Already and this is the daily This is the Daily ohs oh, now it makes sense. Good morning and welcome to the Daily Ods. It is Thursday, the fifteenth of February. I'm Billy, I'm Lucy, Lucy. Before we move on, I feel like anytime I tell anyone about your job at the Daily Odds, they are so intrigued. Can you just tell us what you do here?
Yeah? I'm the fact checker.
I check the facts. That's what I do all day. And what does that involve? How do you check the facts?
Mostly? I bother the journalists. I ask them questions that they would think would be obvious.
You're a big advocate for the primary sources.
Absolutely. I'm always calling people and looking up PDFs and figuring out what the truth is. A full time fact checker, I think it's a rarity at a news organization, especially one of our size. Yes, definitely one of our size.
Now now, on today's episode, we have heard two updates on the Closing the Gap scheme this month, first that governments are at serious risk of not meeting their goals, and then from the federal government this week we learned that progress is not just stalling, but actually going backwards in some areas. Lucy, you're here to explain the failures and successes of the closing the gap scheme. But first, what's making headlines?
More than two million calls to cent a link when unanswered over a six month period last year. Services Australia data for July to December shows seven million callers received congestion messages and had to wait an average of more than thirty minutes to speak to a staff member. Federal senators analyze the data from Services Australia during hearings this week, finding nearly a third of callers hung up after long wait times.
The Competition Watchdog has won a case against car manufacturer Mazda after it received reports of recurring issues with new car peres. The Federal court ordered Mazda to pay eleven point five million dollars in a fine, as well as eighty two thousand dollars to some customers in compensation. Their AGREBRAC accused Mazda of deceptive conduct after it denied dozens of customers refunds or replacements on vehicle faults, which they're entitled to under the Australian consumer law.
Two opposing parties in Pakistan have made a deal to share power after an election last week resulted in a hung parliament, meaning neither party won enough seats to form government. Independent candidates backed by former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who's currently in jail, won the most seats but can't form government on their own. Another former prime minister, Noa's Sharif has agreed to lead a coalition with former Foreign Affairs
Minister Bilawal Bhutu Zadari. Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League is politically conservative, while Zadari's People's Party is described as center left. Despite their differences, the parties have enough seats to form government and have announced their work to gather.
And Today's good news. Breakthrough satellite mapping technology has helped researchers from the University of Queensland find unknown coral reefs. The newly mapped three hundred and fifty thousand square kilometers of reefs means there are more coral ecosystems in the world's oceans than scientists previously thought. The Global Reef Mapping Project, which is focused on conservation efforts, also found new areas of coral reefs up to thirty meters deep.
Billy. It was the sixteenth anniversary of the National Apology to Indigenous People this week. I have a very clear memory of that day in two thousand and eight when my teacher rolled the TV into our year six classroom so that we could watch the speech. And that same year the first iteration of the Closing the Gap targets were set, and we've heard some very interesting updates about those targets this month.
Before we look at what the updates have been, can you first just explain to ours what are the Closing the Gap targets.
Well, they're an acknowledgment that there's a significant difference in the overall quality of life of First Nations people and not Indigenous Australians. So life expectancy, representation in the prison system, health school completion in all of these areas and more statistics tell us that broadly First Nations people are worse off than other people in this country. These targets were first set in two thousand and eight, as I said,
and they were renewed in twenty twenty. More importantly, probably the targets are commitments made by all levels of government, federal all the way down to local to improve First Nations people's lives. Many of these targets actually have deadlines, so governments need to show that they've met these goals by twenty twenty five or twenty thirty one, depending on the target. We've learned quite a bit about how governments are progressing towards those targets this month.
And so what exactly have we learned? How are they progressing?
They're not progressing well, is the thing. So earlier this month we heard from the Productivity Commission. So that's a federal government body that gives independent advice and can evaluate how different government services are performing. I feel like we hear about the Productivity Commission all the time, all the time. They've got their fingers in a lot of different pies.
