The time is out of joint. O
cursèd spite
That ever I was born to set it
right!
Nay, come, let’s go together.
Hamlet, Act one, Scene five.
Ten days ago (on 12 February 2026) Prime Minister Albanese
delivered the annual Statement to Parliament on Closing the Gap (link
here). Simultaneously the NIAA released the Commonwealth Closing the Gap
2025 Annual Report and 2026 Implementation Plan (link
here). I urge interested readers to take the time to have a look at both
documents as I cannot give either the justice they deserve.
It would be churlish not to acknowledge that both documents
make a strong case for a range of positive initiatives which will make tangible
differences to the lives of many Indigenous Australians. These include
initiatives related to housing, food security, hospitals and Indigenous health,
remote employment, and clean water infrastructure in remote communities, and
increased funding for PBCs, the corporate entities that hold native title on
behalf of native title owners.
The Prime Minister’s speech is a well-crafted list of
achievements and ongoing work, albeit without key details and history that
would provide adequate contextualisation to enable a critical assessment of the
Government’s performance in addressing this policy agenda. For example, the
inclusion of the section recounting the important and creditable investments in
water infrastructure omits both the salient fact that this was previously
announced in 2023 by Minister Burney (link
here) and that it is part of the funding operations of the National Water
Grid Authority (link here)
and is in effect a carve out of normal and ongoing mainstream funding, and thus
may not involve additional fiscal effort. The data point cited by the Prime
Minister (40 clean water projects delivering for around 34,000 people in 110
communities) is not available on the National Water Grid Authority web site or
fact sheet (link
here) on First Nations projects, though the fact sheet does mention that
the initiative will contribute to target 9b under Closing the Gap. The Productivity
Commission dashboard (link
here) indicates however that there is no data source currently available
which includes all required data elements to enable reporting against this
target (a larger problem than just data on clean water provision).
He also includes a sophisticated argument about the
inter-connectedness of socio-economic life as well as the potential life
changing implications of a single event or action:
… one lifeline, one moment
when someone recognises your potential and backs it, can change everything.
Sometimes when we talk about Closing the Gap, we can be guilty of focusing on
that first idea [the interconnectedness of everything] at the expense of the
second. The challenges facing us are significant, complex and connected, with
causes that reach back generations. But that does not render us powerless - it
makes each act of change powerful. It means progress towards one target, will
drive improvement in others.
This analysis is of course correct, but in the real world
it can operate both positively or negatively, for better and for worse. Yet the
Prime Minister wishes to focus only on the former and not the latter.
The Prime Minister’s speech includes a pre-emptive defence
against nay sayers and critics built on that partial analysis and is reinforced
by a Panglossian reliance on the psychology of positivity and optimism and
interlaced with a generous dose of conceptual conflation. Excellent rhetoric,
poor analysis. For example, I was struck by this segment of the speech:
We are now 5 years away from
most of the target deadlines. We are clear about where there is more to do. We
must also guard against talk of failure. Because talk of failure dismisses the
aspirations and achievements of Indigenous Australians. It ignores the leaders
and communities who are changing lives. Failure is a word for those who have
stopped trying - or given up listening. I make this clear today: I am not
contemplating failure. Our Government is not contemplating failure. We are
determined to succeed. The Closing the Gap targets are a measure of our
national progress. And there is real progress.
I too do not wish to contemplate failure, but I
fundamentally disagree with the Prime Minister. The targets themselves are not ‘a
measure of our national progress’, but if well designed and structured can be a
way to measure progress or lack of it. Success in policy formulation and
implementation is never guaranteed. It requires hardheaded analysis, a sense of
realism, the establishment of a framework that does not raise expectations
beyond the capacity to deliver, and balancing of available resources (financial,
intellectual and human), the development of a workable and politically attuned
strategy, and a commitment to staying the course. Indeed, it requires a real determination
to succeed, and such determination can be strengthened and sustained by
contemplating the consequences of failure. Importantly, success requires a
preparedness to assess progress, to identify and acknowledge both successes and
failures, and then a preparedness to refine — as necessary — the strategy, the
resources, the implementation plan, the time frame, or all of the above.
