell us what the nature of that problem is. To go a step further and make reducing the level of child removals a policy target in its own right is deeply problematic for at least three reasons: first, it creates incentives within agencies responsible for child welfare and safety to not remove children when their safety is at risk and removal is required; second, it addresses the symptoms and not the causes of the underlying family issues; and third, it incentivises governments to not focus on those causes and simultaneously creates expectations that governments are both responsible for and have the capacity to solve all these issues.

What then is the takeout from this relatively deep dive into the data in plain view on the Productivity Commission dashboard and other Commonwealth webpages?

One might draw the following conclusions:

·       In terms of establishing a policy target for family violence, the current Closing the Gap Framework is not fit for purpose (an argument laid out in some detail in this November 2025 post: link here);

·       There is an urgent need to reformulate the target if the current architecture for Closing the Gap is to be maintained (an issue which I have recently argued would be unwise: link here);

·       There is a need to understand the drivers of family violence in remote regions much better than we currently do. The issues are of a different dimension in remote regions, and thus arguably are of a different nature, and thus have different causes and drivers.

·       The overwhelming conclusion however is that, as with hyper-incarceration (link here), the nation is confronted by a national crisis of monumental proportions in relation to family safety, domestic violence and child protection, and at present despite all the rhetoric around closing the gap the nation is bereft of an effective national policy response.

What this quick overview of the state of play in relation to child protection and family violence suggests, especially when considered in conjunction with the rhetorical ubiquity of ‘commitments’ to closing the gap is that our policymakers, and crucially our political system, are unable to ‘see’ what is in plain view. Data and analysis appear to count for little; pushed aside by self-interest, the influence of interest groups, and the incomprehension of the wider electorate in the face of the barrage of ongoing change that pervades the modern world. What appears to have been lost is a deep-seated and disinterested commitment to the wider public interest.

Emotion cuts through where analysis fails

Over the past two months The Australian has published a flurry of deeply concerning revelations concerning the circumstances leading up to the murder of three children by their Indigenous mother, Margaret Hawke in July 2022 in Port Hedland in WA. Margaret Hawke was subsequently convicted of murdering her children and sentenced to life imprisonment and will serve a minimum of 25 years (link here).

Following the deaths, the children's grandmother Dorothy Papertalk called for an inquest, but this was denied by then Coroner Phil Urquhart in July 2025. His reasons were provided to Ms Papertalk in a 13-page letter where he argued that an inquest was not in the public interest, and that he considered that the children’s deaths were not ‘predictable or preventable’. In his view ‘there was nothing [the Communities Department] could have done differently’. Mr Tony Buti, the WA Attorney General argued consistently that he could not overturn the Coroner’s decision without fresh evidence. In response, the WA Opposition introduced a Bill into the Upper House seeking to clarify the Attorney General’s powers to order a coronial inquest.  

The Australian’s extensive coverage, which amounts to in excess of fifty reports, opinion articles and editorials (likely totalling in excess of 50,000 words) began when it uncovered evidence that internal communications within the Department of Communities (the agency responsible for child welfare) identifying that the children were at risk of harm had lain unseen for over a week over the period when the deaths occurred.

The revelations expanded to report issues in Port Hedland relating to inter alia unsupervised Indigenous children living in public housing, allegations of sexual abuse of young girls by older men, reports that other agencies such as the police and the housing agency were aware of issues that were not addressed by the child protection staff. Coverage initially focussed on the WA Government’s refusal to reverse the coroner’s decision in 2025 to refuse an inquest and then segued into criticism and a political debate centred on the alleged failure of various ministers including the Premier to visit Hedland and respond appropriately to the crisis.  

A wide range of commentators were also quoted or given space to express their views, including former Federal and State politicians, prominent Indigenous commentators, legal experts, and local community members most notably the children’s grandmother Ms Papertalk. At one point, the Commonwealth Minister for Indigenous Australians, Malarndirri McCarthy, called on the Premier to initiate a review or inquiry, and Liberal Party Shadow minister for skills and training, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price made comments arguing that the Commonwealth should take over responsibility for Indigenous child protection.

In recent days several developments have occurred. In response to the mounting public pressure, the WA Ombudsman released details of an investigation he undertook in 2025 into the deaths of the children (link here and link here). The Commonwealth National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People has announced that she will undertake an independent review into the Pilbara Child Protection system (link here) and has released terms of reference (link here).

On Thursday 15 October 2026, Mr Buti finally announced that after personally reviewing the relevant files, he had decided that there was new evidence and had written to the coroner to request a Coronial Inquiry be undertaken. He also announced an internal review of the Coroners Act (link here and link here).

There is clearly a way to go with these issues. The Ombudsman Report is essentially a summary of what they considered but contains almost zero substantive analysis. The three recommendations are so vague as to be meaningless. For example, suggesting that the Department of Communities

develops a supervision framework and implementation plan that includes the monitoring and evaluation of case practice supervision for frontline child safety practitioners; and

takes steps to strengthen the effectiveness of current strategies for frontline child protection service delivery when the number of child safety practitioners in a District falls below critical staffing levels.

strike me as hollow and inconsequential to the point of absurdity. The third recommendation to the Police is similarly pointless. The review, completed in November 2025, appears more like a box-ticking exercise than a serious analysis of what transpired and what might be done better going forward. The Inquest will likely take at least a year and may raise numerous wider issues. The WA Government has now bent to the extraordinary public pressure. While a Coronial Inquest is welcome, and necessary, it will by definition focus narrowly on the deaths of the children. Important as that will be, it is not an adequate response.

An editorial in The Australian on 9 October 2026 was headlined: Inquest into child murders in Hedland only the start. It argued that the official response to The Australian’s reports of widespread abuse and neglect was ‘lamentable’. The editorial went on to say”

It is part of a bigger failing by governments at all levels. It reflects a loss of moral authority not confined to Indigenous affairs.

