Closing the gap: coming to terms with a decade of failure

There was great hope and good intent when the strategy began 10 years ago. But indigenous disadvantage is as great as ever.

Children at the remote Tjuntjuntjara community school, 550km east of Kalgoorlie, in Western Australia. Picture: James Croucher

It has become the Prime Minister’s annual statement of failure, a ­catalogue of defeat when the Closing the Gapreport is presented full of detail about how attempts to ­reduce indigenous disadvantage have delivered little.

For a stab at authenticity you might introduce it in a few rote-learnt words of the local Ngunnawal language: a rhetorical device, an incantation to distract from the modern-day smoothing of the pillow.

There was great hope and good intent when the strategy began a decade ago, soon after Kevin Rudd’s famous apology for the ­stolen generations.

“It felt like a corner had been turned,” Reconciliation Australia co-chair Tom Calma said in Canberra last week, launching a searingly critical review of the now-foundering approach.

Calma’s 2005 Social Justice ­Report was central in awakening the nation to some of the most ­appalling discrepancies between the prospects of indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, in particular around health. It called for the slide to be reversed within a generation.

By the time of Rudd’s 2008 apology in the federal parliament, a historic statement of intent between his government and a range of peak indigenous health organisations was ready to be signed. In the atmosphere of the reconciliation movement there would be a concerted approach involving the commonwealth, states and territories across six measurable targets.

A massive $1.9 billion, 10-year investment in remote housing was key, on the basis that somewhere decent and safe to live leads to ­better health, which leads to education attainment, which predicts a longer, more rewarding life. There was a separate $1.6bn four-year health plan, with chronic disease a focus.

“But 10 years goes quickly, and with four different prime ministers, four different indigenous ­affairs ministers and five health ministers overseeing the delivery of commitments, how can we ­expect to have any stability when there is so much instability in the system?” Calma asks.

Matters have gone so far backwards that Malcolm Turnbull, delivering last year’s report, admitted there was need for a “refresh” of the strategy now containing seven indicators around health, education and lifespan — only one of which (Year 12 attainment rates) was on track last year to be met.

Halving the gap in mortality rates for indigenous children seems to have improved in the past 12 months, as has getting 95 per cent of four-year-olds into early childhood education. But closing the gap on school attendance and life expectancy, halving the gap in literacy and numeracy and in employment outcomes — all are off track. Several of the seven targets are due to expire this year.

There is no doubt that, with $33.4bn spent annually on indigenous need — a figure that ­includes mainstream services available to all Australians such as education and general healthcare, but also $6bn on indigenous-­specific services — greater ­accountability must be established. It is telling, for instance, that there is no simple way of ­directly tracking expenditure and outcomes specifically against the seven Closing the Gaptargets.

So a two-day “refresh” confab was hastily assembled in Can­berra, just ahead of Turnbull’s ­delivery today of the 10th annual report, to ask dozens of hand-picked Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander repre­sentatives how it could be better oriented. This included whether extra targets, including the unequal rate of incarceration for indigenous Australians — they make up 27 per cent of the jail population but just 3 per cent of the general population — ought to be set.

Other possible new target areas considered last week include ­employment, entrepreneurship, revised education elements including tertiary education, family violence and child protection as well as a target to resolve outstanding land and sea claims.

It was also suggested there would be a new series of regional consultations on the refresh, a move Referendum Council co-chair Mark Leibler yesterday ­applauded because “the critical thing is you’ve got to have more ­involvement on the part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in government thinking”.

But as last week’s meeting proceeded, a joint statement was prepared on day two by a clearly agitated quartet representing the Northern Territory’s heavyweight Northern, Central, Tiwi and Anindilyakwa land councils. “Ten years ago they did not talk to us — after 10 years, why are they rushing us now?” asked the four men — Sammy Bush-­Blanasi, Francis Jupurrurla Kelly, Gibson Farmer Illortaminni and Tony Wurramarrba.

Many fear they were invited simply so Turnbull could mask failure today by boasting that he had consulted widely on what needs to change.

Megan Davis, a constitutional law expert, UN representative and University of NSW pro vice-­chancellor, is blunt.

“The refresh is like putting lipstick on a pig,” Davis says. She was part of the Prime Minister’s Referendum Council on indigenous constitutional recognition, whose Uluru Statement From the Heart and its recommendation for a parliamentary advisory body he summarily dismissed.

Davis and others believe this body, or “voice”, is the sort of mechanism that could reverse the very problems that Closing the Gap addresses, by providing assessments of local needs that would then drive policy.

