The latest Close the Gap report highlights work across Australia that is delivering real change for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities, the launch event was told yesterday.
Marie McInerney reports below; also see this summary of posts from the launch, and a video of the full event.
Marie McInerney writes:
For Lose Fonua, CEO of the newly formed First Nations Eye Health Alliance, the urgency and impact of her work really hit home when her six-year-old son began to struggle with his school work.
Her son had loved school when he started, but began to fall behind with reading, writing, and spelling, “becoming increasingly disengaged”, Fonua told the Close the Gap Campaign 2025 report launch in Naarm/Melbourne yesterday.
It turned out he could not see the board at the front of the classroom. Getting glasses saw him go from struggling with his studies and possibly being seen as having behavioural issues, as happens to so many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children with sight and hearing issues, to doing very well and loving school.
Her son, said Fonua, was an example of how transformative it can be for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to have access to eye healthcare, impacting their life course, educational attainment and ability to thrive and be healthy and well in the long term.
Yet Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to experience vision impairment and blindness at significantly higher rates than non-Indigenous Australians, the Alliance says in the report.
In a shocking 94 percent of cases, “the causes – refractive error, cataract, diabetic retinopathy, and trachoma – are conditions that, with timely intervention, are preventable”.
Fonua, who is Wiradjuri and Tongan, said that’s why passionate First Nations eye professionals came together in 2023 to establish the First Nations Eye Health Alliance, working to put cultural knowledge, perspectives and lived experience at the heart of policy and practice, under the goal of ‘Our Vision Our Way’.
The Alliance is working to develop the first ever First Nations Eye Health Plan, First Nations models of care, and the First Nations eye health workforce and related career pathways. It has won Lowitja Institute funding to investigate children’s vision issues and community perspectives on what makes good eye care.
“The importance of self-determination in closing the gap cannot be understated,” Fonua told the report’s launch.
The Alliance is one of 10 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led organisations or initiatives featured in this year’s Close the Gap campaign report, written by the Lowitja Institute and titled: ‘Agency, Leadership, Reform: Ensuring the survival, dignity and wellbeing of First Nations Peoples’.
It was launched at the historic Aboriginal Advancement League headquarters in Thornbury, founded in 1957 by community leaders including Sir Pastor Doug Nicholls, on the lands of the Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin nation.
Roadmap to equity, justice
Case studies in the report highlight work across Australia that is delivering real change and offer a roadmap to justice and equity, said Close the Gap Campaign co-chair Katie Kiss, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner.
“We know that the National Agreement [on Closing the Gap] has stagnated, and we know that progress has been and continues to be painfully slow,” Kiss told the packed event via video.
However, she said the case studies show what can be achieved when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have the resources and tools to drive reform, when communities are able to work with agency.
“It’s their innovation, their dedication and their ability to build partnerships that is driving success across our communities in profound and important ways,” she said.
Together, the report’s case studies tell “a beautiful story of resistance, care, love and dedication to our peoples and to our country’s lands and waterways”, Kiss said.
“These are the stories we wanted to tell,” she said.
Lowitja Institute CEO Paul Stewart was also awed and inspired by the stories, questioning why these successes are not featured on the nightly news or taken up by the ‘nay-sayers’.
“They’re proud, they’re resilient, they’re self-governed, and they’re innovative,” he said of the featured stories.
He highlighted the Palm Island Community Company (PICC), and its deep, place-based commitment to strengthen the social, cultural and economic fabric of Palm Island, 70 kilometres off the coast of Townsville.
PICC’s primary focus is on health and community services for its 3,000 strong community, but it also works to support socioeconomic development, generating jobs across many sectors, including running a regional call centre.
Its predominantly home-grown workforce comprises 203 staff – 87 percent are First Nations people, and 76 percent are Palm Islanders, creating critical pathways to work for a community where nearly a third are aged 14 or under, compared to 19 percent of the broader Queensland population.
Such positive stories “shine a light on the opportunities that exist where self determination becomes a reality”, Stewart said.
“What we need is opportunity. There are great outcomes within our communities and there is greater control for our future when we are in the driver’s seat.”
Across the other side of the country, the report also features the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation in the Pilbara and the Wunan Aboriginal Corporation in the East Kimberley.
Other case studies include the Justice Reinvestment Network Australia, National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ageing and Aged Care Council, Gayaa Dhuwi, Ngaweeyan Maar-oo, and the cultural safety work of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency.
The Healing Foundation was also invited to make a special contribution about its work with the Stolen Generations.
Time for accountability
While the Close the Gap report is focused on Blak excellence, it also delivers a clarion call for accountability from governments and other organisations and agencies whose policies and practices impact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
In a year when the report says Aboriginal and Torres Strait people are “still reeling” from the defeat of the Voice referendum, it highlights how many recommendations and findings from reports and inquiries going back decades lay unimplemented or undermined by other policies.
They include failure of governments to deliver on their responsibilities under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the Bringing Them Home report on the Stolen Generations and, most recently, the Productivity Commission’s 2024 Closing the Gap review.
