Indigenous children in crisis "can't wait" for the nation to close the gap, Aboriginal organisations have warned, as the federal government details its plan to address rising inequality in communities.
Key points:
- The Prime Minister will announce a new $1 billion "implementation plan" aiming to close the gap
- Stolen Generations members from the NT and ACT will receive payments as part of a new redress scheme
- Aboriginal organisations are cautiously optimistic, but say Indigenous perspectives are needed
Prime Minister Scott Morrison will deliver the annual Closing the Gap update in federal Parliament today.
All Australian governments committed to 17 new targets to improve the lives of Indigenous people last year, after the previous Closing the Gap scheme failed.
But the first report card on the new targets' progress shows only three are on track: improving birth weight, early education attendance, and reducing the numbers of Indigenous teenagers in youth justice.
Mr Morrison will today outline the government's new $1 billion "implementation plan" to close the gap in health, education, justice, and employment by 2031.
The national voice for Aboriginal children, SNAICC, said 10 years of limited progress under the 2008 agreement showed there was something "fundamentally wrong".
Chief executive Catherine Liddle, an Arrernte and Luritja woman, said there was an urgent need to improve living conditions for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families.
Supplied: SNAICC
)"Our kids can't wait," she said.
"What we were looking for really needed to happen 10 years ago.
"The last decade was really disappointing because Aboriginal voices were saying there's something wrong with the targets."
The new Closing the Gap implementation plan includes a $378 million new redress scheme for Stolen Generations survivors from the Northern Territory, the ACT and Jervis Bay Territory.
Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt said those elders would also be entitled to an individual apology, after survivors signalled they would sue the Commonwealth for compensation earlier this year.
The government has also committed hundreds of millions for new remote boarding schools, renovating and building new health clinics and boosting alcohol and drug rehabilitation programs.
Mr Morrison said the new Closing the Gap agreement was a genuine partnership, and that the government was "doing things differently with accountability and transparency".
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations are cautiously optimistic that refreshed targets will keep governments accountable, but stress that evidence-based programs need to be prioritised.
"There is now an onus on us to be able to ensure accountability of those projects," Ms Liddle said.
"It's not just about funding something — it has to work, and it has to show how it's embedded an Indigenous perspective."
ABC News
)Labor pledges to boost jobs, establish Treaty commission
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese will also address the Closing the Gap report card in Parliament today. The strategy has bipartisan support.
Labor will announce a commitment to boost public and private sector job opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers.
Mr Albanese will commit to an ambitious Australian Public Sector employment target of 5 per cent, and require 200 of the nation's largest companies to report on recruitment of Indigenous employees.
Labor has also pledged to double the number of Indigenous rangers working on country to 3,800 by the end of the decade.
Mr Albanese said Labor would establish a Makarrata Commission to oversee truth-telling initiatives and treaties.
The Greens said the Closing the Gap report was "another shameful reminder" that families were being separated and that too many Indigenous people were dying by suicide.
DjabWurrung, Gunnai and Gunditjmara senator Lidia Thorpe said in the eight years the Coalition had been in power, most indicators had gone backwards.
"First Nations people are not the problem, the system that is deliberately stacked against First Nations people and the do nothing Morrison Government is the problem," she said.
Suicide and incarceration rates rising, several targets have no data
High rates of Indigenous suicide have worsened, and there are rising numbers of First Nations children in out-of-home care and adults in prison.
Almost 19,000 First Nations children were in out-of-home care — 11 times the rate for non-Indigenous children.
Ms Liddle said a "significant transformation" was needed to meet the target of reducing the numbers of children going into out-of-home care by 45 per cent in the next decade.
"We know once our kids hit that pipeline it's almost impossible to get them out of that and that includes the trajectory into jail," she said.
"The way we structure child protection [and] the way we fund child protection needs to fundamentally shift and it needs to shift fast."
Supplied: Tahnee Jash, File photo
)The refreshed agreement includes new reporting obligations to keep governments on track.
But, when the first report card was released by the Productivity Commission last week, only seven of the 17 new targets were able to be tracked.
The commission said that was because limited baseline data was available to provide an update on the new reforms.
Targets to improve housing conditions and safety for Indigenous women cannot yet be measured; neither can a commitment to tackle structural racism in government organisations.
The Productivity Commission previously found the former strategy did not work because the federal government had been too focused on writing reports and not looking at which Indigenous programs were effective.
Every three years the Productivity Commission will undertake a broader review of Closing the Gap progress, and, every fourth year, there will be an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led review.
Early educators say targets aren't enough without cultural understanding
On the ground, Aboriginal organisations are working hard to provide solutions.
In Alice Springs, new research by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) has found an early childhood program for Aboriginal children improved social skills and increased attendance rates.
The program, run by the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, caters to children from vulnerable families.
A child's learning improved when traditional language and customs were interwoven into teachings, the study found.
Stocksnap: Danielle MacInnes
)The government's target is to have 95 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children enrolled in early learning by 2025.
The commission found that the target is on track; attendance is currently sitting at 93.3 per cent when it was last measured in 2020.
But professor Sharon Goldfeld from MCRI said it was not enough to just reach targets to improve the lives of Indigenous children.
She said there was a lack of high-quality programs, such as this one, across the country.
"I think attending, tick, that's great … ensuring that [learning] is of the highest quality, that's more challenging," she said.
"It needs to be both attending for sufficient hours to a high-quality, culturally well-delivered early childhood service.
"I think all of those boxes need to be ticked if we are going to see what we want, which is that trajectory of closing the gap for children's early childhood development."
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2021-08-04 19:15:43Z
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