The Productivity Commission and Closing the Gap: a footnote in history?

                                                 Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

Troilus and Cressida, Act three, Scene three

 

Summary

This post covers a lot of ground, so I have decided to include an upfront summary which provides a high-level roadmap of the key arguments. Last week the Treasurer issued terms of reference for the Productivity Commission's second triennial review of Closing the Gap. On closer reading, those directions steer the Commission back towards refining the existing framework rather than considering why the Closing the Gap framework isn't working. Federal, state and territory governments have a poor record of translating their formal agreement to previous review recommendations into action. After almost a quarter century, the Closing the Gap Framework is looking tired and vulnerable, and community support is fading. In my estimation, the forthcoming Review is likely the last opportunity to revitalise and refocus the institutional architecture that governs Closing the Gap before community sentiment turns against it. If the opportunity is not taken, the National Agreement will be increasingly vulnerable to abolition. This will require the Commission to broaden its focus and undertake a hard-headed strategic and structural reconsideration that current circumstances require.

 

Background

This post focusses primarily on the role of the Productivity Commission (the Commission) in relation to the oversight and administration of the Closing the Gap process. The Productivity Commission has responsibility for producing the Closing the Gap Information Repository, which tracks progress against the 19 socio-economic targets and four Priority Reforms agreed in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap (link here). Under the National Agreement (link here), the Commission is also responsible for undertaking a triennial review of progress (see clauses 121–124). An important reason for ensuring strong analytical clarity in the Commission’s review derives from the reality that there is at least an appearance of conflict between the Commissions role as administrator of the target metrics and its role as an independent reviewer.

 

The terms of reference

The Commonwealth Government has announced the terms of reference for the Productivity Commission's second triennial review. The review is scheduled to be finalised by the end of 2027. According to Treasurer Chalmers and Minister McCarthy's joint media release (link here), the Commission will assess the outcomes, effectiveness and impact of measures by all governments and the Coalition of Peaks against the targets, and has been asked to complete a more explicit examination of funding, investment practices and community-controlled sector resourcing — including whether government expenditure is aligned with, and supporting, the Priority Reforms.

 

The review web page (link here) frames it this way:

Every three years, the Productivity Commission is required to independently review how parties to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap are progressing towards their commitments. This is the PC's second review. We will focus on what's working and why, and what can be done differently to achieve meaningful change.

 

The Terms of Reference issued by the Treasurer state, inter alia:

Background

… The review will provide an analysis of progress on Closing the Gap against the priority reforms, targets, indicators and trajectories, and examine the factors contributing to progress, including by drawing on evaluation and other evidence. Parties have committed to undertaking actions if the review indicates that achievement of any of the targets that are set out in the Agreement is not on track.

 

Scope of the review

The review will assess how effectively the Agreement is supporting improved life outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In undertaking the review, the Productivity Commission should:

·         Have regard to all aspects of the Agreement and consider the progress, implementation efforts and annual reports of all parties, including jurisdictional progress by the Commonwealth and states and territories

·         Assess progress against the four Priority Reform areas and 17 socioeconomic outcomes [sic — the Agreement specifies 19 targets], including identifying successful approaches, partnerships and delivery models that have demonstrated positive impact

·         Draw on available evidence and evaluation findings, to assess impact, deliverables and outcomes, and progress towards developing measures for the Priority Reforms targets and indicators and outstanding data under socioeconomic targets

·         Assess whether commitments under the Agreement that relate to prioritising and reporting on funding and resourcing to First Nations community-controlled sectors are being met, and whether they are driving changes in the way investments are made and improved outcomes against the Priority Reforms

·         Assess whether new and existing funding – both dedicated and mainstream – is being effectively mobilised to achieve the objectives of the Agreement. 

The review is to have regard to and complement – not duplicate – the previous findings of the first Productivity Commission review of progress on the National Agreement, published on 7 January 2024, and the Independent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led Review, published on 21 June 2025.

 The Productivity Commission should provide recommendations on how to improve, hasten and strengthen implementation of existing commitments in the Agreement. Where necessary to support implementation of existing commitments, the Productivity Commission should provide recommendations on potential changes to the Agreement and its targets, indicators and trajectories, and on data improvements (emphasis added).

 

The terms of reference are, on the surface, reasonably comprehensive. There are some positive elements: the specific mention of the contribution of mainstream funding to shaping outcomes, and the narrow possibility left open for the Commission to recommend changes to the National Agreement — albeit given the repeated focus on ‘progress’, the subtext appears to be to nudge the Commission towards a narrow focus on incremental adjustment to targets, indicators, trajectories and data improvements. These are all potentially important, but I would argue that more structural reform is necessary.

 

Reading between the lines

Close reading of the terms of reference raises a number of issues that are worth contemplating and may prefigure the approach the Government expects the Commission to pursue:

·         The Treasurer is at pains to avoid mentioning failure, and the repetitive use of the word "progress" continuously reinforces the ‘strength-based’ approach that infused the initial selection and framing of the targets by governments (and it must be said the Coalition of Peaks).

·         The focus is primarily on doubling down on the current framework and, ostensibly, on how best to refine it and make it work better.

·         The Treasurer sidesteps the elephant in the room: the failure to make progress against virtually all targets (especially in relation to remote regions where outcomes are much more dire than the national outcomes), and — more importantly — the adequacy (in terms of timely and tangible outcomes) of governments' own responses to the two previous reviews, most of all the first Commission Review.

·         The focus on funding has been left vague, and thus open to misinterpretation. The Ministers’ media release appears to make clear in relation to the ‘explicit examination of funding, investment practices and community-controlled sector resourcing’ (by referencing alignment with the Priority Reforms) that the intention is to nudge the Commission towards recommending funding shift from non-Indigenous private sector and NGO providers to community-controlled organisations — a strong nod to the Coalition of Peaks' primary agenda. However, it can equally be read as a call for more rigorous assessment of funding efficacy more generally. The Australian headlined its report of the announcement of the Terms of Reference on 29 August 2026 as ‘Review of Indigenous Funding: Is pouring cash into the Gap effective?’ (paywalled).

