Indigenous advocates have “enthusiastically” welcomed the creation of a new national commissioner for Aboriginal children and young people, with one peak body saying the role is something they have been demanding for a long time.
Prime minister Anthony Albanese made the announcement on Tuesday as part of his government’s response to the latest Closing the Gap report tabled in parliament, which showed only four of the 19 socioeconomic targets are on track.
Four targets – children’s development, the rate of out of home care, adult detention rates and suicide prevention – have grown worse.
Albanese said the status quo was “unacceptable” and cultural change was needed, which meant working with Aboriginal community organisations to develop solutions.
“If we want to close the gap, we have to listen to the people on the other side of it,” he told parliament. “The price of failure is measured in lives.”
The New South Wales peak body, AbSec, said people throughout the child protection sector were “ecstatic” at the creation of a new national commissioner.
“This is something we have been demanding for a very long time and it’s gratifying to see the federal government has listened,” AbSec CEO, John Leha, said.
“This is exactly what we need to take the next step in the long journey towards keeping our children not only safe, but cared for within their own community.”
An interim commissioner will be appointed and begin consultations from 1 July to determine the powers and functions of the role.
Victoria’s commissioner for Aboriginal children and young people, Meena Singh, said the role would help shift efforts to preventive work, rather than removing children.
“There needs to be a greater focus on systems before child protection gets involved,” Singh said. “So how do we see greater connected-up services like health and education? How do we make sure that early prevention work gets put in place before we need to go to the last resort of removing children, or of charging children and putting them in jail once they turn 10 years of age?”
The Australian Human Rights Commission and Unicef also welcomed the announcement. Unicef’s head of policy, Katie Maskiell, said the role would help in “advancing the rights of Aboriginal children, something which is needed to end the intergenerational cycles of disadvantage that many children face”.
The Northern Territory children’s commissioner, Shahleena Musk, said the decision was “the right one”.
“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are staggeringly overrepresented in youth justice and child protection systems, with an Indigenous child 26 times more likely to be incarcerated than their non-Indigenous counterpart and more than 10 times more likely to end up in out-of-home care.
“Here in the territory on almost any given day, 100% of the children in youth detention are Aboriginal. While 41% of the children in the NT are Aboriginal, they make up 89% of the children in out-of-home care.
”The establishment of a national Aboriginal children’s commissioner is an important step towards addressing systemic imbalances and failures,” Musk said.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton told parliament he wanted more details about the spending commitments announced on Tuesday, including $707m for a remote jobs program to replace the community development program.
Dutton said there were “important questions” including whether the target of 3000 jobs “is achievable rather than simply being a wishful target”.
Dutton said the latest Closing The Gap report showed the federal government was “continuing to fail our most marginalised Indigenous brothers and sisters”, and that the government should focus more on “practical solutions” to address Indigenous disadvantage, particularly in remote and central Australia.
Dutton said the Coalition would continue to raise issues about crime and socioeconomic issues in Alice Springs, and repeated his calls for a royal commission into child sexual abuse in Indigenous communities.
But Singh said she and other children’s commissioners were “hesitant” about a royal commission.
“There is so much that is understood already about what needs to be done. If I think about the 1991 royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody, there were recommendations there that related to child protection, education, youth justice, that if fully implemented, and consistently funded, would have directly impacted on the outcomes that we’re seeing now,” she said.
Dorinda Cox, the Greens’ First Nations spokesperson, said the latest report was a “critical juncture” in Indigenous affairs policy, and called for the government to take “bold action” to change outcomes – including vigorously pursuing truth and treaty processes.
Cox also called for progress on truth and treaty this year, saying it was now a “national responsibility” for the federal government to follow state governments in moving forward in this area.
Indigenous Australians minister Linda Burney said the government still wanted to pursue Makarrata processes, but said the referendum result had hurt the Aboriginal community, and that progress on those issues would only happen “as fast or as slow as the community wants to”.