Unfortunately, neither this Government nor its predecessors have been prepared
to be open and honest with the wider community and with First Nations. Instead,
they have adopted the unstated and arguably deliberately dishonest strategy of
deciding to muddle through, while avoiding being held to account.
The NIAA Annual Report is a highly sophisticated version of
a classic glossy public relations product replete with good news stories. One must
read through to page 78 (Appendix C) of the eighty-page document to get
a high-level account of the progress against the 20 formal targets. There is no
mention of the Priority Reforms, but the Productivity Commission dashboard
tells us that no data is currently available to assess progress on these. Of
the 20 socioeconomic targets, 4 are improving and on track, 7 are
improving but not on track, 4 are worsening and not on track, 1is no change, and
4 have no assessment available. Note the embedded ambiguity: 11 are improving,
with 9 not improving or unable to be determined; but only 4 are on track to
meet their target with the balance not on track or unable to be determined.
These are national level statistics. There is substantial variation across the
states and territories, and of more significance, an analysis of the same
targets for remote regions would be much more dire (but demonstrating this
comprehensively is an exercise for another day).
Here is my high-level critique of
the current strategy for closing the gap which to be fair to the current Labor
Government, was negotiated and put in place by its LNP predecessor with the
negotiation of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap in 2020. It has
however been continued without change by the Albanese Government.
It was not based on an explicit strategic analysis and
fudges the demographic and policy relevant data. The original impetus for the
strategy was to close the socio-economic gap between Indigenous and
non-Indigenous Australians, but the framework chosen by successive governments was
never clear on why various socio-economic indicators were chosen as targets,
and whether they were meant to be the primary areas for policy attention, or
merely signposts or indicators of progress or lack of it in relation to wider
policies addressing much broader socio-economic disadvantage. If the former,
there was no comprehensive strategy employed to reach the targets. If the
latter, it was not articulated. Of more significance however was the decision to
not choose certain key social indicators, and no reasons for these omissions
were given apart from vague statements about the desirability of relying on ‘strength
based’ approaches and avoiding ‘deficit discourse’.
Moreover, in relation to most targets, the denominator is the
relevant Indigenous population. In recent decades it has become increasingly
apparent that the Indigenous population is demographically fluid, and the
structural composition of the Indigenous population has been changing rapidly.
This is an issue that raises fundamental questions regarding the conceptual
underpinnings of the Closing the Gap policy and strategy; questions that are
never asked, let alone answered.
Since the establishment of Closing the Gap in 2008, what
has always been hidden in plain sight is that there is no alignment between the
targets and programs designed to reach them. In a very real sense, the targets
have always been aspirational, and governments have continued to do what they
always do, devise and implement programs willy nilly to assuage the concerns
and pressure of various constituencies. Government rhetoric has always
emphasised that Closing the Gap is directed at meeting the needs and
expectations of Indigenous interests. My own (admittedly heterodox) view is
that this has always been disingenuous; in reality, for governments, Closing
the Gap is fundamentally about assuaging the vague and intuitive concerns of
the wider community that we as a nation have mistreated Indigenous peoples. In
response, governments do just enough to demonstrate that they are acting/trying
while not doing so much that scarce fiscal resources are wasted on regions or
programs that are not electorally efficient in harnessing or maintaining votes.
The chosen targets have invariably been framed as partial: even
if all targets were to be met by say 2031, the actual and real gap in
socio-economic outcomes would still not be closed. The wider community does not
understand this. I understand why governments may wish to be cautious in making
commitments, but the partial nature of the Closing the Gap policy framework
guarantees a day of reckoning when the wider community will realise the present
strategy is not assuaging their diffuse concerns about giving all citizens a
fair go, and yet the gap continues, and a populist consensus will emerge to try
something else.