According to a statement issued by Catherine Liddle of SNAICC (link here), the WA Government commissioned from SNAICC a policy roadmap to guide implementation of its Closing the Gap commitments in 2022, which was finalised in September 2023, but then effectively shelved. According to Liddle:

The road map is a comprehensive way forward, to address key drivers of children coming into contact with the child protection system – poverty, housing insecurity and homelessness, family and domestic violence, a lack of culturally appropriate family-support services, and institutional racism. 

But the government mothballed its own report, ignoring the recommendations developed by the state’s Aboriginal community and its years of expertise, while Aboriginal children continue to be at risk. The government has never even made a formal response to the report. 

The Commonwealth National Commissioner’s review appears designed to reflect Indigenous voices but given its tight time frames and the wider pressures on the Commissioner, I suspect it will struggle to come to terms with the underlying drivers of severe dysfunction across multiple fronts and is unlikely to be taken seriously by either level of Government.

The Australian and its reporters, especially Ros Thomas, have clearly been fearless in pursuing this complex array of related issues and appear unlikely to let go quickly. I don’t agree with the underlying tone of some of the coverage and opinion pieces offered. Nevertheless, in my view, The Australian’s reports have made a remarkably important contribution to raising the profile of these issues.

It is unfortunate that the extraordinary data available in plain sight on the Productivity Commission Closing the Gap dashboard does not engender an equivalent level of concern: emotion invariably trumps analysis.  However, if that concern is to be transformed into substantive and effective policy change there will eventually be a need for hard-headed and rigorous analysis to be fed into the considerations of policymakers and governments. It strikes me that the issues raised by The Australian are a microcosm of much more fundamental challenges impacting Indigenous families nationally, and particularly across remote Australia. We should not lose sight of that fact.

While I am loath to make recommendations that are unlikely to be taken up, it is time for a serious, open and transparent national review process run by a capable, qualified and independent reviewer or reviewers aimed squarely at devising a new policy paradigm for family safety and child protection. Such an inquiry would necessarily examine afresh the assumptions on all sides of the political debate that have guided policy approaches to date. In this context, I will mention just two words that suggest just how difficult the challenge will be: alcohol and gambling.

There are no short term or easy solutions, and it seems clear that our existing political institutions are incapable of taking the nation forward in addressing these issues. Accordingly, there will need to be new institutions created which are beyond the reach of short-term politicking, and which are based on transparency and accountability to both Indigenous Australians and the wider public.  

The alternative is more of the same: more political patchwork; more social and bureaucratic dysfunction; more violence against women; more innocent children maimed, killed, and irreparably damaged and harmed.  In such a world, we all become ‘breachers’, breaching the trust we inherited from the architects of our political institutions, our forebears, and the trust we hope to pass on to our grandchildren. We should all expect much more of those who resort to violence, especially men, but those expectations ring hollow if we don’t expect more of ourselves in the face of outbreaks of extreme violence which serve to complement and reinforce the confronting and long-standing publicly available data which once truly ‘seen’ for what it is cannot be ‘unseen’.

 

16 October 2026

Everyone’s priority; no-one’s responsibility: a submission to the 2026 Review of Closing the Gap

 

 

…when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion...

King Lear, Act one, Scene two.

 

My submission to the Productivity Commission's second triennial review of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap has now been published (link here; submission 11)

My starting point is that Closing the Gap is mainstream national policy, not simply an Indigenous program. It was built on the broad public concern that followed the 1967 referendum, and it will stand or fall on mainstream Australia's confidence that it is working. That confidence is fading. On the Commission's latest figures, only four of the nineteen socioeconomic targets are on track. Ten are either going nowhere or going backwards or cannot be assessed at all.

I argue that support for the current Closing the Gap framework, as well as the broader approach of governments towards addressing Indigenous aspirations, is in long-term decline. Without a new approach based on substantive reform informed by hard-headed analysis and policy narratives that engender trust in the wider electorate, the absence of support will lead to the risk that a future government simply abandons the framework.

The submission argues that the current crisis for the Closing the Gap failure emerges from the design choices built into the National Agreement. The current architecture has nine jurisdictions, nineteen targets, four Priority Reforms, hundreds of programs, more than 600 pages of Implementation Plans each year, and almost constant review. No single person can grasp the whole of it, and no single institution can be held to account for any particular outcome. Closing the Gap has become everyone's priority and no-one's responsibility.

The failure of the Closing the Gap framework and narrative is emblematic of a broader crisis confronting the wider Indigenous policy domain. A new national policy direction is required which in my view will only emerge if the Productivity Commission takes on a much wider remit than set down in the Treasurer’s Terms of Reference (link here) and recommends the significant reforms required along with a viable implementation pathway.

Two propositions are central in my arguments to the Commission:

1. Remote and non-remote Australia are different policy problems. The national targets could in principle be met almost entirely through improvements in urban and regional Australia, while remote communities stand still or go backwards. I propose separating the Agreement into two distinct frameworks.
2. The Review should chart a pathway to a reformed Closing the Gap architecture. In my view it must be built on radical simplification. I propose that such a pathway would require an independent estimate of what substantively closing the gap would actually cost, the development of a small number of high-level comparative targets owned by governments to underpin a long-term national project, and ten-year funded sectoral priorities designed jointly with relevant First Nations interests and which link funding to actual targets. The Commonwealth should lead as ‘first among equals’. I suggest it will be crucial to have a new architecture agreed and funded before the current targets expire in 2031 (some expire before then).

There is much more of interest in what is arguably an overlong submission.

I also recommend interested readers look at Jon Altman’s submission published as submission 9 (link here) which adopts a different, but important perspective on the challenges inherent in the Closing the Gap process.

