National Close the Gap Day is held each year. It expresses the need to reduce the gap in health and other indicators between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian population as a whole. The gap is marked and shameful. It has also proved difficult to shift. Indeed, in the separation of children from their parents it threatens to grow strongly.
This suggests that new approaches are needed. In 2022 the theme of the 17 March day is ‘Transforming Power’. It echoes the recent shift of emphasis in the 2020 National Agreement on Closing the Gap from the yearly setting and reviewing of targets in a range of aspects of wellbeing to setting priority reforms for improving health and establishing 10-year targets by which progress can be measured.
In a perhaps more important decision, the Agreement sets out the broader reforms in attitudes, policy and administration that are needed if specific programs and goals are to be achieved. The relationships of power between government and administrators on the one hand and Indigenous communities need to be transformed to embody more participation and agency of the communities in the making and administering of policy.
These priorities all have to do with relationships between governments and Indigenous bodies in a way that emphasises partnerships and shared decision making, builds the Indigenous community-controlled sector, reforms government organisations, and improves access to data on which communities can make informed decisions.
These changes suggest that closing the gap will not be done by finding technological solutions or by increased expenditure on Indigenous health alone, though these things are necessary. It depends on changing a culture that regards Indigenous wellbeing as a problem for which governments must devise a solution that will then be imposed on Indigenous communities. This takes away agency from the people affected, imports into programs the assumptions that governments and their agents are superior in intellect and practical skill than Indigenous communities, and inevitably fails to recognise aspects of Indigenous cultures and situations that are crucial to effectual change. It is lacking in respect.
The National Day or Closing the Gap summons us all to reflect and to attend to our Indigenous sisters and brothers, our elders in this land. The Gap is not in them. It is in our humanity.