The broken Closing the Gap machine

 

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

Avoiding responsibility: the ANAO Performance Audit of childhood development

O, what may man within him hide,

Though angel on the outward side!

Measure for Measure, Act three, Scene two

 

The ANAO have recently issued a new performance audit titled Closing the Gap in Schooling and Early Childhood Development — Partnership and Reporting (link here).

The focus of the audit is the implementation of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap as it relates to 3 targets related to addressing inequality in outcomes related to schooling and early childhood development: targets 3, 4 and 5 of Closing the Gap.

According to the Productivity Commission Closing the Gap dashboard (link here), at present, Target 3 on Early Childhood Education is improving and on track with 94.2 % of children enrolled in pre-school in 2024 (but see the discussion of data issues below). Target 4 on Children Thriving is worsening and not on track, with only 33.9 % of Indigenous children commencing school being developmentally on track. Target 5 on Student Learning Potential has improved but is not on track with 68.1% of Indigenous people aged 20-24 having attained Year 12 or equivalent in 2021.

While comprising less than 120 pages including appendices, the ANAO Performance Audit is a dense and complicated read, not assisted by its focus on intricate program detail and the complexity of the processes across multiple portfolios, jurisdictions and programs that impact upon these targets.

In para 1, the report states [footnotes removed]:

The objective of the National Agreement is to ‘overcome the entrenched inequality faced by too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people so that their life outcomes are equal to all Australians’. The Australian Government is jointly accountable with the state and territory governments for the implementation of the National Agreement.

In para 9, the ANAO lay out the objectives of the audit as follows:

… to assess the effectiveness of partnership arrangements, funding design activities and measurement of progress for schooling and early childhood development commitments under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap.

In this post, I do not propose to attempt to summarise the audit in any comprehensive way but instead will focus on those findings which seem to me to reveal something deeper about the National Agreement, its implementation, and the performance of the agencies involved. I recommend readers at least have a look at the introductory Summary and Recommendations section to obtain a sense of the overall shape and contents of the Performance Audit.

Paragraphs 11 to 14 of the Summary and Recommendations section outline the conclusions of the audit. Bolding of text has been added to emphasise key points.

In paras. 13 and 14, the ANAO note that:

More can be done to align mainstream federal funding agreements to the priority reforms. There is a lack of transparency over how federal funding agreements support Aboriginal community-controlled organisations…

The Australian Government’s progress reporting for Targets 3, 4 and 5 could be more reliable and complete. Dashboard information published by the Productivity Commission on Targets 3, 4 and 5 is accurate, however Target 3 results (the only one of these three targets considered to be ‘on track’) are not fully meaningful due to a measurement issue. Many ‘supporting indicators’ set out in the 2020 National Agreement on Closing the Gap, which are intended to lead to greater understanding and insight into how governments are tracking against the targets, were not developed as at June 2025. The Australian Government’s annual reports on Closing the Gap are accurate but increasingly incomplete and unmeaningful. The NIAA has not done enough to appropriately advise the government about annual reporting requirements established in the National Agreement.

In para. 17, referring to placed based agreements the ANAO state:

In 2021 it was agreed that state and territory governments would resource the establishment and governance costs for any place-based partnerships in their jurisdiction. Place‑based partnerships were not fully established by 2024 as specified in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. …. The NIAA coordinated Australian Government participation in governance arrangements but did not coordinate with the relevant state governments to facilitate establishment of the two place-based partnerships. Australian Government reporting on place-based partnerships, including for place‑based partnerships relevant to schooling and early childhood development, is deficient and worsening.

In para. 19, the ANAO note:

… The Australian Government has not met the requirement in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap to report annually on the allocation of grant funding to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations (including ACCOs).

In para. 22, the ANAO note:

The coordination and publication of the Australian Government’s annual reports on the Closing the Gap National Agreement have been facilitated by the NIAA. While accurately drawing on the PC dashboards, information on Targets 3, 4 and 5 has become less complete over time, reducing transparency over Closing the Gap progress in schooling and early childhood development.

ANAO Recommendations

The ANAO made only four formal recommendations (pages 11 and 12), each of them quite anodyne. The response to the single recommendation to the Education Department was ‘agreed’. The three recommendations to NIAA recommend actions simply amount to requests for mere compliance with the terms of the National Agreement. In each case, the NIAA response might best be described as prevarication.

