The Commonwealth Closing the Gap Implementation Plan: a provisional assessment

 

Hamlet:                      What news?

Rosencrantz:            None my Lord, but that the world’s grown honest

Hamlet:                      Then is doomsday near?

Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2

 

This morning the Prime Minister released the Commonwealth Closing the Gap Implementation Plan (link here). The National Agreement on Closing the Gap agreed by all Australian jurisdictions with the Indigenous Coalition of Peaks a year ago provides for each party to the agreement to develop an implementation plan to lay out how the commitments made in the agreement will be implemented.

 

This post amounts to a provisional assessment of where we are at. The issues involved are simply too complex to be comprehensively analysed in a few hours. Nevertheless, in the interest of getting an alternative perspective into the public domain, I have decided to lay out my initial assessment.

 

At the time the Federal Budget was handed down in May this year, the Commonwealth advised that it would be deferring specific funding on Closing the Gap until the midyear publication of the Commonwealth Implementation Plan

 

In the May Budget, the Commonwealth allocated in excess of $600m in Indigenous specific funding, focussed largely on income support and employment, education, and health including mental health, including $149m for statistical surveys related to mental health and violence.

 

In response to the May Budget, Pat Turner, the CEO of the Coalition of Peaks issued a media release (link here) stating inter alia:

“We are encouraged to see significant funding in areas of aged care, Indigenous skills and jobs, mental health and women’s safety; but this is very much a ‘wait and see’ budget as the majority of funding directed towards Closing the Gap won’t be announced until later in the year,” she said…

… “Given the massive new investments seen in this Budget, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have a legitimate expectation that there will be a significant boost in funding in all areas of Closing the Gap — including implementation of the Priority Reforms in the National Agreement that we believe will accelerate the closing of gaps,” Ms Turner said.

 

The Prime Minister’s Implementation Plan covers a plethora of initiatives and actions of variable significance, covering both mainstream and Indigenous specific actions and allocations across four Priority Reforms and 17 Closing the Gap targets. Alongside, the Government has announced more than $1bn in ‘new investments’ (link here) as part of the Commonwealth’s implementation plan.

 

There are a number of ways to assess and consider the Government’s announcements: one is to focus on the four priority reforms; a second to assess the actions and associated investment allocated to each of the targets; and a third to focus merely on the dollars invested. While funding is arguably not the best criterion to use in assessing the quality of these announcements, it is the criterion that the Government itself has focussed on.

 

The first paragraph of the Prime Minister’s media release (link here) notes that the Government has committed ‘more than $1 billion in new measures to support to help achieve Closing the Gap outcomes’ [sic].

 

The Coalition of Peaks has issued a media release (link here) welcoming the new funding, albeit noting that more needs to be done:

We have a long way to go to seeing improvements in the lives of our peoples across the country and for the gap in life outcomes to be closed, but today is an important step forward in making this a reality.

 

Of the $1.1bn in ‘new investments’ listed in the Prime Minister’s media release, four broad initiatives account for some $880m. A Territories stolen generations redress scheme (link here) has been allocated $379m and will run for five years; remote health clinics and staff housing is allocated $254m; early childhood education is allocated $123m; and three education initiatives are allocated $126m. These allocations are clearly welcome, but they also serve to highlight areas where the Commonwealth has decided against investing new funds. For example, the Commonwealth invested $5.5bn over ten years in remote housing provision in 2008, and the current Government has not renewed this except in part (it has previously invested $500m over five years) in the NT where it has potential landlord liabilities in relation to long term leases.

 

The Commonwealth’s most significant investment, the stolen generations redress scheme, is limited to former Commonwealth responsibilities in the Territories, and has a target of just 3600 potential recipients (see page 92 of the Implementation Plan). While the investment quantum appears significant (it equates to the price of 380 median priced houses in Canberra), the potential ameliorative impact on deep disadvantage across First Nations citizens is minimal. Moreover, while the ethical case for redressing discriminatory policies is unquestionable, whether this should be classified as closing the gap is much less certain. The real import of this measure is symbolic, a matter that would require separate consideration to fully explore.

 

My major criticism however of the Commonwealth announcement relates to the deliberate opacity and lack of transparency relating to government investments.

 

The action tables at pages 83 to 185 of the Implementation Plan list in the order of 200 to 300 individual actions (I haven’t counted them). Against each action, there is listed any relevant funding, along with a notation indicating whether it is existing or new investment. In many cases, the funding listed is indicated as being mainstream funding relevant to the target, but without any indication or estimate of what proportion of that mainstream funding should be notionally allocated to Indigenous citizens. Moreover, there is no consistent effort to allocate investments over a uniform timeframes. The action items list variable dates, with the majority of funding allocations having no link to the time span of the target.  While some funding is undoubtedly ongoing (eg the income support payments listed in relation to the employment targets) in many cases funding will have been allocated for only a few years.  

 

The result is twofold. First, the Implementation Plan is fundamentally incomplete with existing and new investments not aligned with the target timeframe. To take a random example, Target 10 has a time frame to 2031, but includes a range of funding allocations with timeframes ranging over three, four, five, and seven years. None of the funding extends to 2031. See pages 145 to 148 of the Implementation Plan. This contrasts with the first iteration of Closing Gap where funding was largely (but not entirely) locked in for up to ten years through the use of National Partnership Agreements under COAG, each of which had a specific implementation plan.

 

Second, it is actually impossible to calculate or assess the total level of resources allocated against each target, (and thus to make an assessment of how serious the Government is in relation to meeting those targets). It follows that it is also not possible to calculate the total investment in closing the gap. This problem is likely to be replicated across eight jurisdictions (my examination of the two available state Implementation Plans confirms that they suffer from similar issues).

 

The Commonwealth has made a point of claiming to be accountable (see the Prime Minister’s foreword to the Implementation Plan and pages 8 and 79), yet the deliberate decision not to be fully transparent about the investments being made is a fundamental constraint on that accountability.

 

To emphasise the risks that the public and Indigenous people will be misled either deliberately or through honest mistakes, one need look no further than the Prime Minister’s media release listing $1.1bn in new investments. Yet an examination of the action plan item for the investment of $254m in health clinics and associated housing indicates that $100m of the $254m (see page 98 of the Implementation Plan) is actually existing funding from the Indigenous Australians’ Health Programme. That single case drops the headline figure of $1.1bn in new investments to $1bn (see for example The Age article of 5 August which refers to the $1.1bn figure (link here).

 

For a Prime Minister trumpeting a ‘new partnership based on trust and truth’ (page 1 of the Implementation Plan), a $100m discrepancy may be neither here nor there. Others may disagree.

 

To my mind, the most important issue here is that we face a situation where First Nations citizens disproportionately suffer levels of inequality and deep disadvantage. As a nation, we have known about this for more than two decades, and have had a formal policy framework to address it since 2008. Yet our targets are partial (ie they aim to merely close part of the gaps); the policy reforms promulgated by governments are more fluff than substance, and are continually changing; the investments that governments allocate are inadequate to address the disadvantage we know exists, and have been declining over the past five years. We have established an elaborate bureaucratic and policy ritual designed to persuade ourselves that we are doing all we can to address deep-seated disadvantage and to close the gap. In reality however, we are effectively making a choice to not close the gap.

 

While the Coalition of Peaks deserves credit for seeking to move the government and the nation forward on this issue, and has successfully manoeuvred the Government into a rhetorical proclamation of good faith and serious intent, the reality is that the Commonwealth Government has successfully shifted responsibility for any failure to the states and territories, and bought insurance by locking Indigenous interests into taking at least partial responsibility for the outcomes.

 

So much for a new partnership based on truth and trust.