 

The tax expenditure blind spot

One important but invariably overlooked mainstream funding issue relates to the inequitable distribution of mainstream ‘tax expenditures’.  The Terms of Reference refer to ‘funding’, but tax expenditures are just as relevant to whether government support for Closing the Gap is effective. Take one obvious example: the benefits available to homeowners in our tax system are systemically biased towards non-Indigenous homeowners (link here). The Capital Gains Tax exemption on the sale of a primary residence alone is estimated by Treasury to cost the Commonwealth $66 billion in 2026–27, rising to $78.5 billion in 2028–29 (see exemptions E7 and E8, 2025–26 Tax Expenditures and Insights Statement, p.166: (link here). According to 2021 Census data, 42% of Indigenous households own their own home, compared to 67% of all Australians (link here). It follows that these benefits flow disproportionately to non-Indigenous homeowners.

 

While I accept that the language in the Terms of Reference's speaks of ‘funding’ and ‘investment’ rather than the tax system, the tax system is exactly the kind of ‘mainstream’ lever the Terms of Reference professes an interest in ("whether new and existing funding – both dedicated and mainstream – is being effectively mobilised"), and it bears directly on housing and economic outcomes that sit squarely within the socioeconomic targets. A serious assessment of whether mainstream expenditure is ‘effectively mobilised’ toward Closing the Gap objectives can't extend merely to direct program spending and ignore the significant sums the tax system silently redirects away from the people the Agreement is meant to benefit.

 

The missing 2031 endpoint

There is no term of reference raising directly the rapidly approaching endpoint for most of the targets in 2031. This is likely to be the last review before a post-2031 policy framework for the National Agreement, its targets and its priority reforms would need to be in place if there is not to be a temporal gap in the frameworks implementation. This makes the absence of a specific mention in the Terms of Reference potentially problematic.

 

Governments' record on implementing previous reviews

Perhaps the most egregious absence in the terms of reference is any reference to assessing the adequacy of governments' implementation of their own unanimously positive responses to the previous reviews under the National Agreement, both formal and informal.

 

In relation to the first Commission review, Joint Council met in July 2024 and noted (link here):

Joint Council welcomed the Productivity Commission's first Three-Yearly Review of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap … Halfway through the National Agreement key structures and processes have been established. But Joint Council agreed more needs to be done to deliver on the ground and in communities. Joint Council agreed to the four key recommendations of the Review and to 15 of the 16 recommended actions…

 

Given that governments agreed to the recommendations, and yet the rate of progress is in reverse virtually across the board, the obvious questions are: were the recommendations not implemented? Were they inadequately framed by the Commission review team in the first place? Or both? Hopefully the forthcoming Review will enlighten us.

 

The subsequent record is a case study in process overwhelming substance. At the June 2025 meeting, Joint Council noted the findings of the Independent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led Review and undertook to ‘formally respond to the Report at their meeting in November 2025.’ At the November 2025 meeting, it agreed instead to ‘prioritise finalisation of its response by the end of February 2026.’ By the following meeting in May 2026, it had settled on implementing ‘11 Partnership Actions,’ (which are in fact agreements to cooperate, hardly actions) with members ‘committed to working through remaining Partnership Actions to find an agreed approach … as soon as possible.’ The Joint Council's formal response to the January 2024 Commission review was eventually published in June 2025 (link here), and its response to the subsequent Independent Review in May 2026 (link here).

 

I haven't had time or inclination to analyse these documents in detail, but it's worth noting that while governments agreed unanimously to all but one of the Commission's recommendations, the proposed implementation of each in these formal responses is invariably framed in terms of process rather than tangible action. The Commission might have made more action-oriented, action-limited recommendations; but the responsibility for what transpired ultimately lies with governments.

 

The process problem

 

My overarching assessment is that the whole business of responding to, and then acting upon, the various statutory reviews required by the Closing the Gap Framework is both extraordinarily slow and overburdened with process. Governments can manage complex processes, albeit often at a snail's pace, but most external interests and the public at large have limited capacity to follow what is being decided (or not) when it extends over years. The effect is to prioritise torpidity and lethargy as guiding principles for how business is done. I should note at this point that my earlier submissions related to the first review (see below for links) made this argument at much greater length. The more important question — whether recommendations will make a substantive difference, and whether they will actually be implemented — gets lost in the mists of that process. Hopefully the current review will both get to the bottom of this snail-like process and recommend radical simplification, but as noted above, the current Terms of Reference do not acknowledge this issue and do not encourage such an analysis.  

 

While this process of incessant review — two multi-year reviews every three years, followed by a multi-year process of responding to their recommendations — grinds on, governments remain relatively immune to any criticism that they aren't acting, because they can always point to an ongoing review. This mire of pervasive process, underpinned by a rolling negotiation between nine jurisdictions and the Indigenous Peaks, seemingly designed to produce lowest common denominator outcomes, virtually ensures substantive and visionary reform will never emerge.

 

Again, hopefully the Commission's forthcoming review will cut through and make clear-cut recommendations that create the preconditions for future reform — because without that, the prospects for the future viability of the Closing the Gap framework are dire.

 

What the Commission's own members have said

It's worth reflecting on the perspective the Commission itself brings to these two roles — and the place to start is how its members describe them publicly.

 

In an August 2023 speech to the National Press Club titled Reflections on Productivity, Public Policy, and Challenges Associated with Closing the Gap (link here), outgoing Chair Michael Brennan spoke at length about the Commission's role. Two lines stand out:

Only 4 of the 17 targets set out in the Agreement are on track to be met at this early stage. Others are going in the wrong direction, like the rate of incarceration … It was never clear what governments felt they were putting in place that would reverse this trend.

and, on the labyrinthian impact of the 2,000-plus implementation actions in play at any one time across the nine jurisdictions:

Granted, governments are busy … But this busy-ness is, in many ways, just business as usual.

 

In her May 2024 Stretton Oration (link here), new Chair Danielle Wood gave a masterful summary of income and wealth inequality in Australia (not that Indigenous disadvantage is entirely encompassed by these metrics), pointing to health and education, welfare supports, minimum wage settings and full employment policy as levers for entrenched disadvantage, while correctly noting that particular levers must be context-specific. Indigenous Australians were not, as far as I can tell, explicitly mentioned.

