The annual report on Closing the Gap has been released and is once again showing limited progress on key targets for improving life outcomes for Indigenous Australians.
Only four targets are on track:
- healthy birth weights
- the number of children enrolled in preschool
- a reduction in the rate of young people (10–17 years) in detention by at least 30 per cent
- square kilometres of land.
Four targets that are going backwards are:
- children's school-readiness
- incarceration rates
- suicide rates
- child-removal rates.
A target to accelerate efforts to recognise First Nations people's legal rights and interests in their land and sea has mixed results, with some improvement but not on track to meet its target.
There are another eight targets that do not have results this year because there isn’t any new data to assess their progress.
These include the number of students completing year 12, and a target to reduce family violence and abuse.
Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney says the government already has plans in place to address some of the areas where targets are failing.
"There will be justice reinvestment across 30 communities in this country, which we'll look at community-wide ways of keeping young people out of the criminal justice system, increasing school retention, reducing domestic violence and reducing crime in those communities," she said.
"We are providing national leadership."
The report is being delivered by the Labor government, but mostly encapsulates the time the Coalition was in power.
Ms Burney says that means that next year's report will be more applicable to the new government.
"The first thing to acknowledge is that this is a report that's looking back," she said.
"What's going to be significant is whether or not the dial has moved on any of those targets next year."
Calls for all levels of government to do more
The report confirms that more Indigenous children are being taken from their families and communities than ever before, with more than 22,000 children removed every year.
Only around 16 per cent of children who are removed are reunited with family, and less than half are placed with Indigenous carers.
Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC) chief executive Catherine Liddle says these rates must urgently be addressed.
"The message is to all layers of government, actually, and it is that the evidence shows [that,] where there is a genuine effort to empower communities and to transfer authority to Aboriginal community-controlled organisations, we see results," she said.
"But we can't sit down and wait for these results to happen. We need action and we need it to move faster."
Ms Liddle says the way to stop children being removed is to empower community-controlled organisations.
"We know that the system was built to remove children. The system is administered by non-Indigenous entities," she said.
"Where we see it halted is where Aboriginal communities and Aboriginal community-controlled organisations have worked with their own families to say: 'What is it that you need?'
"The evidence shows Aboriginal community control has the potential to hold the over-representation of our children in out-of-home care."
Victorian Greens senator Lidia Thorpe says the root of the gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is colonisation.
"These injustices are a symptom of a bigger issue that we face in this country, and that is colonisation," she said.
"If we address racism in this country, we will see these rates go down. We confront racism in everything we do to survive as a people. It's systemic racism that continues to hold us back."
Senator Thorpe says the government already has the answers on how to Close the Gap, it just needs to take action.
"Practical action has been sitting there for 30 years with the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody … and also the 20-year-old Bringing them Home report which, again, provides solutions through the recommendations on how to stop this new stolen generation, which is outnumbering the old Stolen Generation."
