The productivity commission says governments need to do more to live up to their commitment to 'close the gap' between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. The commission is responding to this year's closing the gap report from the government which was released last month and reveals only four out of the 19 targets are on track.
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00:00This agreement has been in place since 2020 and only four of 19 targets are on track.
00:08That is early childhood education, employment, land rights and sea rights.
00:12And that is a drop from last year as babies being born at a healthy birth weight has slipped.
00:17Four targets continue to go backwards nationally.
00:19That's incarceration rates, suicide, early childhood development and child removals.
00:24And the latest data shows actually that 15%, there was a 15% spike rather in imprisonment
00:28of Indigenous adults in just one year.
00:31And a reminder that these targets are, there are people behind these numbers, this is about
00:35improving the lives of First Nations Australians across the country.
00:38We know that there is a disparity between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
00:42and non-Indigenous people in places like life expectancy.
00:45And so it is really changing the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
00:50Looking at the states and territories individually, it's clear that there are some wins going
00:54on in progress towards targets.
00:56The Deputy Convener for the Coalition of Peaks, Catherine Little, the body that represents
00:59a lot of these Aboriginal run organisations, is worried and critical about the progress
01:04being made.
01:05A year ago, the Productivity Commission came out and it said the national agreement is
01:11an incredible roadmap.
01:12The priority reforms are your instructions on how to drive through that roadmap.
01:17These are the things that governments need to do to ensure that we're being effective
01:20and ensure we're getting change.
01:22And a year later, effectively, what we've seen is no commitment to that change, no commitment
01:27to that action, and the stats either going backwards or stagnating.
01:32Last year, a review by the Productivity Commission found that governments aren't ceding power
01:37and sharing power with Aboriginal community controlled organisations on the ground, which
01:41had showed that they can make progress in areas and some of these targets that really
01:45need attention.
01:46So the Commissioner, Selwyn Button, says that there's no accountability measure in place
01:51to hold governments to account, to make sure that they're hitting the right targets and
01:55putting the right resources in place.
01:57And they're also calling for a number of targets and data to be revealed from different areas,
02:04because targets like the family and domestic violence target haven't been updated with
02:08data.
02:09Unless we have an independent mechanism in place at a national level and at jurisdictional
02:14levels, we're certainly not going to see the progress that we need, because we actually
02:20don't have any mechanism of accountability that's holding government to account for the
02:25work that they're doing and certainly for the actions that they're undertaking to improve
02:28the targets.
02:29So we are about halfway through a lot of these targets.
02:32All of these targets, the deadlines or the target is to be met by 2031.
02:37So five years in, only four on track.
02:40A lot of community members, a lot of government bodies, a lot of people in the area are concerned.