Federal, state and territory minsters will sit down with Aboriginal organisations for the first time to work on Closing the Gap, after signing a 10-year partnership agreement, but Indigenous groups have said this must not be seen as a substitute for a voice to parliament.

The chief executive of the National Coalition of Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations (Naccho), Pat Turner, was due to co-chair Wednesday’s meeting in Brisbane with the federal Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion.

Aboriginal groups had “done the heavy lifting” to get the partnership signed, Turner said.

“This is first time ever that a [council of Australian governments meeting] has had other people as equal partners at the table. It’s a unique arrangement and it’s long overdue.

“We want real outcomes at the local community level where Aboriginal people can start experiencing secure, healthy living, where they can have ready access to community-controlled, comprehensive primary healthcare no matter where they live, they can have access to the best education services available, from early childhood to adult education.

“We want our people to have jobs – real, full-time paid jobs. That’s how you get out of the poverty trap. We want much better services, early intervention, wraparound services for vulnerable families.

“We want to reverse the removal of our children into state care, reverse the numbers of our children going into detention centres, reverse the number of our adults being thrown in prison. We refer to that as the negative end of the spectrum, where investment is very large.

“We want greater investment at the positive end of the spectrum to help people turn their lives around and be productive members of the community.”

Aboriginal organisations have 12 representatives on the council, “on the basis of getting the power imbalance between governments and Aboriginal people a bit in our favour, and so we have a breadth of geographical representation”, Turner said.

But she said it was important the arrangement was not seen as a proxy voice to parliament.

“Let me make it clear to everybody: we are not the voice, we are simply a coalition of Aboriginal peak organisations to work on Close the Gap.

“We expect any incoming government at the federal level to deal with their policy positions in relation to the voice, the republic, a referendum on recognition in [the] constitution. They are major structural reform issues that any incoming government will have to deal with.

“But I want to make it abundantly clear that our focus is solely on Closing the Gap, which in itself is big enough.”

Turner said building reliable data was a priority.

“The First Nations population is less than a million people, and yet there’s no one consistent dataset on any of the targets, on a comparable basis nationally.

“Every state, territory and national government has their own sets. For less than one million people you would think they could have one set of data.”

Turner said the recent amendments to juvenile justice legislation in the NT were a backward step which ignored many of the recommendations of the royal commission, and expressed concern at the federal government’s recent decision to extend the cashless welfare card trial.

“The Don Dale legislation is a backward step. They didn’t take into account approaches that would let children be rehabilitated and have their health needs met, their trauma and dysfunction dealt with in a healthy way rather than punitive detention. It’s a total backward step and they need to be condemned for it.”