Submission to the Productivity Commission on the Review on the National Agreement on Closing the Gap Draft Report

On 23 August 2019 before the National Agreement on Closing the Gap (henceforth the National Agreement) was signed, I questioned the value of an Indigenous Evaluation Strategy and its capacity to accurately assess the disadvantage experienced by Indigenous Australians today. My main concern was that by focusing on targets set by statistical social indicators, the evaluation could be useful for measuring sameness between an estimated abstract sub-population Indigenous Australians and another sub-population non-Indigenous Australians (irrespective of the fact that many households, families, and communities have Indigenous and non-Indigenous members). But it would be of limited value in dealing with situations where Indigenous people either aspire to live differently or must because of their circumstances dictated by locational and historical circumstances. I suggested that a new policy framework, not a new evaluation framework, is what is most urgently needed.