Governments across Australia are failing Indigenous communities with their "closing the gap" policies. That's one of the scathing findings from the productivity commission. It's called on governments to relinquish power and share it with indigenous-run organisations to achieve real change.
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00:00 Across health, education and housing, Aboriginal-run organisations are delivering services every
00:07 day under the Closing the Gap Agreement. Now a damning report is criticising government
00:15 for not keeping its end of the deal.
00:17 The majority of funding relating to services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
00:21 people actually doesn't go to the community controlled sector. It goes to the NGO sector,
00:26 which is not us.
00:29 Aboriginal community controlled organisations have told the Productivity Commission review
00:33 of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, it's not working.
00:37 The intention was that governments would work with the Aboriginal community controlled sector
00:43 acknowledging that they were underfunded compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts and that
00:48 has not yet happened across the entire agreement.
00:52 Closing the Gap is 15 years old, but in 2020 governments signed up to a radical overhaul,
00:59 promising to share power with Indigenous-run organisations.
01:04 Today's report says governments are unwilling to relinquish control and aren't revealing
01:09 where and what it's spending money on.
01:12 What we need to do is hold Indigenous organisations responsible for the money that the taxpayer
01:18 is giving them and stop turning a blind eye to make sure that money is being well spent.
01:24 Aboriginal community controlled organisations are already audited. There are really, really
01:28 strong controls in place.
01:30 The Productivity Commission spent three years looking into the effectiveness of the 2020
01:34 agreement. What was prevalent in the submissions was tension over money.
01:40 Yes, we did see examples where funding was given to external bodies outside of the Aboriginal
01:46 community controlled sector.
01:48 A message noted by the nation's leader.
01:51 We'll continue to put forward practical measures in order to close the gap and we'll be making
01:56 our statements when the Closing the Gap report is tabled shortly.
02:02 [BLANK_AUDIO]