 

In August 2024, then-Commissioner Natalie Siegel-Brown put the data more starkly (link here):

Another five of the targets are improving but not on track to be met, one has not progressed at all, and four targets are actually going backwards … government performance on reducing rates of removal of children from their families, adult imprisonment, children in detention and suicide is even worse than when we started measuring … this coincides with some states knowingly contravening their commitments under the Agreement.

 

In a November 2024 speech (link here), Commissioner Wood described the first Review's consultation with Indigenous communities as central to its ‘success’. Given the dismal outcomes to date, and the slow progress in implementing the Commission’s recommendations, the assertion of ‘success’ appears misguided and Panglossian.

 

The two Commissioners now responsible for the current Review, Selwyn Button and Angela Jackson, struck a similarly optimistic note in an article earlier this year (link here). In August 2025, Commissioner Button wrote an op-ed in the AFR (link here) extolling community control as the key to closing the gap. His argument downplayed the impact of FASD by pointing to successful community-led initiatives such as had taken place in Fitzroy Crossing, and, on alcohol, cited national data against what he termed "lazy stereotypes." Yet the outcomes on the ground continue to take a terrible toll (link here: my own analysis, not official data), and "strength-based" arguments risk taking pressure off governments to strengthen controls on access to alcohol and other harmful substances for vulnerable remote residents. Community control is arguably a necessary contributor to achieving many of the Closing the Gap targets, but (especially at the macro-level) it is not sufficient on its own; that control must translate into effective and sustainable policy which increasingly encompasses engagement with other interest groups, negotiation and trade-offs with multiple levels of government, effective advocacy and sustained cohesion so as to resist the countervailing efforts of governments and third parties to undermine Indigenous voices.

 

There is clearly a place for rigorous monitoring and data contextualisation, but it's far from clear the Commission has been applying that rigour in the Indigenous policy space. Economist and former Commission employee Cathal Leslie has published a number of op-eds on Closing the Gap in the AFR (link here: paywall) one of which apparently prompting Commissioner Button's article above, another on 10 August 2026 pointing to methodological issues in the Commission's target metrics and to a critical ANAO report and a commissioned ANU report. Leslie's central point is the Commission's downplaying of demographic change in the national Indigenous population — the statistically significant rise in people self-identifying as Indigenous — and he concludes that the Commission has chosen to present statistics it knows cannot be believed, giving ‘cover to failing policies by telling the country that life for Indigenous children is better than it is.’ While I am not privy to the Commission’s internal processes, and so don’t presume to take one side or the other, the methodological and data issues raised by Cathal in a credible national newspaper deserve to be taken seriously by the Commission in its substantive analysis to be published in the forthcoming review.  

 

Déjà vu all over again

The fundamental problem with the terms of reference, and with the Commission's recent signalling of its likely approach, is that it is, to borrow from Yogi Berra, ‘a case of déjà vu all over again.’

 

In December 2022, following a call for submissions to the first three-year review, I submitted a nine-page submission to the Commission (link here). In August 2023, I published a blog post critiquing the Commission's draft report (link here). In September 2023, I submitted a further response (link here), attaching an outline of a potential alternative framework for Closing the Gap. All three failed to gain obvious traction. Rereading them today, I think they made a very strong case then and still do. The concluding paragraphs of the 2023 post included:

 

There is no recognition that the current design architecture for the agreement, while incomplete and thus subject to ongoing remedial work, is simultaneously over-designed and in need of radical simplification. As presently configured, it guarantees that the Coalition of Peaks will be wading through bureaucratic sludge for the next ten years … and ensures that the probability of the national agreement imploding under the weight of its accumulated complexity is high and bound to grow. Proactive reform is preferable to stasis followed by abolition.

 

The bottom line … is that the six recommendations of the draft review … would not make any substantive difference to the nation's progress on closing the gap within five or even ten years. They are an amalgam of doubling down on the current hyper-complexity of the policy architecture along with a hefty dose of blind faith in the bureaucratic leadership of the nation. Did the robodebt royal commission not make any impression at all on the PC?

 

My recommendation for the Commonwealth Government remains the same: issue the Commission with revised terms of reference, and ask it to (a) estimate the cost of addressing entrenched Indigenous inequality; (b) map out a realistic timeframe and strategy for achieving that objective; (c) undertake a more fundamental analysis of the current status of the Closing the Gap architecture; and (d) provide options for radically simplifying the structure and design of that architecture while retaining the four priority reforms. And, for good measure, keep it to fifty pages. Such a report could create a pathway for the Commonwealth Government, which in reality and despite its dissembling, retains primary responsibility for the effectiveness and long term viability of the National Agreement, to engage meaningfully with Indigenous interests and the states and territories.

 

The bottom line

The Productivity Commission has an admirable and long record of real and forthright independence, most recently on the GST and fiscal equalisation. What's needed now is hard-headed policy analysis focused on making a tangible difference to the lives of the most disadvantaged Australians within a finite period. The Commission is not primarily responsible for the poor outcomes to date, but its inability so far to identify a feasible, constructive strategic pathway forward for the National Agreement and its constituent parties has been a major contributor to letting governments evade real accountability to the public and to First Nations.

 

If it were up to me, I would favour narrowing the focus of the National Agreement to the five issues identified by Coalition of Peaks Lead Convenor Ms Donnella Mills who in her comments in response to the Terms of Reference (link here) argued inter alia:

Positive outcomes are achieved when governments have genuinely partnered with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community‑controlled organisations, it is now up to all governments to demonstrate and lead the change our people have said is needed to shift the dial in areas of health, housing, education, employment and justice (emphasis added).

I would add to those proposed priorities the adoption of a robust needs-based funding criterion to ensure that geographic areas or program sectors without access to appropriate mainstream program equivalents are prioritised.

 

It's now almost a quarter of a century since the Rudd Government adopted the Closing the Gap agenda. The patchy progress that has been achieved owes more to wider economic and demographic shifts than to specific policy reform, and in many key areas — especially remote Australia — progress in many respects has been negative. Without a new approach, which in my view will only emerge if the Commission bites the bullet, the National Agreement, which I still see as pathbreaking reform of historic significance, will be vulnerable to abolition. Without a sense across the breadth of mainstream Australia that Closing the Gap is working, the framework will lose the broad-based political support necessary for its ongoing survival.