The Commission's draft report is expected in April next year and the final report is to be finalised in August.

 

6 October 2026

 

This post has been drafted with research assistance from Claude (Anthropic).

Indigenous Data Sovereignty: risks and challenges

 

All that glisters is not gold.

The Merchant of Venice, Act two, Scene seven

 

Last week I read a recent article authored by Sedran-Price et. al. titled Indigenous governance of data held by organisations: how to operationalise Indigenous data sovereignty principles in Australia (link here). My initial reaction to the article was primarily shaped by my perception that the entire implementation strategy proposed for each organisation was to be the establishment of a series of committees to oversight what is best described as layers of process. My experience of committees as the primary mechanism for decision making is that they invariably deliver either a lowest common denominator ‘solution’ or are dysfunctional. The broader Indigenous policy domain is populated by innumerable committees that appear designed to produce bureaucratic sludge and keep issues simmering in a perpetual stasis. I resolved to write something, and this post is the initial result.

Notwithstanding the extensive impetus within academic and even government circles (link here) advocating or endorsing the merits of Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS), to date I have not written critically about the notion of Indigenous Data Sovereignty on this blog. My reasons are to an extent mixed and difficult to articulate. It might be that I have never taken the time to think hard about the merits and demerits of IDS. It may be that I am not inclined towards the technocratic and quantitative side of social science. Given my focus on policy outcomes over process, I do have a view that data and data management is in some senses a second order issue, though I am very conscious that the way data and information is used disseminated and/or withhold has real policy consequences. Perhaps the real reason for my reticence is that I have an intuitive sense that I disagree with the notion that the management of key statistical metrics within the public realm should be placed under the control of interest groups, or more fundamentally the direct political control of governments (link here).

That said, I acknowledge that the questions we ask and the means we use to measure our answers can be culturally shaped and framed and thus are not necessarily neutral. It follows that there is potentially merit in the underlying aspiration from Indigenous interests and academic supporters of IDS.  Having spent some days thinking about the issue, I remain of the view that the idea of Indigenous data sovereignty is an issue that is problematic from both strategic policy and political perspectives.

To assist my thinking about the issue, I asked Claude Sonnet 5 to respond to four requests:

[First to] write a short one or two paragraph summary of the [Sedran-Price] article and/or IDS, two identify the major strengths in the argument, three identify the major flaws/problems with IDS from a practical point of view, and four write a short couple of paragraphs on how the implementation of IDS would actually work if it was decided to apply it to the national census.

Below are the four responses from Claude:

1. Summary

Sedran-Price et al. argue that Indigenous Data Sovereignty — the principle that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples should govern data about themselves — has stalled at the level of aspiration in Australia despite the 2018 Maiam nayri Wingara (MnW) principles being well established in the academic and policy literature. The paper's contribution is meant to be operational: for each of the five MnW principles (control of the data ecosystem; contextual, disaggregated data; data that empowers self-determination; data structures accountable to Indigenous peoples; data that is protective of individual and collective interests) it proposes a concrete "mechanism" — an Indigenous Data Governance Committee (IDGC) with delegated custodian authority, Indigenous data audits and asset registers, contextual statements attached to published data, culturally informed disaggregation, Indigenous Data Management Plans, metadata/provenance standards (IEEE 2890, Local Contexts TK Labels), and free/prior/informed consent protocols.

It illustrates each with case studies — the Mayi Kuwayu Study, the Yarrabah Counts community survey, the Passamaquoddy digital repatriation in the US — which are real and running, but which operate at the scale of a discrete research cohort or a single community partnership, not a national administrative or statistical system.

2. Major strengths

·         It correctly diagnoses a well-documented problem: aggregated, decontextualised Indigenous data has historically produced "deficit" narratives that read the effects of colonisation and policy as intrinsic characteristics of Indigenous people (Walter's BADDR framework). This is a legitimate and long-standing critique in Indigenous statistics scholarship, not a novel grievance.

·         It moves past slogan-level advocacy into enumerated, adoptable mechanisms — a governance committee, a data audit template, a management plan, a metadata standard — giving institutions something they could actually put in a policy manual, rather than leaving "sovereignty" as an undefined aspiration.

·         It doesn't invent the wheel: it explicitly builds on OCAP (Canada) and the CARE Principles, situating Australian practice within a converging international movement rather than a one-off Australian claim.

·         The case studies are genuine, bounded, and running rather than hypothetical — Mayi Kuwayu in particular shows a functioning Indigenous data governance committee with real veto power over a live national cohort study, which is useful proof of concept at that scale.

·         The Indigenous Data Sovereignty / Indigenous Data Governance distinction (the political principle vs. the governance machinery that enacts it) and the separation of "governance of data" from "data for governance" are useful, clarifying pieces of conceptual scaffolding.

3. Major practical problems

·         Representation and legitimacy at scale: an IDGC needs "representation appropriate to the data source," but the paper never specifies how competing claims to authority are adjudicated — between urban, regional and remote communities, native title bodies, community-controlled organisations, and individual voices — especially for datasets that span all 250+ nations/language groups simultaneously. Nor does it address how these appointed, non-elected bodies are themselves held accountable to the people they claim to represent.

·         Scale mismatch: every worked example is a discrete project (a bespoke health cohort, one community's survey). Scaling that governance model to whole-of-government administrative collections — health records, census, justice, child protection — spanning hundreds of agencies and enormous record volumes is a different order of problem, and the paper doesn't really engage with how authority, consent and coordination would work across that scale.

·         Consent in non-optional systems: free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) works for a voluntary cohort study but sits uneasily with compulsory data collection (census, hospital admissions, welfare and justice records) where people are legally required to be counted. The paper doesn't resolve how FPIC applies when there is no opt-out from the underlying collection.

