Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Dodson for his question and I thank him for his leadership in this parliament and his leadership for Australians—our First Nations peoples and non-Indigenous Australians—for decades.

Today the Prime Minister tabled the annual Commonwealth Closing the gap report 2022 and, deeply regrettably, the progress is mixed, with only four of the nine targets for which we have updated data being on track. There is some good news: there are some areas where we are on track. More than 89 per cent of babies are being born with a healthy birth weight, which is on track, and 96.7 per cent of children were enrolled in preschool in 2021, which is also on track. But there has been unacceptably slow progress in other areas, and some metrics have gone backwards. This includes children being school ready, rates of incarceration, the number of children in out-of-home care and deaths by suicide. For the majority of socioeconomic targets, there is little new data available to track trends reliably. Work has started to improve this data so that we will have a clearer picture of how we are tracking in future years.

But I think we are obliged on all sides of this chamber to recognise that decades of inadequate government policies have failed First Nations people and have failed to close the gap. We must reverse the entrenched inequality, disadvantage and structural racism faced by First Nations peoples. We on this side of the chamber—and I hope all across the chamber—are committed to doing this, and to ensuring sustained progress over the life of the 2020 National Agreement on Closing the Gap and the Commonwealth Closing the Gap Implementation Plan. It is clear that the Closing the Gap architecture can only work if we work together, when there are coordinated efforts from all jurisdictions and, most importantly, when we work in genuine partnership with First Nations peoples. It is only when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples— (Time expired)