Last week’s 10-year review was explicit on this, asserting that the Uluru statement’s proposals went “to the core of achieving a refreshed Closing the Gap strategy that is genuinely co-designed”.

The Uluru statement recommended a Makarrata commission to oversee truth-telling and treaties, as well as the constitutionally enshrined voice. It was antici­pated the former would ulti­mately contribute to policy­making through unpacking the trauma of dispossession done to particular communities.

The voice is still being designed, its architects confident the Turnbull dismissal is not the last word on the matter. It is expected to be based on the traditional owner model on which native title operates, making it a significant shift away from the simple election form of the former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and, again, providing community-specific feedback about how to close the gap.

Kyllie Cripps, acting director at the UNSW indigenous law ­centre and a public policy expert, says part of the issue with the present strategy is its over-reliance on ­statistics and the meeting of ­national targets.

“They were very ambitious targets, which is what governments do; they want to change something that’s urgent,” Cripps says. “But politicians aren’t statisticians; they’re not even evaluators. It’s too easy to say it’s an Aboriginal problem, we’ve thrown money at it and it hasn’t worked, therefore it’s still an Aboriginal problem.”

Without indigenous input into policymaking at the community level, she says, untold amounts of money are wasted applying bandaid solutions to poorly diagnosed issues. And evaluation should ­include more qualitative analysis.

“Instead of focusing just on the statistical story, since statistics are reported in cycles, if you’re going to commit to yearly reports, perhaps you could say in the past year we’ve enacted particular policy changes in response to feedback we’ve received that certain things haven’t worked,” she says.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait ­Islander Social Justice Commissioner June Oscar gave Turnbull a blunt assessment at last week’s ­delivery of the 10-year review, written by the independent non-government Close the Gap Steering Committee. “We want to see premiers, chief ministers, health and indigenous affairs ministers in every jurisdiction providing regular, public ­accountability on their efforts to address the inequality gaps in their state or territory — no more finger pointing between governments,” Oscar says.

Northern Territory Labor senator Malarndirri McCarthy laments the loss of bipartisanship she says originally characterised the project; the annual day of the ­report’s delivery in earlier years being one where “the nation recognises this is the parliament speaking, and every parliamentarian is acknowledging that the lives of First Nations people are absolutely the priority”. The ­absence of this, she says, characterises the malaise of the project.

“This whole (refresh) exercise is one of an absolute lack of trust,” McCarthy tells The Australian. “Trust with the Australian people, trust with the First Nations people, and trust with the members of parliament and with the First Nations members of parliament.”

Davis concurs that bipartisanship on indigenous affairs shifted under Tony Abbott and then Turnbull into unilateralism, with “one-sided decisions: disinterested politicians led blindly by an all-powerful and paternalistic bureaucratic elite who, from the leafy suburbs of Canberra, know better”. In such an environment, policy can never develop that actually improves the indigenous lives it seeks to target, she says.

Davis warns, however, of an equal danger in bipartisanship on indigenous affairs, calling it “lazy politics” that shuts down the way parliamentary democracy functions by “mediating tensions”.

“The bipartisanship that emerged post-ATSIC meant mob were excluded from the room and the conversation, and the aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were ­eschewed in favour of a non-­indigenous vision of the good life,” she says. Davis and others even use the “a”-word, seeing in current policy a revived path to the assimilationist drive of old.

Amid the negativity, it is ­important not to forget the positives. Selwyn Button, Queensland ­assistant director-general for indigenous education, says his state’s robust success in high school completion rates is due to what he calls a “sharp and narrow” approach.

“The key is intensive case management, asking schools to get to know every individual student,” Button says.

Queensland’s 2017 data is not yet finalised but he says it will be a more than 97 per cent completion rate for a final-year ­cohort of about 2000 final-year ­indigenous students — the country’s largest.

Queensland also has the fastest-growing NAPLAN result success for indigenous students at all levels, and Button says there is a focus on increasing the number of students entering further education “on merit, rather than indigenous specific pathways”.

But according to last week’s 10-year review, the overall gap will never be closed so long as that statement of intent signed in 2008 remains largely unimplemented — in particular with no effective health equality plan and a lack of primary health services built ­according to local need.

“Over that time we have produced over 70 recommendations and very few have been picked up,” Calma says.

“All the major reports, from the Productivity Commission and so forth, all indicate the same thing: that there needs to be stab­ility and a genuine and appropriate engagement with Aboriginal people at the planning stage and right through to implementation.

“They’re the key fundamentals that we negotiated with government back in 2008 in the statement of intent and that’s never been withdrawn. We hold the government to it.”