Under its first three-yearly check on the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, the Morrison government has tasked the Commission with evaluating its fitness at helping Indigenous Australians at securing employment and the work undertaken to improve life expectancy.
The core of the National Agreement is to break down barriers commonly experienced across Australia’s Indigenous communities and to ensure that government and industry sectors provide adequate access to employment opportunities, as well as services that will help improve their long-term prospects.
Historically, employment opportunities for Australia’s Indigenous population have been limited due to systemic discrimination and the disadvantages associated with living in geographically remote communities – potentially leaving many people at risk of falling behind socially and economically.
It’s a major problem that community and business leaders, politicians, and social advocacy groups have campaigned hard to solve, leading to the creation of federal initiatives like the National Agreement in 2020, receiving ringing endorsement from policy advocates.
But now is the time to see if the National Agreement is hitting its targets, so Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is eager to deploy the federal government’s most senior productivity analysts to comb through its progress against the four ‘Priority Reform’ areas in the Agreement.
These areas include collaboration between government, business and community, building a community-controlled sector, transforming government organisations, and sharing access to data and information at the regional level.
Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt said the Commission will undertake “extensive engagement” with Indigenous Australians to ensure that they have a genuine say in the design and delivery of the review as well as those in the future.
The progress of the review is likely to attract scrutiny of its own from advocacy groups who initially helped to champion the National Agreement, including the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA), which launched an Implementation Plan in 2021 to ensure that councils were ready to roll out infrastructure to support Indigenous communities.
ALGA has also boldly called for $100 million per annum to be allocated to councils to “support the capabilities of Indigenous councils” and the implementation of the Closing the Gap plan.
The National Agreement isn’t the only federal government initiative set up to give Indigenous Australians a leg-up.
It’s also backed up by the Indigenous Procurement Policy, which mandates all Commonwealth government departments and agencies to comply with procurement quotas through Supply Nation, a B2B catalyst bridging Australia’s corporate and government sectors with Indigenous-owned businesses.
The Productivity Commission expects to publicly release a draft report and provide its final report to the Joint Council on Closing the Gap by the end of 2023, which will also be made publicly available.