Recommendation One focusses on reporting on the implementation of place-based partnerships; see paragraph 2.25 to 2.36. In para 2.34, the ANAO note that the last three annual reports on closing the gap compiled by NIAA have not complied with the requirements of clause 37 of the Agreement. The NIAA response was not to agree, nor to disagree, but to ‘note’ the recommendation, adding a comment that the content of the annual reports is a matter for Government.

Recommendation Two, which arose from the analysis in Chapter 3 of the Audit on funding design focusses on the extent to which the annual reports list the number of Community controlled organisations receiving funding, a requirement of clause 118 of the National Agreement. The NIAA response was identical to that provided in relation to Recommendation One. In this case, the ANAO had noted (para. 3.46) that NIAA had not briefed the Minister on the requirement to include this information prior to her approval of the Annual Report.

Recommendation Three was directed to the Department of Education and dealt with improved monitoring of the same issues. The Department’s response was to agree with the recommendation and (in effect) promise to do better.

Recommendation Four (para 4.36) dealt with reporting on progress on closing the gap. The ANAO had examined this issue in detail in Chapter Four of the audit and raised a series of detailed issues which I won’t seek to summarise. I will note one instance (para. 4.13) where the formula used to measure Target Three used different data sources for the numerator and denominator, and this led to inaccuracies and overestimates in the progress being achieved. In 2021, the Productivity Commmission commissioned a review from the ANU to identify improved ways of dealing with the data measurement problems. The ANU report recommended in November 2024 the use of an alternative data source ‘to avoid the biased and at times mathematically impossible observations that result from the numerator-denominator mismatch’. The ANAO report that as of June 2024, the Joint Council’s Partnership Working Group had not considered the recommendation and further reported that the Productivity Commission had advised (footnote 124) that a further study would be required. In this policy domain, everyone hastens slowly.

In relation to the meaningfulness of annual reporting on closing the gap, in para. 4.27, the ANAO state:

When preparing the Australian Government 2022 Annual Report, a brief to the NIAA Chief Executive Officer from the Closing the Gap Branch stated that, in order to meet commitments under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, the annual report would ‘at a minimum’ need to comply with Clause 118 of the agreement (see paragraph 4.23).

Yet, as noted in para 4.29:

since the 2022 Annual Report, for Targets 3,4 and 5, the completeness of target information included in the annual report has declined (Table 4.4), reducing transparency over outcome progress for schooling and early childhood development commitments.

In concluding their audit, the ANAO cited (para 4.34) the Productivity Commission (PC) 2024 Review:

In 2024 the PC’s three-yearly Review of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap found that implementation plans and annual reports were not fulfilling the intended purpose. The review found that the two documents did not reconcile (annual reports contained a limited set of the actions that governments had committed to and reported on actions not listed in the Closing the Gap implementation plan). The review found that reporting on progress was high level or incomplete, and delivery risk and issues were not included. The PC concluded:

By and large, the annual reports focus on listing activities that have been undertaken, while giving significantly less attention to describing what has not been delivered as planned and areas where there has been little progress.

Recommendation Four and the NIAA response are the concluding two paragraphs of the ANAO Audit report:

4.36 The Australian Government improve the completeness and meaningfulness of the Australian Government’s Closing the Gap annual reports and comply with clause 118 of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap by: drawing from the Productivity Commission dashboard to include information about target results and status; and including risks, successes, failures and lessons learned.

National Indigenous Australians Agency response: Noted

4.37 Any amendments to the Commonwealth Closing the Gap Annual Report is a matter for consideration by Government. The NIAA will brief the Government on the ANAO findings and recommendations.

Commentary

The following comments in response to this audit are high level and are best characterised as comprising a set of assertions and questions based on my own experience rather than detailed analyses.

