In what was widely heralded as a “scathing review” of progress against Closing the Gap priorities, the Productivity Commission has condemned governments at all levels for failing to fulfil their commitments.
Anyone scathed by it must not have read it; the review, released on Wednesday, is 100 pages of vague language about the need for governments to listen better to Indigenous people. It contains no examples of where this is being done well and where it is failing. There is also no clear guidance on how it could be done effectively. To be fair to the authoring commissioners, the priorities against which they were reviewing progress are also a bit fuzzy. In the end, the review comes off as a belated plea for a constitutionally enshrined Voice, which accidentally shows how difficult implementing the Voice would have been.
Indigenous wellbeing is not out of reach, but we must reach for the right solutions.Credit: Jason South
The review precedes the upcoming release of the next Closing the Gap dashboard, which will provide a statistical report on progress against the targets. It is a neatly timed reminder ahead of that release that nice words and good intentions alone don’t achieve goals.
It’s uncomfortable to say it, but we must if we are genuinely interested in improving outcomes for Indigenous people: the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous health, wealth, education and self-determination will not be solved by trying to treat Indigenous communities as somehow congenitally or temperamentally different to everyone else. Doing so has led to perverse outcomes. As Professor Marcia Langton has repeatedly pointed out over the years, the high rates of violence and abuse in many Indigenous communities are not part of Indigenous culture, though they are often attributed to it by “well-meaning people and governments”. They are a result of conditions that can be addressed.
Indeed, people like Langton and other well-known Indigenous leaders show by example that there is no reason why Indigenous people should have shorter lives, lower levels of education, less say in public discourse, or worse life outcomes than anyone else. The gap is not about Indigeneity, it is the gap between access to the advances of Western medicine, education and urbanisation. It is, to some degree, the same gap that yawns between rural and metropolitan Australians. It is also a gap in access to participatory democracy, which is the way in which non-Indigenous communities have a say in the policies that affect them.
We can respect the desire of some Indigenous people to live on country, and we can recognise and empathise with the intergenerational trauma that has fuelled a cycle of disadvantage for some Indigenous people. But for their sakes, we must stop pretending that the gap is going to be closed in some other way than by embracing the social and medical technologies that have given non-Indigenous Australians an advantage.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the life expectancy for Indigenous girls and boys born today is now better than it was for non-Indigenous girls and boys born in the early 1960s. But of course, in the meantime, non-Indigenous Australians have also made gains.
The improvement can, according to Richard Jukes from the AIHW, be attributed to “improved medical knowledge and technology, health care availability (such as the widespread accessibility to antibiotics and vaccines), improved living conditions and overall better quality of life”.
Our failure to close the gap is not about who but where
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10.02.2024
In what was widely heralded as a “scathing review” of progress against Closing the Gap priorities, the Productivity Commission has condemned governments at all levels for failing to fulfil their commitments.
Anyone scathed by it must not have read it; the review, released on Wednesday, is 100 pages of vague language about the need for governments to listen better to Indigenous people. It contains no examples of where this is being done well and where it is failing. There is also no clear guidance on how it could be done effectively. To be fair to the authoring commissioners, the priorities against which they were reviewing progress are also a bit fuzzy. In the end, the review comes off as a belated plea for a constitutionally enshrined Voice, which accidentally shows how difficult implementing the Voice would have been.
Indigenous wellbeing is not out of reach, but........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
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