 

The work of the forthcoming Review, and its ability to persuade governments to pursue substantive reform, may well be the last real opportunity to ensure the National Agreement and Closing the Gap does not go the way of the NAC, the NACC, ATSIC and the Voice to Parliament, and becomes a mere footnote in the history of the ongoing struggle for inclusion within the nation’s institutional architecture by First Nations citizens. That would be a tragedy for First Nations, and for the nation.

 

1 September 2026

 

This post has benefited from editorial assistance from Claude Sonnet 5. The text and arguments are entirely my own.

 

Indigenous hyper-incarceration: a remote problem?

 

Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?

Macbeth, Act one, Scene three.

 

Yesterday, I read an important and I suggest ‘must-read’ assessment of the state of carceral policy in Australia. Published in The Conversation (link here), and titled Prisons don’t create safer communities, so why is Australia spending billions on building them? The article is co-authored by a disciplinary diverse team of academics headed by Emma Russell from La Trobe University. The article summarises available data by jurisdiction and while the focus is on the mainstream, it refers in passing to Indigenous incarceration rates which have been skyrocketing across the nation.

One data point quoted stood out:

As of January, the Northern Territory hit a grim milestone. More than 1% of the territory’s total population is now incarcerated in adult prison.

This was supplemented with an extraordinary graph titled Percentage of the Population in Adult Prison, showing the incarceration rates for each Australian jurisdiction since 1860. What jumps off the page is the stratospheric growth in incarceration rates in the NT, rising from 0.22 % in 1980 to 0.66 % in 2020, and then to 1.03% in 2025. No other jurisdiction records any such increase, though virtually all jurisdictions have recorded close to a doubling in their incarceration rates off a low base over the same period.

The ABS released data on incarceration rates on 19 December 2025 (link here). The report a national prison population of 44,403 persons on 30 June 2024. Of these, 15,871 were Indigenous. The Indigenous prison population increased by an extraordinary 2019 persons or 15% over the previous year.

The remote angle

While The Conversation article is extraordinarily valuable, it strikes me that it underplays the role that the hyper-incarceration of remote Indigenous people is playing in driving the rise in incarceration rates. The article points to changes to policy for these trends (longer prison sentences and less access to bail) and cites Andrew Leigh’s 2020 article The Second Convict Age: Explaining the Return of Mass Imprisonment in Australia in the Economic Record (link here). The abstract to Leigh’s article states, inter alia:

Fully 2.5 per cent of Indigenous adults are incarcerated (2,481 prisoners per 100,000 adults), a higher share than among African-Americans. The recent increase in the Australian prison population does not seem to be due to crime rates, which have mostly declined over the past generation. Instead, higher reporting rates, stricter policing practices, tougher sentencing laws, and more stringent bail laws appear to be the main drivers of Australia's growing prison population.

These reasons are fine as far as they go, but where are these stricter policies being applied, and why? The answers to these questions are required to find the appropriate policy responses.

My hypothesis is that the accelerating growth in incarceration rates is associated with more punitive approaches by governments to criminal behaviours in remote regions, which are themselves a response to increasing dysfunction associated with alcohol and drug abuse, and longstanding lack of investment by governments in finding substantive policy solutions. To be clear, social dysfunction is an institutional affliction impacting Indigenous communities, but its causes can be traced to the long-standing failure of governments of all persuasions to establish and maintain the institutional and economic frameworks required to ensure social cohesion is guaranteed. Intuitively, it seems clear that the causal relationship between social dysfunction and alcohol and drug abuse goes in both directions; that it they are mutually reinforcing.

In the NT, according to an NT Treasury paper (link here), in 2021, 74.6% of the NT Aboriginal population resided in remote or very remote locations. The Aboriginal population of the NT comprises around 30 % of the NT total population of just over 250,000.

Unfortunately, while the Productivity Commission Closing the Gap Information Repository / data dashboard includes a number of disaggregations in its reporting on Target 10 related to over-representation in the criminal justice system (link here), the dashboard does not record the geographical status of prisoners and/or arrests leading to imprisonment. Nor does it record any information related to the association or role of alcohol or drugs in the crimes leading to incarceration. Nor does the ABS publish this data. We are left to extrapolate pending some detailed demographic research by academic criminologists or geographers…

In an earlier post titled The drivers of stratospheric rates of Indigenous incarceration (link here), I spent some time discussing the recent research report by Don Weatherburn, Michael Doyle, Tegan Weatherall and Joanna Wang titled Towards a theory of Indigenous contact with the criminal justice system (link here).

The following paragraph from the Executive summary of the Weatherburn et al paper supports my hypothesis:

The strongest risk factor is having used illicit drugs and alcohol over the preceding 12 months, which increases the marginal risk of arrest by 14 percentage points…The strongest protective factor is school completion, which reduces the risk of arrest by 7.9 percentage points….

According to the ABS (link here) the total NT prison population on 30 June 2024 was 2284. Of these, 2023, or 88.5%, were Indigenous. The extraordinary increase in NT incarceration rates is almost entirely Indigenous, and three quarter of the NT Aboriginal population reside in remote or very remote locations. It seems clear that Indigenous hyper-incarceration is predominantly a remote issue in the NT. Based on my experience of some decades, and the anecdotal media reports on social dysfunction in remote communities in WA, SA, and Qld, it seems likely that similar trends will be found to exist in these jurisdictions. The only reason they are not apparent is that the Indigenous populations of these states is proportionately much lower than in the NT.

The other gap in The Conversation article (which flows perhaps from the line of argument above) is that role of alcohol or drug abuse in driving criminal behaviour particularly in remote regions. There have been longstanding calls by Western Australian police for alcohol controls in remote regions of WA (link here), and the debate over alcohol controls in the NT has been in play for decades. I don’t propose to recapitulate the case on the damaging impacts of alcohol and the case for stronger policy action on the availability of alcohol in remote regions, but will merely point readers to some previous posts on this blog (link here; link here; link here; link here; link here; link here; link here; link here; and link here).