The ANAO are to be commended for their detailed analysis of what is a complex and dynamic policy domain, however, I was left with a deep-seated sense that they are much too cautious. Their analysis itself focusses on compliance with process, taking the National Agreement as the benchmark, and assessing all that is going on (or not going on) against that benchmark. But the benchmark itself (that is the institutional architecture of Closing the Gap) is deeply flawed and as I have argued elsewhere (link here and link here), seems likely to have been deliberately designed to be partial in its focus, and to be so complex and complicated that no interested observer (not even the ANAO) can effectively monitor its implementation. The result is that there is no way for anyone, from the Joint Council down to scribblers based in universities, to keep governments accountable. In these circumstances, the ANAO’s efforts in devoting around a year’s work to assessing compliance against a flawed benchmark is in effect a wasted opportunity. In addition, the audit reflects a wider flaw in ANAO reports, namely that the formal recommendations do not adequately reflect the shortcomings identified in the analysis. This appears to be a deliberate policy aimed at not upsetting the Executive arm of government (which effectively controls the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit to which the ANAO reports), while maintaining a technical commitment to independence and evidence-based analysis. For an example of the operation of this dynamic hidden in plain sight, refer to Appendix Two of the ANAO Performance Audit.

A close reading of the Audit makes extremely clear that NIAA are failing comprehensively in both ensuring the National Agreement is implemented, and in undertaking the policy work (that used to be core business for the APS) that would allow and ensure that the policy was being updated and made increasingly effective. It is as if the NIAA considers that suggesting improvement to the National Agreement is someone else’s job. And as for the NIAA responses to the three recommendations, they amount to telling the ANAO and the wider public to ‘go jump’; in effect, they are saying it’s not their problem.

As the NIAA CEO states in her response letter in Appendix 1, the NIAA ‘will continue to work with Government to support implementation of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap within its remit.’ [emphasis added]. How this supporting role and implicitly constrained remit aligns with the functions contained in the Executive Order establishing NIAA (link here) is difficult to reconcile. Those functions are unequivocal and provide NIAA with an expansive remit involving leadership and coordination across the breadth of the public sector:

•  To lead and coordinate Commonwealth policy development, program design and implementation and service delivery for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
• To provide advice to the Prime Minister and the Minister for Indigenous Australians on whole-of-government priorities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
• To lead and coordinate the development and implementation of Australia’s Closing the Gap targets in partnership with Indigenous Australians

The ANAO performance audit is the result of perhaps a year’s work by a team of around eight analysts, yet there is no discussion about

·       whether the schooling and education elements of closing the gap are in fact working well or not, and if not why not;

·       the implications of rapid demographic change in the Indigenous population;

·       why there is no target directed to improving school attendance;

·       whether there are regional differences in outcomes, and if so what to do about them;

·       whether the 44 separate programs (listed in Appendix 7) directed at the three targets in focus are designed to be effective (rather than just whether they involve partnerships or community-controlled organisations);

·       and importantly, whether the $1.48bn allocated nationally to addressing the targets (see Appendix 7) is too little, or perhaps too much, spent well or poorly, or whether it is poorly directed.

Of course, the response to this critique will be that I am asking for an evaluation not a performance audit. Or to put it another way, I am focussing on effectiveness, whereas the ANAO and the relevant agencies are focussed on efficiency. If so, I plead guilty. The 2024 PC review of Closing the Gap did not address most of these issues and arguably failed to adequately address the structural conflict of interest involved in its management of the dashboard and reporting framework for Closing the Gap. There is a desperate need for an independent and comprehensive macro-evaluation of the entire Closing the Gap framework.

Agencies control what is to be evaluated and when, and often decide to delay or cancel publication (link here). The bottom line is that across the public sector the resources directed to systematic and comprehensive evaluation of Government programs is minimal and decentralised notwithstanding the comparatively recent establishment of the Australian Centre for Evaluation (link here). Invariably, agency initiated evaluations focus on micro programs rather than larger programs, thus avoiding the possibility that an evaluation will reach politically embarrassing conclusions. Governments prefer not to be held to account for lack of effectiveness and find it much easier to manage issues that can be characterised as related to efficiency or process. A focus on effectiveness involves asking whether adequate resources are being allocated, whereas a focus on efficiency sets the issue of adequate funding aside. The absence of adequate investment in effectiveness evaluation is a root cause of structural and systemic policy failure, especially where the interests advocating for greater access to government resources are comparatively weak.

