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).