Policy Solutions

While there is undoubtedly a case for much greater investment in developing alternatives to incarceration both in mainstream contexts and in relation to Indigenous incarceration across the whole nation as advocated by the extraordinary and energetic work of the Justice Reform Initiative (link here), reversing the dire state of social dysfunction across remote Australia is in my view the only way to address the extreme hyper-incarceration of Aboriginal people.

I am under no illusions that the political vibe nationally has taken a more punitive turn and like the authors of the Conversation article, I see this as deeply counterproductive. Reversing the cataclysm confronting remote communities will require sustained political vision and commitment, and a substantive focus on expanding and accelerating some clear policy priorities.

The policy solutions outlined by Don Weatherburn and his co-authors in their Institute of Criminology research paper referenced above were framed as follows:

Measures to reduce illicit drug and alcohol use, improve school retention and improve economic outcomes for Indigenous Australians are essential if Australia is to achieve any long term reduction in the scale of Indigenous over-representation in prison.

I wholeheartedly agree.

Yet each of these three identified actions, are themselves comprised of assemblages of complex policy measures involving legislative and/or regulatory changes, access to adequate and increased funding, and most importantly, an institutional structure that can operate at scale, and is guaranteed to be sustained over at least a decade. To take an example of a recent national priority, AUKUS, each of these elements have been provided for. Unfortunately, the operation of our day-to-day political system, especially in relation to an issue that is invariably defined as the responsibility of the states, does not normally guarantee that these essential elements are provided for. I will repeat this point: our democratic politics as usual is not working to fix this issue.

Below I set out one potential model designed to ensure progress is made in reversing the worsening crisis of Indigenous hyper-incarceration. The details are less important that its description of the level and intensity of action that would in my view be required to drive real change.

As the issue of hyper-incarceration has bedevilled the nation for decades, it is clear that new approaches and ways of operating are required. The first, and most obvious, is that the issue of Indigenous over-representation in our prisons should be made, substantively and not merely rhetorically, a national priority. To this end, the Commonwealth should step up and exercise its constitutional powers granted in the 1967 referendum to develop and drive a truly national policy framework on Indigenous incarceration.

Second, for the purposes of delivering the necessary policy and program reform initiatives to underpin the incarceration reform agenda, the Commonwealth should carve out notional jurisdiction across remote northern and remote Australia and drive a comprehensive and coordinated reconceptualisation of core service delivery across remote communities and their associated service.

A core element would be the establishment of a legislated ten-year policy framework providing for ministerial regulations to implement key reforms, and the establishment of a small five-person Commission comprised of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous members to develop policy and program recommendations to apply across remote Australia. The Commission should aim to work cooperatively with existing bodies (state and local governments, Commonwealth agencies, community organisations, landowners) to drive innovative reforms and to recommend policy and program changes to governments at all levels. Its recommendations should be public and would need to be agreed and implemented by governments. The Commission’s legislated powers and functions would be such as to ensure that Commonwealth agencies and states and territories alike would be required to cooperate and to respond to recommendations within three months.

Such a Commission would not be required to delve into each and every policy issue but should be statutorily required to decide which issues are most relevant to the continuation of dysfunction and to focus on identifying reform strategies for the Commonwealth to implement, hopefully in conjunction with existing service delivery institutions. Obvious areas for attention would include controls on the availability of alcohol across remote Australia; upgrades to educations systems and infrastructure, and the necessity or significant expansion of subsidised remote employment focussed on community needs such as land care, ranger programs, appropriate policing models, disability support, and community maintenance.  A key assumption of this model is that the Commonwealth should be responsible for outcomes, and for bringing the states and territories to the table.

Third, a parallel structure to the remote Commission, perhaps relying more on the National Coalition of Indigenous Peaks, should be developed for addressing the challenges of reversing Indigenous incarceration rates in regional and urban areas of the nation.

Conclusion

The extraordinary levels of Indigenous hyper-incarceration are a national disgrace and are causing untold and ongoing harm to myriad Indigenous families across the nation. There are no short-term solutions, but it is clear that the punitive approaches being pursued by jurisdictions right across the nation will not be successful in preventing recidivism and repeat offending, will be extraordinarily expensive for taxpayers, will likely weaken social cohesion, and are causing permanent emotional and psychological damage to hundreds of thousands of Indigenous family members.

It is the case that the process of colonisation turned the world upside down for Indigenous people across the nation, and the people of remote Australia are generations closer to that social cataclysm.

Mainstream Australia cannot undo those social processes, and the world has moved on for all Australians. However, given the clear evidence of deep dysfunction arising from those social processes that were neither chosen nor desired by Indigenous people, and the impacts those changes inevitably imposed and continues to impose, the nation and its policy elites must be prepared to consider policy options that turn established modes of policy formulation upside down. Not to do so would amount to an extraordinary admission of national policy failure. Indigenous incarceration is just one of the impacts that arise from widespread social and economic dysfunction across remote Australia and woven through pockets of urban and regional Australia.

To allow this level of dysfunction to emerge, to grow and develop, and to persist as if it is somehow outside the nation’s field of vision is both a political failure and an indictment on the moral underpinnings of our nation.

 

24 January 2025

 

A shaft of sunlight: the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee 2024 Report

                                                 Men judge by the complexion of the sky

The state and inclination of the day…

King Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2.

 

The 2024 Report of the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee (link here) chaired by Jenny Macklin was released on 26 April 2024, some two weeks before the 2024 Budget is due to be delivered. In my view, this is an excellent report, extremely well argued, quite technical at times (reflecting a bias towards identifying the evidence for its recommendations), and as one might expect, encompassing an admirable mix of ambition and pragmatism.

 

The report makes 22 broad recommendations across the span of the social security policy domain, and identifies five policy priorities for 2024:

1. Substantially increase JobSeeker and related working age payments and improve the indexation arrangements for those payments.
2. Increase the rate of Commonwealth Rent Assistance.
3. Create a new employment services system to underpin the goal of full employment and ensure a more positive focus on supporting Australians seeking work.
4. Implement a national early childhood development system that is available to every child, beginning with abolishing the Activity Test for the Child Care Subsidy to guarantee all children access to a minimum three days of high quality early childhood education and care (ECEC).
5. Renewing the culture and practice of the social security system to support economic inclusion and wellbeing.