·         Legal and statutory conflict: statistical secrecy, agency independence (e.g. the ABS Statistician's powers under the Census and Statistics Act) and privacy law are established in legislation. The paper doesn't explain how community-body "custodian" authority would sit relative to those existing statutory protections — complementary, subordinate, or overriding — which is a substantial legislative gap, not just an administrative one.

·         Resourcing without a funding model: the paper acknowledges more resourcing is needed but doesn't quantify it or say where it comes from, against already stretched Indigenous organisational capacity — creating a real risk that Indigenous Data Governance becomes an unfunded compliance burden that lands disproportionately on Indigenous staff, which the paper itself flags as a risk without solving.

·         Authority without alternative infrastructure: if governance bodies gain the power to restrict release or use of data but no parallel investment builds an alternative reporting or infrastructure, the likely near-term effect is less data available for both government accountability and community planning — an unintended consequence the paper only gestures at in its final paragraph.

·         Disaggregation vs. comparability: locally defined indicators (as in Yarrabah Counts) improve local relevance but can undermine the standardised measures used for national monitoring (Closing the Gap), funding formulas, and international treaty reporting. That trade-off is real and isn't resolved in the paper.

4. How would this actually work applied to the national census?

Applying the MnW principles to the Census would mean an Indigenous Data Governance Committee holding genuine decision authority — not advisory input — over how Indigenous-related concepts and questions are designed (identification, language, kinship and cultural variables), how remote and community enumeration is conducted, how results are disaggregated and released, and under what conditions community-level data can be accessed or repatriated. Some of this already exists in weaker form through the ABS's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory processes, but the MnW principle requires shifting that from consultation to actual control — a materially larger institutional change.

Several of the practical problems above become sharp here. Disaggregation to "individual, community and First Nations levels" runs directly into statistical confidentiality: many remote communities have populations small enough that any fine-grained breakdown risks re-identifying individuals, which is exactly why current practice uses cell suppression and perturbation — a real ceiling on how far disaggregation can go regardless of governance arrangements. A single national IDGC could not plausibly exercise custodianship over data spanning 250+ distinct peoples in the way a 12-member committee does for one voluntary health cohort; a federated model of a national body plus many regional or local ones would need a decision-rights mechanism for when they disagree, which the paper doesn't specify anywhere. And because the ABS Statistician's independence and secrecy powers are set in the Census and Statistics Act, meaningful custodian authority for a community body would likely require legislative change, not just an internal policy shift — a considerably higher bar than adopting an internal data management plan. Finally, because the census is a compulsory, universal collection, free-prior-informed consent could only really apply to secondary use and release of Indigenous data, not to the primary act of being counted — meaning full application of the FPIC principle, as stated, isn't actually achievable within a compulsory census design; at best it would be a partial, reinterpreted version of the principle.

After giving this response some consideration, I requested Claude Sonnet 5 to:

draft another section focused on IDS generally (ie beyond this article) and how it interacts /relates to mainstream institutional frameworks more generally. You may (or may not) wish to express a view on IDS as a coherent general philosophy, and I would be happy if you framed this as issues to be determined or requiring attention or buy in from broader interests and or the nation’s governing institutions....

Claude responded as follows:

Addendum

Set aside this article's specific institutional mechanisms and the harder question is whether IDS amounts to a single, coherent philosophy at all, or whether it spans two quite different claims that get run together under one banner. At one end sits a negotiated, political-process account: Indigenous peoples, as citizens with distinct collective interests and historical claims, seek enhanced authority over decisions that affect them, won and adjusted through ordinary political and legislative means — the kind of shared governance built incrementally through agreement, much as other forms of devolved or co-managed authority have been. At the other end sits a stronger, "unceded sovereignty" account, closer to the language UNDRIP itself uses (self-determination, authority, control) — in which Indigenous authority over Indigenous data is treated as inherent and prior, something that doesn't need to be granted by settler political institutions because it was never ceded to them in the first place. These aren't cosmetic differences. The first account can be built through statute, agreement, and administrative reform, remains answerable to and revisable by ordinary democratic processes, and requires broad public and institutional buy-in as a matter of legitimacy. The second implies a standing entitlement that exists independently of, and potentially prior to, the authority of the very institutions being asked to implement it — which is a fundamentally different, and far more contested, constitutional proposition. The literature, including this paper, tends to move between the two registers without quite specifying which is doing the work, which leaves a genuine and unresolved question about what buy-in is actually being asked for.

That ambiguity matters because it collides directly with the architecture IDS proposes to operate inside. Australia's data-holding institutions — the ABS, universities, state agencies — sit within a system built on parliamentary sovereignty and the equal application of law, where administrative and statistical independence is itself a legislated, revisable arrangement rather than a standing entitlement belonging to any group. Embedding "Indigenous authority" as something delegated through negotiated agreement is compatible with that architecture; embedding it as something that precedes and constrains that architecture is not, at least not without a much larger constitutional conversation than a data governance framework can settle on its own. This is, in miniature, the same fault line that ran through the recognition and Voice debates — and IDS advocates would be entitled to say the data question shouldn't need to wait on that larger settlement. But the paper's silence on which model of authority it's assuming means the practical ask (what does an agency actually need to cede, and to whom) is left underspecified in exactly the place where institutional buy-in would have to be secured.

