New Indigenous Australians Minister Malarndirri McCarthy says Labor will seek a new bipartisan approach to closing the gap between Aboriginal Australians and the rest of the country. Source: The Australian.
It comes as bureaucrats’ tightening grip on Indigenous policymaking is blamed for a calamitous backslide in suicide and incarceration rates.
In her first pledge since taking over the troubled portfolio from Linda Burney, Senator McCarthy said she would reach out to the Coalition and crossbenchers to tackle increasingly entrenched Aboriginal disadvantage.
The Productivity Commission’s latest Closing the Gap report shows: the incarceration rate has risen among Aboriginal people of all ages. including children; the Indigenous suicide rate has increased; and so has the rate at which Indigenous children are removed from their families since 2020.
“These figures are deeply troubling, but I am determined to work in partnership with First Nations Australians, the Coalition of Peaks and state and territory governments to bring about positive change,” Senator McCarthy said yesterday.
“I will be reaching out to my colleagues across the Parliament to seek a bipartisan approach to Indigenous affairs.”
Her comments came as Anthony Albanese and Indigenous leaders were set to descend on the annual Garma festival this weekend to revive the reconciliation project and the movement to improve Indigenous lives in the wake of the failed voice referendum.
The Productivity Commission’s annual report on the decade-long Closing the Gap deal, released last night, shows that the Indigenous gap on some socioeconomic measures is worse nationally than it was four years ago.
Report co-author Natalie Siegel-Brown warned that bureaucrats were prioritising “the churning of documents” over working with Aboriginal people on the ground and were not building trust.
Out of the 15 Closing the Gap targets that the commission was able to assess in the past year, the gap was widening in the Northern Territory in eight. These included: Indigenous females now being expected to die even earlier than other female Australians; the proportion of Indigenous babies born a healthy weight going down; and the proportion of Indigenous children enrolled in preschool dropping.
FULL STORY
Urgent plea to close the Indigenous political gap (By Paige Taylor, The Australian)
RELATED COVERAGE
‘Walk with me’: new Indigenous Australians minister Malarndirri McCarthy wants a new kind of discourse (The Guardian)
