Closing the Gap: A historic day … but so much still to do

Coalition of Peaks lead convener Pat Turner. Picture: Gary Ramage

“This is the task of all of us,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Thursday. Some Indigenous experts in fields including child protection and family violence see this as a clever bet each way.

If the rewritten Closing the Gap agreement to reduce Indigenous disadvantage fails, as the original so unfortunately did, the blame will fall not just on the commonwealth this time. It will be shared with the 51 Indigenous organisations that helped write the 16 targets in the new agreement. The states and territories will also wear the shame, as will the Australian Local Government Association. They are all signatories to this new plan.

The new national agreement is pitched as an act of faith in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to lift up their own.

As lead convener of the coalition of Indigenous organisations that helped write the agreement, Pat Turner has steered the parties to this point alongside Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt.

Ms Turner believes that making community-controlled Indigenous organisations into service providers on a massive scale can also help get her people off welfare and into jobs.

More than that, the agreement is presented as a policy document that commits every government in Australia to partnerships with Indigenous organisations. Asked how Indigenous organisations would be funded to do this work, Mr Morrison said: “There have been significant resources directed to these tasks over many years but the way those resources have been applied have not always got the results. I‘ve seen some of the most extraordinary responses and outcomes from some of the most modest elements of funding to community-based organisations”.

Some said the agreement, two years in the making, failed to sufficiently draw on the ideas and expertise of some of the nation’s most prominent Indigenous thinkers and entrepreneurs. Warren Mundine said an agreement that aimed to get Indigenous people into jobs should have involved a wide variety of Indigenous people with private sector experience and success.

“It’s like having a health committee with no health people on it,” he said.

The announcement of Indigenous people as partners with government should have been cause for celebration. For the first time, states and territories will be accountable every year for how they have or have not reduced Indigenous disadvantage. And they have committed to produce detailed data that will give a full picture on important matters such as Indigenous school attendance.

But the anger from highly placed critics on Thursday was real and it stung. The claim that this is not meaningful reform could prove another challenge for an agreement that already has so much work to do.