The Close the Gap campaign’s big focus is on the need for governments to address the National Agreement’s four priority reforms: shared decision-making, strengthening and building the community controlled sector, transforming government organisations and shared access to data.
“Four years on from the revised National Agreement we are deeply disappointed that very little meaningful reform has been implemented,” the report says. “For almost two decades some iteration for the Closing the Gap strategy has been in place and yet comprehensive departmental and agency reform is seriously lacking.”
That’s clearly the case for Stolen Generations, who experience “a gap within a gap” in health and wellbeing, yet have seen a “woeful” governmental response over three decades to the recommendations of Bringing Them Home, said The Healing Foundation Board member Stephanie Harvey, a Bidjara woman.
She spoke to the event about a recent report that found only six percent of Bringing Them Home recommendations had been fully implemented in 30 years. Its title asks: “Are you waiting for us to die?”
“Everybody has the right to age in safety and dignity, and none more so than the Stolen Generations survivors,” she said.
Harvey said her “heart breaks over and over” to think of the courage of Stolen Generations survivors in Queensland who shared their stories with the state’s newly founded Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry, only for it to be abolished within months by incoming Liberal National Party Government.
Neither Queensland nor Western Australia have ever offered a Stolen Generations reparation package, she said.
Backward steps
In its Year in Review section, the report highlights a number of welcome moves, including more flexible funding for Aboriginal community controlled health organisations, the work of the South Australian Voice to Parliament, and the appointment of respected Warumungu and Larrakia woman Andrea Kelly as the Interim First Nations Aged Care Commissioner.
But it says Queensland’s decision to repeal its Path to Treaty Act (2023) is “a significant step backwards” and criticises the Northern Territory, Victorian, and Queensland governments for their “backpedal” on commitments to increase the age of criminal responsibility.
At the event, Victorian First Peoples Assembly member Lisa Briggs raised the recent “knee-jerk” toughening of bail laws in Victoria, which will disproportionately impact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, particularly children who come through the out-of-home care system.
First Nations director at the Human Rights Law Centre, Maggie Munn, said it was “deeply shameful” that the Victorian Government, facing an election next year, had “capitulated to the tabloid media” about crime rates.
The Government this week admitted that so many people are expected to be remanded under the changes that the reforms will be staged to allow more corrections staff to be hired to cope with the influx.
“They’re actually walking back from the commitments in the National Agreement,” Briggs said. “Incarceration rates cannot go up.”
A Gunditjmara woman who is a former National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO) CEO, Briggs is executive director of Ngaweeyan Maar-oo, the Victorian Government’s formal implementation partner on the National Agreement.
She urged better funding of prevention, early intervention, action on the social and economic determinants of health, stronger support for Justice Reinvestment, commitment to Treaty, oversight of police, lifting the age of criminal responsibility, and proper funding and recognition of Aboriginal community controlled organisations.
“All we are doing is funding interventions, not the root causes [of health inequity],” she said, declaring that the National Agreement provides “the blueprint for change”.
“Governments need to be held accountable for their decisions, and need to inherently change how they do business,” Briggs said.
“Aboriginal people need to be involved in the decisions that directly impact them. Our ACCOs need the support to be able to deliver policy and services for our mob, and we need access to data and evidence to guide how to do it.”
Focus on accountability
The 2025 Close the Gap report makes 44 recommendations, with a focus on accountability and measuring impact and implementation for the National Agreement, on Voice, Treaty and Truth, and commitments to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workforce, cultural safety and the elimination of racism in the health system.
In a separate statement, the Lowitja Institute said the recently published Closing the Gap Commonwealth 2024 Annual Report reaffirmed the need for a renewed systematic approach, with only five of 19 Closing the Gap targets on track to be met by 2031.
“Most notably, Closing the Gap targets relating to the rates of incarceration, suicides, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care have all worsened since previous years,” it said.
Assistant Indigenous Health Minister Ged Kearney told the launch that she looked forward to discussing each of the recommendations with the Close the Gap campaign.
Kearney said the Federal Government was closely watching the “incredibly important” Treaty process in Victoria, although she did not address widespread concerns that the Labor Government has walked away from the Uluru Statement.
As well as highlighting the successes and expertise of the people on the ground “doing the hard yards”, she acknowledged that the Close the Gap report “holds everyone to account for the failings, including governments of all colours and all levels”.
Highlighting the “amazing outcomes” of Birthing on Country initiatives, Kearney said she was deeply disappointed that the latest Closing the Gap data shows “we are no longer on track to meet the healthy birth weight target.
She pledged the Government would seek “to turn that around with you”.
“I hear and feel your frustration at the slow move towards reform,” she said.
“We have to do better.”
• Charles Maskell-Knight will include the health sector’s response to the report in The Zap next week.
Disclaimer: Marie McInerney was a member of the writing team for the Lowitja Institute that prepared the report and for The Healing Foundation. She wrote this article as a probono contribution for Croakey readers.
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