The complexity of the Closing the Gap framework is mind
boggling. I challenge anyone to have a close look at the Productivity
Commission dashboard (link here) and
not step away confounded. There are four priority reforms that are effectively
treated as targets (I have argued elsewhere that seeking to measure them like
targets is a mistake), 17 targets or outcome areas, three of which have two
elements. In total, the nation is seeking to measure and assess progress
against 24 effective targets.
The bulk of the targets relate to policy and program
sectors that are traditionally state or territory responsibilities. So, for
each target we have eight separate jurisdictional outcomes (changing year to
year depending on data availability) plus the national outcome. Conceptually,
anyone seeking to assess progress overall must consider a matrix with
dimensions of 24(targets) by 9 (jurisdictions), a total of 216 separate cells
each year. Each cell is further elaborated by a suite of varying supporting
categories of disaggregated data. For example, target 3 related to early
childhood education includes disaggregated data by sex, by remoteness area
(five separate categories), by Index of Relative Socio-economic Disadvantage
(IRSD) quintile, and finally by disability status.
Further, each target is measured using multiple data
sources for both the numerator and denominator. The targets were chosen without
first assessing whether the data to measure them is available, and in fact, in
many cases it is not. Data is often unavailable, and/or collected only every
five years in the census (link
here).
The responsibility for collection of the temporal year by
year performance data comprising what becomes a multi-dimensional matrix is the
responsibility of multiple agencies across multiple jurisdictions, with the
only high-level oversight being a sub-committee of the Joint Council which
oversees the implementation of the National Agreement (see Appendix B to
the NIAA Annual Report).
Jurisdictional implementation plans are not consistent
utilising different templates and often read more like lists of every
Indigenous related activity a jurisdiction is undertaking and have little or no
obvious link to the data being collected for each target (See Appendixes E,
F & G for the Commonwealth’s current approach to reporting on
implementation). Assessing all implementation plans for any one year would
involve reading and comprehending hundreds if not thousands of pages of often unsourced
initiatives described in bureaucratese (a language few Australians speak or
understand).
The overall CtG framework was devised by senior and
experienced bureaucrats, and therefore we can confidently assert the complexity
was clearly deliberate; the result is a deep-seated avoidance of accountability.
The Productivity Commission which oversights the data dashboard is also
responsible for one of the regular reviews of the Closing the Gap process (and
thus arguably has a conflict of interest in relation to some aspects of the
National Agreements implementation), but Indigenous interests insisted that
they too should commission a regular review. These reviews are the product of
seemingly unending consultation and ‘co-design’ and end up being long and
unwieldy documents spanning hundreds of pages which inevitably sink without
trace and without any apparent political or policy impact apart from ephemeral
mentions upon their initial publication in the daily media cycle (But see Appendix
D of the NIAA Annual Report for the exception that proves the rule).
The National Agreement on Closing the Gap which was
a truly innovative step forward in many respects (link
here) involves the Coalition of Peaks, and the Coalition’s Secretariat is
funded by NIAA. It appears that its staffing is about the size of a single
branch in a large government agency. These limited policy capabilities are arrayed
against the combined bureaucratic and policy heft of nine governments and span
virtually the entire extent of government activity. If they are to have any
substantive influence with government policy development, the Coalition of Peaks
(and their state and territory components) must be experts on virtually every
facet of government; an extraordinary ask for an impossible task. See Appendix
E for a stocktake of the 50 odd partnerships that ostensibly operate in
refutation of my assertions. I would merely note that while they give
Indigenous participants the sense of interacting with government
decisionmakers, in a complex and process-dominated policy environment, the
power imbalance is huge. There is no line of sight which allows th
effectiveness of these processes to be independently assessed.
Finally, notwithstanding the Commonwealth’s constitutional
powers in relation to Indigenous matters, the Commonwealth refuses to step up
and take a leadership or coordination role in relation to the implementation of
the National Agreement. In a December 2025 Estimates Hearing, Senator Barbara
Pocock asked Minister McCarthy a follow up question related to previous claims
she had publicly made that she would consider aligning funding to the states
and territories with progress on Closing the Gap targets (link
here). Notwithstanding her recent comments (link
here), the answer provided on notice (NIAA1743) is a lesson in bureaucratic
fudging. The Minister’s idea (which was directed at assuaging concerns in the
Indigenous community) will disappear without trace.
