…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:
- 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.
- 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).
