Stronger Accountability Needed to Address Failure to ‘Close the Gap’: Productivity Commission

A young girl holds up an Australian Aboriginal flag in Sydney, Australia, on Jan. 26, 2022. Steven Saphore/AFP via Getty Images

Australia needs more solid accountability mechanisms to address governments’ lack of action in eliminating inequalities among the Indigenous communities.

This is the conclusion from a draft report (pdf) on the progress of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap by the Productivity Commission.

In 2020, all Australian governments signed a national agreement with the coalition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peak organisations to improve life outcomes for Indigenous people.

Federal and state governments promised to take action according to the strategies outlined in the agreement.

However, an inquiry by the Productivity Commission has found that not much has been done since the agreement was signed and proposed establishing stronger mechanisms to ensure states and territories were more responsible in delivering their promises.

Lack of Government Progress

According to the report, among the 17 socio-economic targets identified in the agreement, only four were on track to be met, while another four were going backwards.

There was also evidence that state governments had not prioritised the four central pillars of the agreement, which are formal partnerships and shared decision-making, building the community-controlled sector, transforming government organisations, and sharing access to data and information at a regional level.

Specifically, the commission found that governments had failed to share decision-making power with the Indigenous community despite demonstrating a willingness to partner with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups.

In many cases, government agencies consulted with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on a pre-determined solution rather than collaborating to devise a solution.

This resulted in Indigenous communities feeling the consultation was symbolic and lack of substance.

An Indigenous child is seen during a community BBQ in Wurrumiyanga, Australia, on April 18, 2019. Stefan Postles/Getty Images

Meanwhile, Aboriginal community-controlled organisations complained that they were treated as passive recipients of government funding and were not recognised as critical partners in providing necessary government services (including healthcare) tailored to the needs of their communities, which contradicted the agreement’s goal of strengthening the community-controlled sector.

There was also an absence of a clear strategy to change the structure of mainstream government agencies and institutions to ensure they were accountable for improving the life outcomes of Indigenous people. So far, the focus has only been on changing small-scale, individual actions instead of making system-level changes.

Similarly, there has been little progress on changes to government practices to allow the Indigenous community to access government-held data needed to make important decisions.

While Aboriginal groups have reported having difficulty accessing government data, it is often found that the data collected were not meaningful or useful to the Indigenous community.

“Overall progress against the priority reforms has been slow, uncoordinated, and piecemeal,” the report stated.

“It is too easy to find examples of government decisions that contradict commitments in the Agreement, that do not reflect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s priorities and perspectives and that exacerbate, rather than remedy, disadvantage and discrimination.”

Stronger Accountability Mechanisms Needed to Push Forward Changes

Under the agreement, states and territories are jointly accountable for monitoring their progress against the changes in socio-economic outcomes.

However, the agreement does not describe how jurisdictions will be held to account for their contribution to these targets, resulting in no agreed approach for determining whether each jurisdiction has made acceptable progress.

Consequently, many parts of the government took a “business as usual” approach to Indigenous policy, where they implemented small changes rather than “root-and-branch transformations.”

“The existing mechanisms lack ‘bite’—they are not sufficiently independent, do not contain timely and appropriate consequences for failure, obscure the individual responsibilities of each party, and are not informed by high-quality evaluation,” the report stated.

The commission warned that without establishing stronger accountability across all government organisations, the agreement would likely become another broken promise to the Indigenous community.

To address the issue, the report suggested designating a leadership group to drive change throughout the public sector in each jurisdiction.

Other potential solutions included establishing or enhancing sector-specific accountability mechanisms and embedding responsibility for improving the Indigenous community’s outcomes into the core employment requirements and performance assessments of all public servants.