A cynic might think that the Closing the Gap framework is a
machine designed to achieve the minimum necessary while giving the appearance
of action. They would be wrong: for the machine does not work perfectly. Every component
of the machine’s operations is subject to failure, and a single component
failure can bring the machine to a halt. Bureaucratic delay, complexity, data
constraints, inter-agency conflicts, and the myriad opportunities for
implementation failure mean that this machine in terms of its ostensible
aims is entirely ineffective. Any positive outcomes (and there have been a
few) are the results of a rising demographic tide, th operation of pre-existing
institutional frameworks such as exists for native title, and the innovation,
experience and determination of a very few individuals within the system (both Indigenous
and non-Indigenous) who find ways to produce outcomes despite the machine’s
built-in design constraints.
This critique is arguably too abstract to be persuasive. To
address that deficiency, I will point to just one of the areas of egregious
policy failure that the Closing the Gap machine fails to address: remote school
attendance.
According to the agency charged with measuring national
school attendance, ACARA (link
here):
In Australia in 2025:
• The attendance rate for [all]
students in Years 1–10 was 88.8% …
• Attendance rates:
v were
higher among students in major cities than in remote areas;
v were
lower among students from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds than
for non-Indigenous students.
According to ACARA (link
here), the attendance rate for the NT in 2025 was 76.9%, a full 11 % below
the national average.
The NT Education Department recently released attendance
data for public schools across the NT (link
here). It shows (Table 3) that in very remote areas, there were
6881enrolled Aboriginal students and 7886 non-Aboriginal students. The
attendance rates for Aboriginal students averaged 40% compared to 80 % for
non-Aboriginal students. In some of the larger remote communities,
attendance rates dipped well below 40%.
The Closing the Gap framework has no target
related to school attendance. The bottom line: school
attendance rates in the NT are well below the rest of Australia and Aboriginal
student attendance is extraordinarily low. In very remote NT regions, the
school attendance rate for Aboriginal children is catastrophic. Given that
low school attendance has been a problem for decades, and will not be turned
around overnight, it is safe to assert that we as a nation are allowing a generation
of children numbered in the tens of thousands to reach adulthood without the
basic numeracy and literacy skills that will allow them to engage with the
modern world they will live in. In a recent media release (link
here) the NT Minister for Education promised to continue to crack down on
low attendance through the use of truancy officers and making parents
responsible, but gave no indication that she understood that there was a major
crisis ongoing in her portfolio.
The takeout from this example is that governments are
deliberately ignoring the hard problems, and that the very hardest problems are
in remote Australia. I have been banging this drum for a couple of decades with
little success. It has been a consistent theme of this blog (for example: link
here, link
here, link
here, and link
here). If change for the better is to occur, clearly governments must do
something different.
Reform options for Closing the Gap
Clearly the challenges facing the nation in terms of
Indigenous socio-economic disadvantage are enormous and seemingly
intractable. I do not consider them to be intractable, rather the evidence
suggests that while the problems are complex, and not all the solutions are
within the capacities or remit of government, the reality is that governments
have not been prepared to put their shoulder to the wheel in ways that make a
difference. Worse still, they have adopted a strategy of pretending to be
concerned and pretending to act because the politics of being honest with the
Australian community and with First Nations is too difficult.
There are ways forward, and there is no single lever to
pull which will solve the policy challenges or even ensure we are on the right
path. I do have some suggestions for how governments should proceed. Here are five
broad suggestions that would be a good start.
First, acknowledge that the Closing the Gap
machine is broken. It is too complex; it is too focussed on
process. It lacks effective political leadership. It needs reform (not
abolition, not disposal, not starting afresh). Reform would necessarily involve
a radical rethink based on a critical assessment of the conceptual
underpinnings. It would require a radical simplification to focus on what is
important, to identify a limited number of strategically significant priorities
(I would nominate education, employment, incarceration, housing and health;
cross cutting priorities would include alcohol reform and disability access).
