Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma laid out the challenge in an historic 2005 Social Justice Report which showed the shameful 17-year gap between the life expectancy and health conditions of First Nations people and that of the rest of the population. The First Nations infant mortality rate was three times higher.
“It is not credible to suggest that one of the wealthiest nations in the world cannot solve a health crisis affecting less than 3% of its citizens.” This was not just a health problem but a human rights failure, Calma noted.
Calma’s report recommended that “the governments of Australia commit to achieving equality of health status and life expectation between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and non-Indigenous people within 25 years”.
That deadline is just five years away.
Multiple government agreements have been made to “close the gap”, the latest being the 2020 National Agreement on Closing the Gap but the 2025 Closing the Gap report reveals that most measures will not be reached by 2030.
Only four of the 19 “Priority Reforms” are on track to meet the target and four are moving backwards. The rest are progressing, but not on track.
Failure denied
When Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese tabled the report in parliament on February 12, he denied this was a failure: “Failure is a word for those who have stopped trying — or given up listening. I make this clear today: I am not contemplating failure.”
The four widening gaps are: Rates of First Nations imprisonment; rates of First Nations children being removed from their families; and First Nations early childhood development and suicide rates.
This should be no surprise because Labor and Coalition governments’ reactionary and racist law-and-order policies were always guaranteed to produce this result.
The latest figures on First Nations deaths in custody, which are the highest in four decades, are a moral indictment of these policies.
Albanese ignored this ugly elephant in the room and argued that any talk of failure would be a slight on First Nations people who are working hard to close the gap! “We must also guard against talk of failure, because talk of failure dismisses the aspirations and achievements of Indigenous Australians. It ignores the leaders and communities who are changing lives.”
Systematic government abuse of First Nations children is leading to the gap widening in those four areas. It is a result of governments pandering to racist fear campaigns, pursued relentlessly by a billionaire-funded right-wing political resurgence.
But Albanese did not challenge this racist law and order slide. Instead he deflected blame and excused it. “The primary responsibility for law enforcement and detention rests with State and Territory Governments — and they have every right to put the safety of their communities first. No-one is making excuses for crime.”
But just as responsible is the systematic bureaucratic resistance of state and federal government departments to First Nations community-led initiatives to close the gap.
This has been identified since 2024, even by the conservative Productivity Commission. Government departments were bureaucratically ticking boxes but resisting real moves to First Nations community-led action, its report then noted.
There was no improvement a year later, when the first independent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led review of Closing the Gap revealed that there was only “limited evidence that governments are making any systemic changes to meet commitments under the National Agreement”.
As a result, there was “a lack of transformational change across all services and systems, policies and programs aligned to the Priority Reforms”.
“Governments continue with business-as-usual approaches that are inconsistent with their commitments under the National Agreement and are not yielding widespread impact,” it reported.
Racism
It pointed to “racism” as “a core foundational issue that sits across every aspect of Closing the Gap and any potential long-term, sustainable successes”. It said racism “in its myriad forms” is preventing “effective implementation of all four priority reform areas”.
“Despite the National Agreement commitment to identifying and eliminating racism, no systemic steps have been taken despite, or perhaps because, racism is a deeply rooted problem that was baked into government institutions from their very inception of this country.”
In short, state and federal governments have shown that they are not serious about closing the gap.
The 82-page 2020 Closing the Gap report is a master class in bureaucratic dressing up of failure to look like success. A reader has to go to Appendix C to see that only four out of 19 Priority Reforms are on target. And don’t expect to see the hard numbers on these failures. For that you have to wait until March when the Productivity Commission is due to release its next “Dashboard” on Closing the Gap.
The Commission’s Dashboard, released in July last year, revealed the four dramatic reversals in Priority Reforms:
• First Nations imprisonment rate in 2024 was 2304.4 per 100,000 adult population, a rise from 1906.1 per 100,000 adult population in 2019.
• First Nations children, aged 0–17 years in out‑of‑home care, was 50.3 per 1,000 children in the First Nations population in 2024, a rise from 47.3 per 1000 children in 2019 (the baseline year).
• In 2024 only 33.9% of First Nations children starting school were assessed as being developmentally on track in all five Australian Early Development Census areas — a decrease from 35.2% in 2018 (the baseline year).
• In 2023, the suicide age-standardised rate for First Nations people was 30.8 per 100,000 people — the highest rate over the period from the baseline in 2018 (23.6 per 100,000 people).