 

In this post I propose to point to the areas of the report, and the specific recommendations, that have salience for First Nations policy outcomes.

 

Of course, while the reports overarching focus is on mainstream policy, it must be remembered that First Nations citizens will be impacted by mainstream policies as much as indigenous specific policies, and perhaps more so.

 

There are I think three elements of the Committee’s report with particular significance for Indigenous interests.

 

The first element relates to the Committee’s discussion of the Remote Area Allowance and recommendation 4. They base their analysis on work undertaken by Francis Markham from the ANU, and which I published a post about in February (link here). In that post, I extended the argument to argue for an overhaul of the Community Development Program, an issue that the Inclusion Committee has not addressed directly but see the second element below. The Committee recommendation states:

Recommendation 4. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) or an appropriate researcher or research centre in partnership with remote communities should be funded to undertake analysis of the additional costs of living in remote areas, but the case for an immediate increase in the Remote Area Allowance (RAA) seems particularly strong.

 

This recommendation, if adopted and implemented, would lay out in detail the case for much more targeted cost of living support for remote communities, including in relation to food security, energy costs, transport costs, and rent costs. At a strategic level, it begins the process of developing an evidence base for a more comprehensive policy approach to remote Australia, an issue I have been advocating for over 25 years.

 

The second element relates to employment services reform and is perhaps the most significant of the Economic Inclusion Committee’s recommendations for First Nations interests. The recommendation states:

Recommendation 6. The Government commit to a full-scale redesign of Australia’s employment services system by adopting the recommendations in the report from the Select Committee on Workforce Australia Employment Services. As a priority the Government should: a. Finalise an implementation plan and enact necessary legislative changes in 2024. b. Commit to a full redesign of the mutual obligations and compliance settings in the Workforce Australia system that focus on building capability and confidence to support people into work, consistent with the directions outlined in the Select Committee’s report. c. Build and refine a new practice model that genuinely meets the needs of people furthest from the labour market, including through: [details omitted; refer to page 10 of the report].

 

I published a post on the Select Committee’s report last December (link here) where I spelt out the specific elements that were of relevance to First Nations interests. I recommend readers look at that post. While the Economic Inclusion Committee has not framed its discussion and recommendation on these issues as mainstream, there are enormous, embedded implications for remote Indigenous interests, particularly in the Inclusion Committee’s comment about the needs of people furthest from the labour market. The elephant in the room here is the issue of direct employment creation by the Commonwealth. The Prime Minister in his comments upon the release of the most recent Commonwealth Closing the Gap Implementation Plan described the Community Development Program (CDP) as a failure, announced (link here) the creation of the Remote Jobs and Economic Development Program, and funding for the employment of 3000 CDP participants by organisations working in remote regions. Yet the result was to leave around 27,000 CDP participants in a ‘failed program’.

 

The third element relates to First Nations Housing, and in particular building a better evidence base for assessing both need and ongoing management of housing stock. Again, this is a hugely significant policy issue for Indigenous interests, with implications for disability policy, educational outcomes, the social determinants of health, child welfare outcomes, the prevalence of domestic violence, and not least, economic inclusion. Again, while not limited to remote Australia, it has long been clear that housing need for Indigenous interests is most acute in remote regions, not least because there is a limited private market in housing provision. The Committee’s recommendation (edited) is as follows:

Recommendation 10. The Government urgently commit substantial investment to address need in public housing and homelessness for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, including maintenance and upgrades, community infrastructure and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander housing sector.

To improve the economic efficiency of investments, the Government should fund a National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Housing Data Register to improve data availability, quality and sharing… To better target existing investment, including from the Housing Australia Future Fund and Social Housing Accelerator Fund, the Government should: a. Negotiate improved performance reporting and data sharing within intergovernmental agreements and arrangements. b. Undertake rapid needs assessments of homelessness and overcrowding, maintenance, repair and community infrastructure requirements in remote hotspot areas. c. Commission a redesigned Community Housing Infrastructure Needs (CHINS)- like survey, which considers limitations of earlier iterations and subsequent advancements in data collection…

 

The import of this recommendation is that it explicitly focusses on establishing a much better and transparent evidence base for this most crucial area of policy. It will mean that Indigenous advocates such as the Coalition of Peaks and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Housing Association will have the means to make a much more persuasive argument for needs based assistance into the future.

 

The Economic Inclusion Committee report appends an excellent detailed consultancy report addressing First Nations Housing issues. That report is too detailed for me to summarise here, but I commend it to readers as an excellent summary of the state of play in relation to First Nations housing policy in Australia today.

 

Conclusion

The Economic Inclusion Committee has made an excellent contribution towards sharpening the policy agenda for First Nations interests. Clearly there are a swathe of other issues of relevance to Indigenous interests that deserve attention by the Commonwealth Government. But there are limits to what governments, and their advisers, are prepared to take on and prioritise. From my perspective, I consider that the Inclusion Committee has done an excellent job in highlighting key areas that deserve prioritisation and continuing attention. Of course, the real issue will turn on what the Commonwealth Governments response will be, and whether they allocate the intellectual and financial resources to deliver on whatever commitments they do make.

 

In any case, the publication of this report provides a shaft of bright sunlight that bodes well for the days ahead.

 

26 April 2024

Dodge dip and dive: eight ‘data points’ on remote policy

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players

As You Like It, Act two, scene seven

 

A consistent theme on this Blog has been the social, economic and environmental crisis facing remote Australia, and in particular, remote Indigenous communities (link here, link here, link here, link here and link here).

 

It is perhaps time for me to chance my arm and lay out a high level outline of a potential policy strategy along with the accompanying rationale to address this crisis, albeit one that will take time to devise and implement, and longer to gain traction. Nevertheless, the alternative is to keep muddling on, at serious and ongoing cost to the life opportunities of the 150, 000 remote Indigenous residents across Australia.