It would require the ditching of the political correctness that fails to
recognise that Closing the Gap is as much about the nature of mainstream
Australia as it is about the future of First Nations interests.
Second, I would suggest that the National
Agreement on Closing the Gap be reconstituted into two separate agreements: one
for urban and regional Australia, and another for remote Australia. Indigenous
Australians living in both domains have significant challenges to be included
within the institutions that frame the daily lives of mainstream Australians,
but they are fundamentally different in nature across a considerable number of
domains.
Third, given:
· the
increasing political polarisation in modern liberal democracies;
· the
seeming intractability of the issues in play; and
· the
poor understanding of the experience and realities of life for many First
Australians; and (frankly)
· the
policy illiteracy of most Australians based on the rise of social media and the
complexity of modern government in a rapidly changing global world;
there is a pressing need for an innovative
approach to the governance of the oversight of this policy domain. My
suggestion is that key elements of its governance should be placed at arm’s
length from Executive Government in recognition of the ongoing failure of
Executive governments across the partisan divide to turn these issues around
(while acknowledging that ultimately governments are elected to make final
policy determinations). My suggestion is to build into the governance of a
new Closing the Gap model scope for the extensive use of deliberative democracy
and citizens juries to deal with major policy challenges (like remote
education, and the regular oversight reviews of the process).
Fourth, while the states and
territories have been and will continue to be substantial players in the
Indigenous policy domain, the nation requires the Commonwealth to step up
and ensure that these issues are considered from a national perspective. The
1967 Referendum passed with an overwhelming majority and gave the Commonwealth
the power to legislate in relation to Indigenous affairs. The decision by
Commonwealth governments over the past decade to step back and abdicate control
and authority by effectively leaving responsibility for Closing the Gap outcomes
with the states and territories has been both a gross dereliction and a policy disaster.
Fifth, the focus of reform efforts
must be on institutional reform, not greater access to benefits for selected
constituencies within the current framework. One example of institutional
reform would be a comprehensive shift to ensure the greater use of needs-based allocations
across the board thus ensuring that constituencies where disadvantaged Indigenous
citizens are over-represented are allocated greater attention without framing
the policy as an indigenous specific program. If implemented widely, this would
do much to undercut the potential for populist backlash which has been a major
constraint on Indigenous policy reform over recent decades.
Conclusion
The Closing the Gap machine is broken. It requires reform,
not jettisoning or discarding. There are pathways forward. Unfortunately, I see
little prospect that a critical mass of concern presently exists that might
lead to such reform. From governments, all we get are words, words, words.
In remote Australia, largely out of sight of mainstream
Australia, we are building another machine which is efficiently producing
ongoing illiteracy, innumeracy, dysfunction, crime and hyper-incarceration.
Tens of thousands of Australian citizens are being relegated to live shortened lives,
often shaped by violence, family tragedy and despair. It is easy for some to
blame the victims. Overwhelmingly, they are not responsible for the life
choices available to them.
In 2007, I co-authored a book with Neil Westbury where we
argued that remote Australia is in effect a failed state. The institutional
frameworks that we take granted in non-remote Australia were under-developed and/or
non-existent. The following two decades have seen some improvements, but in
many respects, not much has changed. How can we accept a school system where
for tens of thousands of students the attendance rate is forty percent. How can
we accept a culture where alcohol and substance abuse are rampant, and governments
fail to rein in the ability of liquor retailers to sell alcohol to vulnerable
people (of all backgrounds) while they know that alcohol is an underlying cause
of widespread health issues. The causes of state failure are complex and the
solutions are complicated. But an absolute pre-requisite is for governments to
do their job, acting in the public interest, and not at the behest of private
interests. An essential part of the job for our political leaders is to focus
on what matters for all Australians, not just some Australians, and certainly the
job is not to deliberately obscure what matters.
The Closing the Gap machine is failing. Our leaders have stopped
trying…and listening.
The times are certainly out of joint.
22 February 2026