Conclusions

The core issues that I would emphasise (beyond Claude’s analysis that I largely agree with) are as follows:

There are fundamental problems with the under- conceptualisation of the near ubiquitous aspiration for implementation of Indigenous Data Sovereignty in academic and bureaucratic circles. As Claude notes, the arguments for the wider implementation of processes based on Indigenous Data Sovereignty — based on normative/aspirational principles that are legitimate on their own terms — are potentially fundamentally at odds with the currently accepted precepts of democratic governance in modern Australia. Moreover, much data relevant to the Indigenous policy domain is in effect also relevant to the mainstream policy domains, a function both of the increasing demographic hybridity of Indigenous populations, economic activities, and interests and also of the nature of information itself: it is not entirely ‘public’, but is best conceptualised as akin to what economists refer to as a public good characterised as non-rivalrous (my use does not affect your use) and non-excludable (once released it is difficult to control its use by others). While private information rights do exist (eg copyright), in policy domains the importance of public access to information for democratic accountability and good policymaking suggest that attempts to maintain what is essentially private control over information requires clear and cogent justification. While there are categories of Indigenous related information that are clearly able to be justified as inherently requiring to be confidential or private, the advocacy in favour of moving towards Indigenous data sovereignty (link here) is generally framed in much broader terms. 

Even were we to surmount these issues, there are at least two serious challenges: first, I doubt that governments are actually committed to implementing these principles in full, and thus they adopt strategies of adding layers of process that in effect divert Indigenous interests into dead ends, while ministers and bureaucrats in effect are virtue signalling rather than locking in institutional reforms. This has the effect of raising expectations within First Nations interests that are never intended to be met. Telling communities they have a right to "control the data ecosystem" are a recipe for perpetual disillusionment. As the census example shows, attempts to implement such an agenda would inevitably collide with mainstream privacy laws and would potentially undermine the statutory neutrality of the ABS, changes that could be leveraged into a political maelstrom and are thus never likely to be seriously pursued by any government.

Second, there are strategic risks for Indigenous interests in at least two ways: the opportunity costs involved in dedicating scarce intellectual resources amongst Indigenous advocates towards devising ways to measure Indigenous strengths and participating in myriad process-based committees at the cost of ignoring the hard work of policy reform aimed at driving achievable substantive reform in areas such as education, health, employment and housing would be considerable. More importantly, the continued articulation and advocacy for processes built around implicit claims of sovereignty that are not widely supported in the wider Australian community create the preconditions for a backlash against Indigenous interests that, should it emerge, would extend well beyond erasing the mere control of the ‘data ecosystem’ relating to First Nations citizens.

Finally, there are two observations worth making. First, while I am deeply sceptical about the feasibility of implementing and making operational an Indigenous data sovereignty agenda across the span of the Indigenous policy domain in any meaningful way, and similarly sceptical about promises by governments and bureaucracies to implement such an agenda, I am not suggesting that the aspiration itself for control over data and information related to Indigenous communities is in any way illegitimate. I too wish to control and exercise individual sovereignty over data related to my life. It is a legitimate aspiration. But I don’t expect or trust governments to assist me in that aspiration. First Nations interests should seriously consider what is realistically possible in relation to the preparedness of governments to deliver on First Nations aspirations in this area, what they would gain from succeeding against the potential costs involved, and respond accordingly. 

Second, my sense is that there has been a gradual and inexorable shift in our policy and academic institutions and their academic publications towards under-valuing substantive independence on issues related to Indigenous concerns and aspirations. I raise this because (to return to where I began this post) it strikes me that part of my reluctance to write about these issues has been the knowledge that my views would rub up against a near universal consensus that categorises any criticism (real or imagined) of Indigenous Australians or their policy and political agendas as being either racist, right wing, or somehow politically incorrect. The fact that the Indigenous data sovereignty agenda can develop and gain the traction it has without (to my admittedly limited knowledge) a broader debate about its conceptual underpinnings (the literature I am familiar with never cites dissenting perspectives) strikes me as both intellectually flawed and politically counterproductive. The challenges facing Indigenous Australians and the nation as a whole in relation to Indigenous policy are too important to be left hostage to the intellectual hubris of groupthink.

Given my neglect to date in writing about this issue, I will endeavour to think and read more about the wider issues of Indigenous data sovereignty and if I find there is more that I can usefully say, I will share my thoughts in due course.

 

9 September 2026

 

This post has been written with the research assistance of Claude Sonnet 5. The core intellectual contribution is mine alone.

The Productivity Commission and Closing the Gap: a footnote in history?

                                                 Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

Troilus and Cressida, Act three, Scene three

 

Summary

This post covers a lot of ground, so I have decided to include an upfront summary which provides a high-level roadmap of the key arguments. Last week the Treasurer issued terms of reference for the Productivity Commission's second triennial review of Closing the Gap. On closer reading, those directions steer the Commission back towards refining the existing framework rather than considering why the Closing the Gap framework isn't working. Federal, state and territory governments have a poor record of translating their formal agreement to previous review recommendations into action. After almost a quarter century, the Closing the Gap Framework is looking tired and vulnerable, and community support is fading. In my estimation, the forthcoming Review is likely the last opportunity to revitalise and refocus the institutional architecture that governs Closing the Gap before community sentiment turns against it. If the opportunity is not taken, the National Agreement will be increasingly vulnerable to abolition. This will require the Commission to broaden its focus and undertake a hard-headed strategic and structural reconsideration that current circumstances require.

 

Background

This post focusses primarily on the role of the Productivity Commission (the Commission) in relation to the oversight and administration of the Closing the Gap process. The Productivity Commission has responsibility for producing the Closing the Gap Information Repository, which tracks progress against the 19 socio-economic targets and four Priority Reforms agreed in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap (link here). Under the National Agreement (link here), the Commission is also responsible for undertaking a triennial review of progress (see clauses 121–124). An important reason for ensuring strong analytical clarity in the Commission’s review derives from the reality that there is at least an appearance of conflict between the Commissions role as administrator of the target metrics and its role as an independent reviewer.

 

The terms of reference

The Commonwealth Government has announced the terms of reference for the Productivity Commission's second triennial review. The review is scheduled to be finalised by the end of 2027. According to Treasurer Chalmers and Minister McCarthy's joint media release (link here), the Commission will assess the outcomes, effectiveness and impact of measures by all governments and the Coalition of Peaks against the targets, and has been asked to complete a more explicit examination of funding, investment practices and community-controlled sector resourcing — including whether government expenditure is aligned with, and supporting, the Priority Reforms.