 

Before doing so, hopefully sometime in the next month, I thought I would present a random and non-prioritised assembly of key remote ‘data points’ or markers that I have been collecting over the month or so. In laying out the data points, I will add some brief contextual commentary. My point in approaching this issue in what is a deliberately adventitious way, without suggesting an order of priority, importance or significance, is to provide a sense of the breadth and interdependence of the policy challenges facing remote Australia and its residents as well as the temporal cycles that permeate this domain.

 

I am hoping readers think about the underlying implications of each data point, but also consider what it means if the data point is replicated more widely. While it is clear that not every remote location and community faces the same circumstances, it is also clear that individual data points are replicated more widely, albeit to an unknown extent, creating notional data sets. Moreover, the interactions of the totality of different notional data sets operate are not independent or constrained, but reinforce each other in ways that resist the constrained and limited policy horizons of governments and policymakers confined by self-imposed bureaucratic silos. The implication of this insight is that policy responses must also be designed and implemented as assemblages of reinforcing initiatives.

 

Remote data points

Data point one: A recent ABC news article reports that in Halls Creek in the Kimberley region of WA, school attendance at the District High School has dropped from 38 per cent in 2021 to 26 per cent last year, compared to 80 per cent across Western Australia's public schools (link here). An earlier August 2022 ABC news article (link here) reported that the Western Australian Coroner had found that poor school attendance was a common factor in the deaths [by suicide] of young people in the town between 2012 and 2016.

 

Data point two: In 2022, ANU researchers finalised an extensive 140 page report on Groote Eylandt for the Anindilyakwa Land Council titled Social Indicators and Data Governance to Support Local Decision Making in the Groote Archipelago (link here). It is worth reading in full for the contextual background. Three sets of issues from the report caught my attention for their policy implications:

The first issue relates to overcrowding: The report notes (pages 87-88) that in 2006, 39% of the community-controlled housing stock was uninhabitable ...The number of Indigenous occupied dwellings in the Archipelago as defined by the census has increased by more than 50% over the past 15 years ….The percentage of census-identified dwellings that are overcrowded declined from 49% in 2016 to 37% in 2021 (pages 87-88). My comment: What the report does not do is to explicitly draw out the policy implications of this data. Notwithstanding the improvements over the past 15 years, overcrowding is clearly a significant issue with a third of houses overcrowded. Yet clearly the substantial investment included in the now discontinued National Partnership on Remote Indigenous Housing had a positive impact. What is unclear is whether the current NT Housing program at a considerably lower level of overall investment will have the momentum to overcome the ongoing rate of housing asset deterioration (in a worsening climate) and continue to eat into the overcrowding backlog. As an aside, the ANU report does not address the quantum and allocation of mining royalties by the ALC on Groote: in many respects, Groote is unique amongst remote communities in northern Australia, and it is the major driver of royalty equivalent payments that fund the operation of all four NT Land Councils plus the ABTA. Royalty allocation decisions are an important issue on Groote as mining will not last for ever. The allocation of royalties must be directed to capital investment (including private housing investment) rather than recurrent expenditure if it is to have a lasting impact. That is an issue for separate consideration and study.

The second issue relates to health: the Report notes (page 106) that for residents of Groote Eylandt, hospitalisation rates are higher now than 20 years ago for all leading causes, except in the case of genito-urinary diseases which includes renal failure …. Other notable increases in the rate of hospitalisation have occurred for external causes and alcohol-related diseases. The latter have been much higher over the decade 2011–2020 compared to 2001– 2010 … Intentional self-harm hospitalisations have also been much higher over the past 10 years, with the rate for females double that for males. My comment: the important, but unanswered question here is what has caused these retrograde developments. It may be a reduction in the quality of health services, but my intuition is that the problem lies more in the area of the social determinants of health.

The third issue relates to education: on school attendance, the report notes that the overall attendance rate at Groote Archipelago schools (% of those enrolled attending only some of the time) has been consistently low at 40–50% since 2011. The overall attendance level (those attending >90% of the time) has been consistently very low at <10% since 2011. In effect, this means that a large share of the current generation of school aged children have missed an effective education. My comment: this is an extraordinary indictment on the NT Government and its education policies.

 

Data point three: A recent academic article on the organisational depth, robustness and footprint of political parties in remote Australia, authored by Griffith University political scientists Duncan McDonnell and Bartholomew Stanford, titled The Party on Remote Ground: Disengaging and Disappearing? (link here and link here). This research documents the weakening and extremely thin footprint of organised political parties in remote electorates such as the Barkly in the NT and the Kimberley in WA, and points to the adverse implications for democratic participation and engagement, including amongst Indigenous citizens. My comment: what the authors don’t say, but perhaps should have, is to emphasise the crucial role of political parties in shaping public policy, and the concomitant consequence that political party remote disengagement risks exacerbating the ongoing remote policy vacuum. See the discussion in my submission to the Joint Select Committee on the Voice Referendum (#65 at link here). I previously posted on the low voting turnouts in remote Australia (link here).

 

Data point four: in a recent Submission (link here) to the Standing Committee on Community Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry into the provisions of the Social Security (Administration) Amendments (Income Management Reform) Bill 2023, ANU researchers Matthew Gray and Rob Bray  used ABS and AIHW data to track Indigenous imprisonment rates in the NT over the past twenty years against non-Indigenous rates in the NT and nationally (see Figure 1) and Indigenous school attendance rates in the NT over the decade from 2009 to 2020 (Figure 4).

In relation to incarceration, they observe that compared to non-Indigenous adults, Indigenous imprisonment rates have dramatically widened since 2000, exceeding 2700 per 100, 0000 in 2020, up from just under 1000 per 100, 000 in 2000. Non-Indigenous incarceration rates have remained stable throughout these decades at about 200 per 100, 000.

In relation to school attendance, they report declining school attendance across the NT over the past decade, reaching mid sixty percent levels for remote schools and mid forty percent levels for very remote schools. To which I would add two comments: this data is consistent with the Groote statistics cited above, suggesting Groote is not an outlier; and second, the statistics in Figure 4 do not cite the most educationally significant data, namely, the proportion of students who attend 90 percent plus of the time. These data are consistent however with the extraordinary conclusion that a substantial proportion of remote Indigenous students over the past decade are missing out on an education, and there is no policy initiative on the horizon to suggest this will change over the coming decade.

