Fresh strategy to close the gap

First the good news. The Closing the Gap process, launched by the Rudd government with Coalition support 12 years ago, is on track to have 95 per cent of indigenous four-year-olds enrolled in early childhood education by 2025. The gap in Year 12 attainment is also narrowing, opening up better job and study opportunities. The number of indigenous Australians accessing higher education has more than doubled in a decade, with 20,000 Aborigines attending university, as Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt wrote on Wednesday.

While celebrating the improvements in education, the minister was frank in admitting that progress has been disappointingly slow in other areas. The process has fallen short of its goals on literacy and numeracy, school attendance and employment. The 49 per cent indigenous employment rate compares with 75 per cent for non-indigenous Australians. In 2018, the mortality rate of 141 per 100,000 among indigenous children was twice that of non-indigenous children. Nor is the target to close the life expectancy gap by 2031 on track. In 2015–17, life expectancy at birth for indigenous males was nine years lower than for non-indigenous males, with a similar gap for females.

Responsibility for those failures rests with federal, state and territory governments on all sides during the past 12 years, and in some cases with service providers. Closing the Gap, Scott Morrison said on Wednesday, has been a story of hope, frustration, disappointment, good intentions and good faith. But the results are not good enough. Mr Wyatt, who takes a pragmatic approach to his portfolio, says improving the living standards of indigenous Australians is more important to him than establishing a voice to government or securing constitutional recognition. He is right.

Given the failure to make headway on key metrics and in view of the move to create an indigenous voice to government, the reforms to the process proposed by the government are broadly right. A new structure for Closing the Gap is expected by April, with the intention to draw greater input from indigenous Australians and local communities. The Prime Minister envisages a partnership “where we listen, work together and decide together how future policies are developed, especially at a regional and local level”. Replacing “independence with welfare” in trying to help Aborigines was a mistake: “We must restore the right to take responsibility, the right to make decisions, the right to step up, the opportunity to own and create Australians’ own futures. It is what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been saying for a long time.”