 

The review web page (link here) frames it this way:

Every three years, the Productivity Commission is required to independently review how parties to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap are progressing towards their commitments. This is the PC's second review. We will focus on what's working and why, and what can be done differently to achieve meaningful change.

 

The Terms of Reference issued by the Treasurer state, inter alia:

Background

… The review will provide an analysis of progress on Closing the Gap against the priority reforms, targets, indicators and trajectories, and examine the factors contributing to progress, including by drawing on evaluation and other evidence. Parties have committed to undertaking actions if the review indicates that achievement of any of the targets that are set out in the Agreement is not on track.

 

Scope of the review

The review will assess how effectively the Agreement is supporting improved life outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In undertaking the review, the Productivity Commission should:

·         Have regard to all aspects of the Agreement and consider the progress, implementation efforts and annual reports of all parties, including jurisdictional progress by the Commonwealth and states and territories

·         Assess progress against the four Priority Reform areas and 17 socioeconomic outcomes [sic — the Agreement specifies 19 targets], including identifying successful approaches, partnerships and delivery models that have demonstrated positive impact

·         Draw on available evidence and evaluation findings, to assess impact, deliverables and outcomes, and progress towards developing measures for the Priority Reforms targets and indicators and outstanding data under socioeconomic targets

·         Assess whether commitments under the Agreement that relate to prioritising and reporting on funding and resourcing to First Nations community-controlled sectors are being met, and whether they are driving changes in the way investments are made and improved outcomes against the Priority Reforms

·         Assess whether new and existing funding – both dedicated and mainstream – is being effectively mobilised to achieve the objectives of the Agreement. 

The review is to have regard to and complement – not duplicate – the previous findings of the first Productivity Commission review of progress on the National Agreement, published on 7 January 2024, and the Independent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led Review, published on 21 June 2025.

 The Productivity Commission should provide recommendations on how to improve, hasten and strengthen implementation of existing commitments in the Agreement. Where necessary to support implementation of existing commitments, the Productivity Commission should provide recommendations on potential changes to the Agreement and its targets, indicators and trajectories, and on data improvements (emphasis added).

 

The terms of reference are, on the surface, reasonably comprehensive. There are some positive elements: the specific mention of the contribution of mainstream funding to shaping outcomes, and the narrow possibility left open for the Commission to recommend changes to the National Agreement — albeit given the repeated focus on ‘progress’, the subtext appears to be to nudge the Commission towards a narrow focus on incremental adjustment to targets, indicators, trajectories and data improvements. These are all potentially important, but I would argue that more structural reform is necessary.

 

Reading between the lines

Close reading of the terms of reference raises a number of issues that are worth contemplating and may prefigure the approach the Government expects the Commission to pursue:

·         The Treasurer is at pains to avoid mentioning failure, and the repetitive use of the word "progress" continuously reinforces the ‘strength-based’ approach that infused the initial selection and framing of the targets by governments (and it must be said the Coalition of Peaks).

·         The focus is primarily on doubling down on the current framework and, ostensibly, on how best to refine it and make it work better.

·         The Treasurer sidesteps the elephant in the room: the failure to make progress against virtually all targets (especially in relation to remote regions where outcomes are much more dire than the national outcomes), and — more importantly — the adequacy (in terms of timely and tangible outcomes) of governments' own responses to the two previous reviews, most of all the first Commission Review.

·         The focus on funding has been left vague, and thus open to misinterpretation. The Ministers’ media release appears to make clear in relation to the ‘explicit examination of funding, investment practices and community-controlled sector resourcing’ (by referencing alignment with the Priority Reforms) that the intention is to nudge the Commission towards recommending funding shift from non-Indigenous private sector and NGO providers to community-controlled organisations — a strong nod to the Coalition of Peaks' primary agenda. However, it can equally be read as a call for more rigorous assessment of funding efficacy more generally. The Australian headlined its report of the announcement of the Terms of Reference on 29 August 2026 as ‘Review of Indigenous Funding: Is pouring cash into the Gap effective?’ (paywalled).

 

The tax expenditure blind spot

One important but invariably overlooked mainstream funding issue relates to the inequitable distribution of mainstream ‘tax expenditures’.  The Terms of Reference refer to ‘funding’, but tax expenditures are just as relevant to whether government support for Closing the Gap is effective. Take one obvious example: the benefits available to homeowners in our tax system are systemically biased towards non-Indigenous homeowners (link here). The Capital Gains Tax exemption on the sale of a primary residence alone is estimated by Treasury to cost the Commonwealth $66 billion in 2026–27, rising to $78.5 billion in 2028–29 (see exemptions E7 and E8, 2025–26 Tax Expenditures and Insights Statement, p.166: (link here). According to 2021 Census data, 42% of Indigenous households own their own home, compared to 67% of all Australians (link here). It follows that these benefits flow disproportionately to non-Indigenous homeowners.

 

While I accept that the language in the Terms of Reference's speaks of ‘funding’ and ‘investment’ rather than the tax system, the tax system is exactly the kind of ‘mainstream’ lever the Terms of Reference professes an interest in ("whether new and existing funding – both dedicated and mainstream – is being effectively mobilised"), and it bears directly on housing and economic outcomes that sit squarely within the socioeconomic targets. A serious assessment of whether mainstream expenditure is ‘effectively mobilised’ toward Closing the Gap objectives can't extend merely to direct program spending and ignore the significant sums the tax system silently redirects away from the people the Agreement is meant to benefit.

