Released on the 19th of March, the 2026 Close the Gap Campaign report calls for bold and decisive action through legislative reform, to enable greater self-determination for Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander peoples. Indigenous Futures Centre Deputy Director and Health & Wellbeing Co-Theme Lead, Professor Roxanne Bainbridge has shared the below reflections.
“The Closing the Gap framework stands as a significant evolution in Australian Indigenous policy. This is expressed through its explicit but rhetorical commitment to structural reform and partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people; an approach strongly advocated by our leaders such as Professor Tom Calma in his leadership role as Chair of the Advisory Board for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous Futures at the University of Queensland. Yet in the everyday, this commitment remains constrained by entrenched power asymmetries that privilege state authority over Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty. Despite CtG’s strengthened architecture in recent years, we all know that progress is unequal. Evidence indicates a persistent gap between the Agreement’s reform intent and its implementation. The disconnect reflects enduring challenges, including limited redistribution of decision-making authority, poor resourcing, fragmented service systems and an over-reliance on outcome monitoring without equivalent accountability for government behaviour and robust data infrastructures.
Emerging evidence demonstrates that implementation of the four Priority Reforms, formal partnerships and shared decision-making (PR1), strengthening the community-controlled sector (PR2), transforming government organisations (PR3), and advancing data access and sovereignty (PR4) is limited and uneven. The result is a system that continues to reproduce intergenerational inequities under the guise of reform. This is sustained by fragmented service delivery and an over-reliance on technocratic performance monitoring that obscures accountability for government behaviour. Evaluations and policy analyses consistently show that PR1 is constrained by state retention of agenda-setting power where partnership structures are often advisory rather than authoritative. PR2 is similarly restricted, with underinvestment and short-term funding cycles undermining the capacity of community-controlled organisations to exercise sustained leadership. PR3 is particularly resistant to change, as bureaucratic systems continue to privilege existing administrative logics that result in minimal evidence of the deep institutional transformation envisaged in the Agreement. Here we need ‘structural’ change that is measurable. PR4 commitments to data access and Indigenous data sovereignty remain subordinate to government-controlled data regimes and limit Indigenous ownership and control over information.
These implementation failures reflect enduring power asymmetries. That is, the state continues to control resources, define success and set the limits in the scope of reform. This failure is not incidental, but indicative of entrenched institutional interests that resist ceding control. Governments continue to dominate funding flows, policy priorities and evaluative frameworks, while the language of partnership and codesign obscures the limited transfer of real authority. The ethical question is whether governments are willing to enact the redistribution of power that the Priority Reforms imply. As accentuated by the Indigenous Futures Centre’s focus on Indigenous knowledges and the structural drivers of intergenerational inequities, we are concerned with how power operates, who benefits and what constitutes an ethical course of action. This highlights the need for a fundamentally different ethical orientation; one that centres Indigenous authority, embeds enforceable shared governance and commits to genuine power-sharing.
Meaningful change requires enforceable power-sharing, sustained investment in Indigenous-led institutions and evaluative frameworks grounded in Indigenous-defined value, local context, lived experience and data sovereignty. Without these shifts and confronting the political reality of state reluctance to implement its own Priority Reforms, they risk continuing to operate as symbolic commitments or at best procedural compliance that enable CtG to function as a mechanism of policy continuity while reproducing the very inequities they are intended to disrupt.”
Read the 2026 Close the Gap Campaign Report here.
