Victoria will push the federal government to commit to preferencing Indigenous community-controlled service providers under the redesigned Closing the Gap program when ministers meet ahead of the Council of Australian Governments meeting on Friday.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates will travel to Canberra on Wednesday for a national meeting ahead of the ministerial talks to report back on the first round of consultation on refreshing the decade-old targets, four of which expire this year.

Despite being in the early stages of consultation, it is expected the federal government will try to finalise the outline, if not the detail, of the new targets this week.

Speaking to Guardian Australia ahead of that meeting, the Victorian Aboriginal affairs minister, Natalie Hutchins, said that giving responsibility for service and program delivery, Indigenous community-controlled organisations was an “absolute obvious outcome” of an updated Closing the Gap strategy.

“It may not be a target in itself but it may be a core principle that underpins how we achieve the targets,” Hutchins said. “It’s one thing to set a bunch of targets, it’s another thing to have a strategy that underpins it to achieve them.”

Of the seven targets set in 2008, only one – to halve the gap in year 12 attainment by 2020 – is on track.

Hutchins said that experiences in Victoria showed that health and other services had greater success rates in targeting Indigenous if they were in Indigenous hands.

“I think if we can reflect that more with how we’re allocating our funding at all levels of government then we’re actually going to see more successful outcomes reaching those targets and targets that get set in the future,” she said.

A spokesman for the federal Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, said that Indigenous enterprise and Indigenous procurement would be a federal government priority in the policy refresh.

The spokesman said the value of contracts awarded to Indigenous businesses by the federal government in the first two years of its Indigenous procurement policy was 90 times higher than in the last year of the Rudd/Gillard government.

However a report by the Productivity Commission last year found the proportion of federal funding that went directly to Indigenous organisations for program service delivery has fallen by a third since the original Closing the Gap strategy was announced.

Scullion’s office also said the federal government remained committed to finalising the new Closing the Gap targets by July.

Victoria has held one community consultation on refreshing the Closing the Gap program, and has two more scheduled to occur in a month.

The treaty commissioner, Jill Gallagher, one of the six Victorian Indigenous delegates, said the overwhelming message from consultations so far was the need to embed self-determination into the structure of the Closing the Gap program, and reflect the importance of culture.

“The current targets are more like indicators,” she said. “We should be more aspirational.”

The delegates will also emphasise the need to uphold Indigenous community decisions such as the Uluru Statement, key parts of which have already been dismissed by the Turnbull government.

Gallagher, who will attend Coag on Thursday and Friday, has joined other voices in urging the government not to abandon the current targets, saying they represent key areas that have still not been met.

Gallagher said the lack of time originally allocated for community consultation and the language in a discussion paper released by the federal government this week did not fill her with confidence.

The seven-page discussion paper suggests targets be based around four pillars of “prosperity”: economic, individual, community and environment.

It’s not a word that came from the Indigenous community, Gallagher said.

“It’s an indication of who is running the country and who is running Aboriginal affairs at a national level,” she said.

Scullion will not attend the delegates meeting but will meet with them on Thursday.