 

The missing 2031 endpoint

There is no term of reference raising directly the rapidly approaching endpoint for most of the targets in 2031. This is likely to be the last review before a post-2031 policy framework for the National Agreement, its targets and its priority reforms would need to be in place if there is not to be a temporal gap in the frameworks implementation. This makes the absence of a specific mention in the Terms of Reference potentially problematic.

 

Governments' record on implementing previous reviews

Perhaps the most egregious absence in the terms of reference is any reference to assessing the adequacy of governments' implementation of their own unanimously positive responses to the previous reviews under the National Agreement, both formal and informal.

 

In relation to the first Commission review, Joint Council met in July 2024 and noted (link here):

Joint Council welcomed the Productivity Commission's first Three-Yearly Review of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap … Halfway through the National Agreement key structures and processes have been established. But Joint Council agreed more needs to be done to deliver on the ground and in communities. Joint Council agreed to the four key recommendations of the Review and to 15 of the 16 recommended actions…

 

Given that governments agreed to the recommendations, and yet the rate of progress is in reverse virtually across the board, the obvious questions are: were the recommendations not implemented? Were they inadequately framed by the Commission review team in the first place? Or both? Hopefully the forthcoming Review will enlighten us.

 

The subsequent record is a case study in process overwhelming substance. At the June 2025 meeting, Joint Council noted the findings of the Independent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led Review and undertook to ‘formally respond to the Report at their meeting in November 2025.’ At the November 2025 meeting, it agreed instead to ‘prioritise finalisation of its response by the end of February 2026.’ By the following meeting in May 2026, it had settled on implementing ‘11 Partnership Actions,’ (which are in fact agreements to cooperate, hardly actions) with members ‘committed to working through remaining Partnership Actions to find an agreed approach … as soon as possible.’ The Joint Council's formal response to the January 2024 Commission review was eventually published in June 2025 (link here), and its response to the subsequent Independent Review in May 2026 (link here).

 

I haven't had time or inclination to analyse these documents in detail, but it's worth noting that while governments agreed unanimously to all but one of the Commission's recommendations, the proposed implementation of each in these formal responses is invariably framed in terms of process rather than tangible action. The Commission might have made more action-oriented, action-limited recommendations; but the responsibility for what transpired ultimately lies with governments.

 

The process problem

 

My overarching assessment is that the whole business of responding to, and then acting upon, the various statutory reviews required by the Closing the Gap Framework is both extraordinarily slow and overburdened with process. Governments can manage complex processes, albeit often at a snail's pace, but most external interests and the public at large have limited capacity to follow what is being decided (or not) when it extends over years. The effect is to prioritise torpidity and lethargy as guiding principles for how business is done. I should note at this point that my earlier submissions related to the first review (see below for links) made this argument at much greater length. The more important question — whether recommendations will make a substantive difference, and whether they will actually be implemented — gets lost in the mists of that process. Hopefully the current review will both get to the bottom of this snail-like process and recommend radical simplification, but as noted above, the current Terms of Reference do not acknowledge this issue and do not encourage such an analysis.  

 

While this process of incessant review — two multi-year reviews every three years, followed by a multi-year process of responding to their recommendations — grinds on, governments remain relatively immune to any criticism that they aren't acting, because they can always point to an ongoing review. This mire of pervasive process, underpinned by a rolling negotiation between nine jurisdictions and the Indigenous Peaks, seemingly designed to produce lowest common denominator outcomes, virtually ensures substantive and visionary reform will never emerge.

 

Again, hopefully the Commission's forthcoming review will cut through and make clear-cut recommendations that create the preconditions for future reform — because without that, the prospects for the future viability of the Closing the Gap framework are dire.

 

What the Commission's own members have said

It's worth reflecting on the perspective the Commission itself brings to these two roles — and the place to start is how its members describe them publicly.

 

In an August 2023 speech to the National Press Club titled Reflections on Productivity, Public Policy, and Challenges Associated with Closing the Gap (link here), outgoing Chair Michael Brennan spoke at length about the Commission's role. Two lines stand out:

Only 4 of the 17 targets set out in the Agreement are on track to be met at this early stage. Others are going in the wrong direction, like the rate of incarceration … It was never clear what governments felt they were putting in place that would reverse this trend.

and, on the labyrinthian impact of the 2,000-plus implementation actions in play at any one time across the nine jurisdictions:

Granted, governments are busy … But this busy-ness is, in many ways, just business as usual.

 

In her May 2024 Stretton Oration (link here), new Chair Danielle Wood gave a masterful summary of income and wealth inequality in Australia (not that Indigenous disadvantage is entirely encompassed by these metrics), pointing to health and education, welfare supports, minimum wage settings and full employment policy as levers for entrenched disadvantage, while correctly noting that particular levers must be context-specific. Indigenous Australians were not, as far as I can tell, explicitly mentioned.

 

In August 2024, then-Commissioner Natalie Siegel-Brown put the data more starkly (link here):

Another five of the targets are improving but not on track to be met, one has not progressed at all, and four targets are actually going backwards … government performance on reducing rates of removal of children from their families, adult imprisonment, children in detention and suicide is even worse than when we started measuring … this coincides with some states knowingly contravening their commitments under the Agreement.

 

In a November 2024 speech (link here), Commissioner Wood described the first Review's consultation with Indigenous communities as central to its ‘success’. Given the dismal outcomes to date, and the slow progress in implementing the Commission’s recommendations, the assertion of ‘success’ appears misguided and Panglossian.