Conclusion

The bottom line here is that the ANAO has done an excellent job in identifying and laying out the myriad ways in which implementation actions directed towards just three of the 19 Closing the Gap targets are not meeting the benchmarks established in the National Agreement. One can only wonder what the comparative results would be for the 16 targets not examined. Yet the more fundamental questions of effectiveness that permeate the policy architecture established to implement and monitor ongoing policy and program action to close the gap have not been addressed.

The Commonwealth Government has not provided a response to the Productivity Commission Review of Closing the Gap completed in 2024, and no Commonwealth Government has formally responded to the 2017 Productivity Commission Review into an Indigenous Evaluation Strategy (link here). What we observe here is the contemporary and ongoing maintenance of Stanner’s Great Australian Silence (link here). In these circumstances, the ANAO by deciding to initiate a Performance Audit focussed on process has in effect provided yet more political and policy cover for ongoing Government inaction in relation to addressing the endemic and systemic effectiveness issues that prevent the Closing the Gap policy from succeeding.

The continuing policy failure on Closing the Gap, and the deliberate refusal to avoid addressing issues related to the effectiveness of current policy approaches is a tragedy for Indigenous interests (particularly those Indigenous citizens suffering deep social and economic disadvantage), but also a tragedy for the nation. It represents a major failure of our political democracy.

 

 

23 January 2026

Domestic and Family Violence and Closing the Gap

Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins

 Remorse from power.

Julius Caesar Act 2, Scene 1

The National Agreement on Closing the gap sets out 17 targets and four priority reforms. Target 13 relates to domestic and family violence (link here).

Target 13 is specified as follows:

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.

The following text is taken from the Productivity Commission dashboard:

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 national data point of 8.4% incorporates varying jurisdictional data points rangeing from 10% in NSW to 6.4% in Qld.

If we unpack the specification of the target, it becomes clear just how meaningless it is. The benchmark data have not been updated for six years. More problematically, the AIWH (link here) cites research from 2011 that found that ‘around 90% of violence against First Nations women and most cases of sexual abuse of First Nations children are undisclosed’. [Willis M (2011) ‘Non-disclosure of violence in Australian Indigenous communities’ Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice no. 405, AIC]. Moreover, multiple instances of family violence against an individual are recorded as equivalent to one instance and thus embed the potential for systemic undercounting into the target specification.

The PC Closing the Gap dashboard section on Target specifications for Target 13 notes, inter alia:

Experiences of harm are likely to be under‑reported. Due to the sensitive nature of the questions, responses were not compulsory, and a person may have chosen not to answer some or any of the questions.

The physical and threatened physical harm data collected in the 2018–19 NATSIHS is not comparable to other ABS data sources collecting similar data, including data from: the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey; the General Social Survey; the Personal Safety Survey; or, Recorded Crime – Victims.

And also, in relation to Future Reporting:

Future reporting will seek to include the following additional disaggregations: remoteness areas and other small geographic areas (where available); disability status; gender; age; and Indigenous status.

Yet there appears to be no progress whatsoever in measuring the target trajectory, let alone updated disaggregation. Importantly, the PC dashboard also notes that comparable data on non‑Indigenous people is currently not available. Given that the problems with the target specification mean that the benchmark data points are essentially meaningless, this is perhaps not surprising.

The FDSV Summary on the AIHW website (updated July 2025) reports (link here) the following data on mainstream domestic and family violence:

Results from the 2021–22 PSS showed that an estimated 3.8 million Australian adults (20% of the population) reported experiencing physical and/or sexual family and domestic violence since the age of 15. It is estimated that of all Australian adults:

·         11.3% (2.2 million) had experienced violence from a partner (current or previous cohabiting)

·         5.9% (1.1 million) had experienced violence from a boyfriend, girlfriend or date

·         7.0% (1.4 million) had experienced violence from another family member (ABS 2023c).

Clearly this is substantial issue across all demographic segments of Australian society. The AIHW notes (link here) that:

Comparable national data are not available to compare the prevalence of FDV among different population groups.

This may be a deliberate policy by ABS and AIHW to avoid the potential misuse of such data to typecast and/or demonise ethnic groups in Australia. It does mean however that the fundamental conceptual basis of ‘closing the gap’, namely decreasing the variation in rates of domestic violence between mainstream population and First Nations populations cannot be applied to the issue of domestic violence.

