Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Closing the Gap—it's another colonial venture. You cannot close the gap on colonial rule and an unacknowledged genocide. As Djarindjin Aboriginal Corporation describes it, Closing the Gap 'asks communities to align with government systems that were never designed with us in mind, and it measures progress using indicators we did not write'.

The government thinks that it can slogan away the legacy of colonialism, but cheap words don't solve injustice. Yet the government cannot even manage to abide by its own agenda. How absolutely shameful but all too predictable is it that still only four out of 19 national agreement targets are on track to be met, and four are moving backwards—and this, 17 years after the first Closing the gap report was published!

The Albanese government is not delivering justice for First Peoples. They attempted a failed referendum in their first term and then just shut up shop. Intent on making matters worse, it seems, the Albanese government just signed off on the appointment of David Connolly as the Administrator of the Northern Territory. This is a man who has consistently made public his contempt for First Nations people, a man who has made jokes about domestic violence survivors and has mocked Indigenous languages. This is a white man who has said he is indigenous to Australia. But what is the punishment for this racism? It is a promotion to govern the territory that has the highest proportion of First Nations peoples.

Then we have the Allan Labor government in Victoria locking up black kids for life. In New South Wales, Premier Chris Minns has overseen a devastating record high number of First Nations deaths in custody almost 30 years on from the royal commission. In every corner of the country you will see that First Nations injustice is now core to Labor's policy platform.

How much does the government really care about closing the gap when it doesn't even know how much progress it has made since 2021 on the goal of increasing the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people aged 25 to 34 who have completed a tertiary education? At estimates last month, the department couldn't tell me whether they knew if the government's current initiatives would even achieve the goal of 70 per cent. How much do you really care when all you give out is empty words and half-baked programs with no regard to their effectiveness?

When a bomb was thrown into an Invasion Day protest, the police did not even call it a terrorist attack until nine days later. If a bomb had been thrown into almost any other crowd, the country would have been in uproar, and rightly so, but, when First Nations people are targeted for exercising their right to mourn, to protest and to speak truth about this country's violence, there is silence and there is denial.

But what has Closing the Gap actually achieved? Still, we have continuation of the Stolen Generation. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women experience violence three times more than non-Indigenous women. First Nations people remain some of the most incarcerated in the world. Incarceration rates are higher now than they were before Closing the Gap began. If the Albanese government wants to see First Nations justice, it needs to close the gap on its own racist systems, policies and practices.