 

The two Commissioners now responsible for the current Review, Selwyn Button and Angela Jackson, struck a similarly optimistic note in an article earlier this year (link here). In August 2025, Commissioner Button wrote an op-ed in the AFR (link here) extolling community control as the key to closing the gap. His argument downplayed the impact of FASD by pointing to successful community-led initiatives such as had taken place in Fitzroy Crossing, and, on alcohol, cited national data against what he termed "lazy stereotypes." Yet the outcomes on the ground continue to take a terrible toll (link here: my own analysis, not official data), and "strength-based" arguments risk taking pressure off governments to strengthen controls on access to alcohol and other harmful substances for vulnerable remote residents. Community control is arguably a necessary contributor to achieving many of the Closing the Gap targets, but (especially at the macro-level) it is not sufficient on its own; that control must translate into effective and sustainable policy which increasingly encompasses engagement with other interest groups, negotiation and trade-offs with multiple levels of government, effective advocacy and sustained cohesion so as to resist the countervailing efforts of governments and third parties to undermine Indigenous voices.

 

There is clearly a place for rigorous monitoring and data contextualisation, but it's far from clear the Commission has been applying that rigour in the Indigenous policy space. Economist and former Commission employee Cathal Leslie has published a number of op-eds on Closing the Gap in the AFR (link here: paywall) one of which apparently prompting Commissioner Button's article above, another on 10 August 2026 pointing to methodological issues in the Commission's target metrics and to a critical ANAO report and a commissioned ANU report. Leslie's central point is the Commission's downplaying of demographic change in the national Indigenous population — the statistically significant rise in people self-identifying as Indigenous — and he concludes that the Commission has chosen to present statistics it knows cannot be believed, giving ‘cover to failing policies by telling the country that life for Indigenous children is better than it is.’ While I am not privy to the Commission’s internal processes, and so don’t presume to take one side or the other, the methodological and data issues raised by Cathal in a credible national newspaper deserve to be taken seriously by the Commission in its substantive analysis to be published in the forthcoming review.  

 

Déjà vu all over again

The fundamental problem with the terms of reference, and with the Commission's recent signalling of its likely approach, is that it is, to borrow from Yogi Berra, ‘a case of déjà vu all over again.’

 

In December 2022, following a call for submissions to the first three-year review, I submitted a nine-page submission to the Commission (link here). In August 2023, I published a blog post critiquing the Commission's draft report (link here). In September 2023, I submitted a further response (link here), attaching an outline of a potential alternative framework for Closing the Gap. All three failed to gain obvious traction. Rereading them today, I think they made a very strong case then and still do. The concluding paragraphs of the 2023 post included:

 

There is no recognition that the current design architecture for the agreement, while incomplete and thus subject to ongoing remedial work, is simultaneously over-designed and in need of radical simplification. As presently configured, it guarantees that the Coalition of Peaks will be wading through bureaucratic sludge for the next ten years … and ensures that the probability of the national agreement imploding under the weight of its accumulated complexity is high and bound to grow. Proactive reform is preferable to stasis followed by abolition.

 

The bottom line … is that the six recommendations of the draft review … would not make any substantive difference to the nation's progress on closing the gap within five or even ten years. They are an amalgam of doubling down on the current hyper-complexity of the policy architecture along with a hefty dose of blind faith in the bureaucratic leadership of the nation. Did the robodebt royal commission not make any impression at all on the PC?

 

My recommendation for the Commonwealth Government remains the same: issue the Commission with revised terms of reference, and ask it to (a) estimate the cost of addressing entrenched Indigenous inequality; (b) map out a realistic timeframe and strategy for achieving that objective; (c) undertake a more fundamental analysis of the current status of the Closing the Gap architecture; and (d) provide options for radically simplifying the structure and design of that architecture while retaining the four priority reforms. And, for good measure, keep it to fifty pages. Such a report could create a pathway for the Commonwealth Government, which in reality and despite its dissembling, retains primary responsibility for the effectiveness and long term viability of the National Agreement, to engage meaningfully with Indigenous interests and the states and territories.

 

The bottom line

The Productivity Commission has an admirable and long record of real and forthright independence, most recently on the GST and fiscal equalisation. What's needed now is hard-headed policy analysis focused on making a tangible difference to the lives of the most disadvantaged Australians within a finite period. The Commission is not primarily responsible for the poor outcomes to date, but its inability so far to identify a feasible, constructive strategic pathway forward for the National Agreement and its constituent parties has been a major contributor to letting governments evade real accountability to the public and to First Nations.

 

If it were up to me, I would favour narrowing the focus of the National Agreement to the five issues identified by Coalition of Peaks Lead Convenor Ms Donnella Mills who in her comments in response to the Terms of Reference (link here) argued inter alia:

Positive outcomes are achieved when governments have genuinely partnered with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community‑controlled organisations, it is now up to all governments to demonstrate and lead the change our people have said is needed to shift the dial in areas of health, housing, education, employment and justice (emphasis added).

I would add to those proposed priorities the adoption of a robust needs-based funding criterion to ensure that geographic areas or program sectors without access to appropriate mainstream program equivalents are prioritised.

 

It's now almost a quarter of a century since the Rudd Government adopted the Closing the Gap agenda. The patchy progress that has been achieved owes more to wider economic and demographic shifts than to specific policy reform, and in many key areas — especially remote Australia — progress in many respects has been negative. Without a new approach, which in my view will only emerge if the Commission bites the bullet, the National Agreement, which I still see as pathbreaking reform of historic significance, will be vulnerable to abolition. Without a sense across the breadth of mainstream Australia that Closing the Gap is working, the framework will lose the broad-based political support necessary for its ongoing survival.

 

The work of the forthcoming Review, and its ability to persuade governments to pursue substantive reform, may well be the last real opportunity to ensure the National Agreement and Closing the Gap does not go the way of the NAC, the NACC, ATSIC and the Voice to Parliament, and becomes a mere footnote in the history of the ongoing struggle for inclusion within the nation’s institutional architecture by First Nations citizens. That would be a tragedy for First Nations, and for the nation.

 

1 September 2026

 

This post has benefited from editorial assistance from Claude Sonnet 5. The text and arguments are entirely my own.