There is a strong sense from the AIWH and ABS discussion of family violence that the rate of Indigenous family violence is higher than the rate in the mainstream. Yet there is no direct data available. One way to get a better sense of this is to consider national homicide rates. Intuitively, homicide rates are a function of numerous factors, but one of the obvious factors would be rates of family violence. Thus, by looking at the extreme outcomes of family violence, we can get a sense of the comparative significance of family violence within Indigenous and non-Indigenous contexts.

The Australian Institute of Criminology report Homicide in Australia 2023–24: Statistical Report 53 (link here) reports 55 intimate partner homicides nationally of which 46 were women (page 11) in 2023-24. The following extracts have been selected to shine more light on the potential significance for comparative rates of family violence, and bold text added for emphasis. The authors note (page 11):

The [national] female intimate partner homicide rate in 2023–24 was 0.43 per 100,000 female population aged 18 years and over. This is a marked increase from the rate of 0.32 per 100,000 recorded in 2022–23 and the second highest rate of female intimate partner homicide in the last 10 years.

In terms of geographic location, they note (page 14):

Excluding Western Australia, the homicide rate for incidents in regional and remote areas exceeded the national incident rate for 2023–24 (1.08 and 3.51 per 100,000 respectively vs 0.98 per 100,000), while the rate of incidents in major cities was lower than the national rate (0.77 per 100,000) [emphasis added].

In terms of Indigenous status (page 20):

Of the 277 homicide victims in 2023–24, 44 (16%) were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and 226 (82%) were non-Indigenous (see Table 13) ….. Between 1989–90 and 2023–24, 14 percent (n=1,407) of homicide victims were Indigenous and 85 percent (n=8,637) were non-Indigenous

In relation to Indigenous victims (page 24):

The homicide victimisation rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in 2023–24 was 4.31 per 100,000 relevant population (see Table 17), a decrease from the rate of 5.36 per 100,000 recorded in 2022–23.

On page 26:

Around two-thirds of Indigenous female victims from cleared incidents were killed by an intimate partner (64%, n=9; see Table 20), almost double the proportion of Indigenous women killed by an intimate partner in 2022–23 (38%, n=5). Between 1989–90 and 2023–24, over two‑thirds of Indigenous women victims of homicide were killed by a current or former intimate partner (69%, n=337). In 2023–24, Indigenous women experienced an intimate partner homicide victimisation rate seven times greater than the rate for all Australian women (2.84 per 100,000 relevant population vs 0.43 per 100,000 respectively).

In relation to non-Indigenous victims (page 27), the authors note:

The homicide victimisation rate of non-Indigenous Australians was 0.88 per 100,000 (see Table 22), an increase from the rate of 0.74 per 100,000 recorded in 2022–23.

In relation to offenders, the authors note inter alia:

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander homicide offender rate in 2023–24 was 6.87 per 100,000 relevant population). Males comprised 78 percent of Indigenous homicide offenders (n=43) with an offender rate of 10.80 per 100,000. A fifth of Indigenous offenders were female (22%, n=12) with an offender rate of 2.99 per 100,000 (page 37).

Two-thirds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander [primary homicide offenders] … and 46 percent… of non‑Indigenous primary homicide offenders (excluding New South Wales) had a known history of domestic and family violence (page 44).

The AIC evidence that Indigenous female homicides occur at much higher rate than in the mainstream is consistent with the hypothesis that there is a very strong correlation between prior domestic violence and later homicides. While every homicide is a tragedy, my purpose here is to focus on family violence and the strong suggestions that it occurs as much higher rates within Indigenous households than mainstream households. The gap exists; we just do not know its depth and width.

Given that the current Closing the Gap target 13 is both only intermittently measurable, likely to be grossly under-reported, and deeply flawed conceptually, there is  an overwhelming case for the parties to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap to revise it into a form that both reflects the lived reality of Indigenous people’s lives and which allows progress or regression to be measured so that the results of government efforts to reduce the enormous adverse impact of family violence on Indigenous women and children will be transparent.