 

Data point five: the Gray/Bray submission referred to above, along with a number of other submissions, comprehensively demonstrates that the continuation by the current Commonwealth Government of universal compulsory income management across remote communities in the NT lacks a robust evidence base. The submission points out that policy breaches Labor’s pre-election promises, and points to departmental efforts to ignore or not publish relevant data. My own comment on this situation is as follows: the underlying rationale for continuing this selective policy can only be a blunt and indirect attempt to limit expenditure on alcohol by remote residents in circumstances where the NT Government is incapable and unwilling to impose robust regulation of the alcohol sales across the NT. This policy is increasingly at risk of tipping into being racially discriminatory, as its status as a ‘special measure’ under the Racial Discrimination Act requires it to have a beneficial impact. Yet if the evidence does not support this, the ‘special measures’ rationale falls apart.

 

Data point six: a recent research publication by ANU researchers (led by my CAEPR colleague Bradley Riley) and representatives of two Central Australian Aboriginal organisations documented the impact of COVID on energy security amongst remote NT residents. Titled Disconnected during disruption: Energy insecurity of Indigenous Australian prepay customers during the COVID-19 pandemic (link here), the research reported that:

The risks associated with the regular de-energization of prepay households have long been overlooked by government reporting and this contributed to a lack of visibility of energy insecurity and available protections for this group during the pandemic response. In contrast to the rest of Australia, energy insecurity in the form of disconnections remained unrelentingly high or worsened for prepay households during this time. COVID-19 magnifies pre-existing health and socio-economic inequities. 

I have previously posted about this issue, and the potential destructive interplay of high levels of pre-pay disconnections and rising temperatures (link here). The recent publication pays particular attention to the lack of comprehensive data. The paper concludes:

While the national moratorium on disconnection provided to post pay customers during COVID-19 meant that experiences of energy insecurity decreased for most Australians, remote living Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prepay customers did not receive commensurate protections …. While there are few published metrics relating to avoiding or reducing the frequency and duration of involuntary self-disconnection events experienced by prepay customers, what data there is shows that frequent de-energization of Indigenous prepay households continued and, in many cases, worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Data point seven: In early February, the ABC had reported that ‘Data reveals 50 per cent spike in alcohol-related emergency presentations after lifting of bans in Alice Springs’ (link here). These bans related to the consumption of alcohol on town camps around Alice Springs, and numerous other remote communities.

 

On 20 April 2023, NT Chief Minister Natasha Fyles issued a media release which stated in part:

The Northern Territory Government will extend takeaway alcohol restrictions in Alice Springs. Over the past three months we have seen these alcohol restrictions work, and support our community and frontline workers. 

Alcohol-related emergency department presentations at Alice Springs Hospital have almost halved, and domestic violence has dropped by a third in the month since the takeaway alcohol restrictions were reintroduced into the Northern Territory town. 

 

While the Chief Minister appears to be shifting the narrative away from the earlier across the board alcohol bans which she initially opposed, and reluctantly agreed to re-introduce after pressure from the Commonwealth, the points to note for present purposes are first the extraordinary human toll of alcohol abuse, and second, the direct link between alcohol consumption levels and hospital presentations. The latest available published data on the NT Government website (link here) is for the fourth quarter of 2022, and indicates 1299 alcohol related hospital emergency presentations. There were a total of 4145 alcohol related emergency presentations at the Alice Springs hospital for the 2022 year. To put this in context, a 2018 Deloittes Report (link here) noted that there had been a total of 46, 785 alcohol related emergency presentations across Australia in 2016-17 (table 2.1). Clearly, alcohol abuse levels in the NT and in Alice Springs have been at extraordinary levels for a considerable time. 

 

Data point eight: on 28 April 2023 Guardian reported (link here) on the ABS release of updated socioeconomic indexes based on 2021 census data which take into account census data on income, education, occupation, housing, employment and family structure, among other factors, to rank each of Australia 547 local government areas (LGAs).  The data is used to create a score with an average of about 1,000. Lower scores indicate areas of relative disadvantage. Unsurprisingly, by my rough reckoning, the 33 most disadvantaged LGAs in Australia all have a substantial majority of Indigenous residents. Of course, even more advantaged LGAs can include pockets of extreme Indigenous disadvantage, but these index scores are moderated by the population mix within the LGA. According to the ABS, “disadvantaged areas tend to be in regional and remote communities, while advantaged areas tend to be in major cities”.

 

Conclusion

I am conscious that these random data points, and particularly the associated notional data sets, largely represent shortfalls in the performance of governments, and are biased towards issues that have received media coverage which in turn is likely to be a proxy for policy attention from governments. Issues that are in my view significant, but are not listed here, include wider health issues (including for example the long lasting effects of FASD); employment / unemployment, and in particular the interaction with the Community Development Program which delivers income support to some 35, 000 remote citizens; environmental management including the operation of Indigenous Protected Areas and ranger groups; the impact and operation of land rights and native title legislation; and issues related to commercial and economic development. Each of these policy domains along with others I have not mentioned undoubtedly interacts with and contributes to the quality of life for remote citizens, along with the policy issues I have addressed. Nor have I focussed on institutional structures such as the operations and effectiveness of Indigenous organisations, or the impact of federal governance.

 

What is clear however is that given the synergistic interactions of multiple policy domains, the current model of policy design and implementation has not worked. This raises the potentially unsettling prospect that, at a fundamental systemic level, governments and policymakers are not incentivised to take the policy decisions that are required to make a substantive difference to the policy challenges that exist. Instead they are incentivised to manage difficult issues, oil squeaky wheels, and engage in a performative ritual designed merely to persuade an electorally significant non-Indigenous constituency (and a less electorally significant, but more animated, Indigenous constituency) that they are doing what is required to address the policy challenges that surface periodically in the public consciousness.

 

A recent review of a book on Boris Johnson (link here) described his motto for governing as ‘dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge’. As it turns out, this is an extraordinarily apt description of the systemic approach of Australian governments to remote policy challenges.