So they shared what's been achieved since those targets were renewed in twenty twenty, and their report was pretty scathing. It called current Efforts week and said that although there were some pockets of good practice, measures have been slow, uncoordinated, and piecemeal, so all over the place.
Like you said, that's pretty scathing. Did it call out any specific failures.
One of the more damning comments I think was that lawmakers have quote failed to fully grasp what they'll actually need to do to live up to those commitments they made. So that's one specific The Productivity Commission doesn't think those governments, So that's all levels of government are showing they understand
what they've actually agreeed to. And another big point that was called out was that governments haven't actually consulted enough with First Nations communities to design measures together to close the gap. It's said that First Nations community organizations actually deliver better outcomes than governments in many areas, and that part of the report really reminded me of this saying, which I think comes from disability activism. Nothing about us
without us. Basically, people need to be involved in policies that will affect them.
And did the Productivity Commission have any recommendations about what the government can do to fix that?
So the report recommended our fundamental rethink of systems used to address disadvantage and it's said agreeing to those targets requires government decision makers to accept that they do not know what is best for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
It said that without large scale changes, governments risked quote another broken promise to First Nations people, and it said, the agment can and should be a blueprint for real WALK reform, but governments need to move beyond business as usual and address entrenched attitudes, assumptions, and ways of working that stop progress. So all of that came out last week and really foreshadowed what happened this week when we got a federal update on how the targets are progressing.
So we know that broadly the targets are not progressing well before we look at what the update this week was, can you first just explain what actually are the targets that we're looking at here, how many of them are there?
So they cover all areas of quality of life. They include things like increasing the number of people speaking Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders languages, making sure small children are thriving before school and when they go into school, reducing the number of kids and out of home care, ensuring people aren't living in poor quality overcrowded houses, and even
increasing native title rights to land and sea country. And then in terms of numbers, there's these four Priority reforms which cover more of the enacting programs, and then there are seventeen targets and a couple of subtargets, so kind of nineteen broad targets and so we're flagged that there was another update this week. What was that?
So PM Anthony Albanizi made a speech in Parliament this week kind of touching on what that update was.
Sixteen years after the apology, only eleven out of nineteen socioeconomic outcomes for average on Tyres Strait Islander people's are improving. Just four are on track to meet their targets. What should give us pause is that outcomes have worsened for four critical targets.
And that worsening that he mentioned, that's got the government very worried.
We just heard him mention four targets that are getting worse. What are those?
So they're critical targets as he said, So those targets are one first nation's children hitting developmental mind in their first year of school, to making sure adults aren't overrepresented in the justice system, three keeping kids out of home care and for reducing the suicide rate. So the stats show us that all of these things are getting worse, not better. The government said it's determined to fix this.
But considering what we've just heard about the Productivity Commission's report, it does sound like a lot of work needs to be done.
Are there any targets that are on track?
Yeah, they're silver linings. So some of those targets that are on track are actually related to those that are getting worse, so we could possibly see better outcomes in the future. So like, for example, the target for the majority of First Nations children to be in culturally appropriate early childhood education is on track to be met, so we could see better outcomes in terms of that target of kids meeting markers in their first year of school.
You know, if preschool attendance is getting better, then KINDI is probably going to.
Start to look better.
And there's also been improvement in the overrepresentation of children in the criminal justice system. First Nations children are still very much overrepresented, but those numbers are getting lower, and that relates to the overrepresentation of adults in the system because research shows us that incarceration as a child is a key driver of incarceration as an adult, So fewer kids being incarcerated could possibly lead to fewer adults being incarcerated.
We can see the whole trajectory of this possibly getting better. And then the other targets that are on track are increasing access to land and the employment rate for adults. One thing to note, not all of this data is new, so we'll probably hear more from the Productivity Commission and from the government throughout the year as more of those stats start to come through, more data gets updated, and we'll keep you across all of that on TDA.
Lucy, Thank you so much for joining us. It is always a treat when we get to pull you away out of primary sources and deep into every document ever to be on the mic. Thank you so much.
What would it be here?
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My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Dunda Bungelung Caalcuttin woman from Gadigol Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present,