Last week, the Australian Government’s Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission handed down its Yearly Report to Parliament (link here). The report includes a number of recommendations relevant to First Nations (Recommendations 11, 12, 15, 1617 and 18). The report identifies the data shortcomings related to Closing the Gap target 13 but doesn’t criticise its inherent limitations as a policy target. It mentions some extraordinary statistics, for example, that in 2023-24, Indigenous women were 27 times more likely to be hospitalised for family violence than non-Indigenous women (page 33). Yet despite a detailed account of the issues confronting Indigenous families (pages 78 to 89), its recommendations were bound up in process: the establishment of more advisory bodies, more funding, and commitments to work with organisations implementing various action plans and the like. In short, more of the same.

While the DFSV Commission is clearly well-intentioned, there was no cut through policy agenda proposed despite the discussion appearing in a section headlined Priority Areas for Action. There was minimal discussion of the role of alcohol and drugs in creating the preconditions for family violence to occur, and no discussion of the desirability of constraining access to alcohol across the community at large. To be clear, I am not suggesting that alcohol use is the only cause of family violence, but it clearly of such importance that reducing and /or constraining access to it is a necessary if not sufficient policy action in addressing the epidemic of family violence in remote Australia, and probably beyond. If the argument for doing so requires further strengthening, then its complicity in contributing to Indigenous hyper-incarceration (link here) provides a rationale in its own right for taking action.

I discussed the systemic underpinnings of the domestic violence crisis in remote Australia in an earlier post this year (link here). That post argued that the domestic violence crisis in the NT is a symptom of a wider crisis, and that alcohol is a key element of that. In an even earlier post from 2023 discussing the withdrawal of alcohol controls  following the lapse of the Commonwealth Stronger Future legislation (link here), I pointed to the clear statistical links between alcohol and domestic violence:

To take just one data point, alcohol related domestic violence assault offences spiked in Alice Springs, Katherine, and outside major centres in the 12 months to March 2023 (link here). The only location where there was a decline in these offences was in Darwin. Across the NT, there were almost 1000 extra reported assault offences over the year coinciding with the nine months of reduced [alcohol] restrictions. With the majority of NT electorates in the Darwin region, it is not difficult to develop a hypothesis for why the NT Government may have been intent on removing alcohol restrictions in the bush. In the light of the issues outlined above, the unqualified confidence of the Committee (set out in para. 3.66) in the capacity and political willingness of the NTG to manage alcohol related harm astounds me. [note: the hyperlink above is to a web page that has been updated since 2023]

While alcohol is likely a key driver of the high rates of domestic violence across remote Australia (and possible more broadly) it may not be the only driver. Nevertheless, I suggest that in the absence of greater controls, domestic violence and other social dysfunction will continue unabated, and in turn this will open the flood gates for more punitive social and economic policies.

The deeper problem of course is that governments are adept at creating policy silos, commissions, action plans and advisory committees that provide a defensive fig leaf against criticism when some egregious event hits the headlines but are content to do nothing to address systemic issues facing the most disadvantaged members of the Australian community. The fact that we allow governments to pursue these fake strategies without holding them to account makes all of us complicit in creating and sustaining the existence of the conditions that engender violence against women and children.

Summing up, I see two specific policy opportunities which would make a tangible and substantive positive impact on the family violence crisis engulfing remote communities (and likely on communities beyond remote Australia). First, revise and reframe Target 13 in the Closing the Gap policy framework to replace the current unworkable and deeply flawed target with a target that is measurable and reflects the real world. Second, initiate a comprehensive policy shift based on the policy approaches recommended by experts and the World Health Organisation (WHO) to constrain and reduce unfettered access to alcohol in communities and regional towns (and ideally major cities). The adverse health impacts of alcohol use are well known, and the WHO now advises (link here):

There is no form of alcohol consumption that is risk-free. Even low levels of alcohol consumption carry some risks and can cause harm.

While the politics of controlling access to alcohol induced harm, and the consequential impacts such as family violence, are challenging, the objective case for doing so requires governments to take action even without considering the wider individual and societal costs of dealing with the fallout. These wider costs include the adverse impacts on the life opportunities of children born into families affected by alcohol abuse, family violence and whose parents are incarcerated, and the economic costs for taxpayers of excessive hospitalisations, and avoidable incarceration. Finally, what does it say about us as a nation when we can adopt without apparent remorse policies that create so much pain and harm. That truly is an abuse of our democratic power.

 

6 November 2025