Government audit says strategy not properly evaluated and does not meet government guidelines

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Labor, the Greens and peak Indigenous groups say the government must overhaul its Indigenous advancement strategy after a report found that the $5.1bn program was not being properly evaluated and did not align with the government’s policy objectives.

The strategy was a huge shakeup in Aboriginal affairs funding introduced by the Abbott government in 2014, designed to “eliminate waste and duplication” by consolidating more than a 120 economic, health, education and cultural programs under the prime minister’s department. More than $500m was cut from Indigenous spending.

A report released on Tuesday by the Australian national audit office said there had been “substantial delays” evaluating the strategy, and for the first two years there had been no evaluation at all.

The strategy was meant to offer funding flexibility, cut red tape and more clearly link funding to outcomes. However, in 2017 the national audit office found it was poorly implemented and not transparent.

The department did not meet its guidelines, keep records of key decisions or set performance targets for all projects.

Aboriginal groups to partner with state and federal ministers in Closing the Gap Read more

The national audit office said the department was “in the early stages” of building an evaluation framework that “has the potential” to ensure it delivered high quality, ethical and inclusive outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Labor’s Linda Burney said: “This is no way to manage billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. Indigenous Australians deserve better, particularly when this year’s Closing the Gap report showed five out of the seven targets are not on track.

“Serious questions about the administration of the [strategy]have been swirling for years.”

The Greens senator Rachel Siewert was “horrified” by the findings and “outraged that it took two years for the government to even get an evaluation process up and running”.

“Because there is no evaluation, the government isn’t able to say with certainty what has worked and what hasn’t,” she said. “We need a serious change in approach, that is better directed, transparent and accountable.”

The chief executive of the national Aboriginal community-controlled health organisation, Pat Turner, said the report was “not good enough for the department in charge of the Australian public service”.

“This audit shows that it is time for a radical shift away from governments and public servants to Aboriginal-led delivery through their own community-controlled organisations,” she said.

“They will take responsibility for outcomes in a way that the public servants do not.”

She was pleased the prime minister, Scott Morrison, had agreed to a new Coag partnership agreement on Closing the Gap, which brings the representatives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples into the equation.

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“It will allow us to hold agencies much more to account for what they are doing and not doing,” Turner said.

“But we also have to commit to building up the community-controlled organisations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait peoples to manage programs and deliver services to our people.”

The prime minister’s department acknowledged the findings of the audit report but said the strategy was set up within a “very challenging timeframe”.

It was “moving into a more mature phase of implementation that draws on lessons learned”.

The report made four recommendations, which the department agreed to andwas already working to meet.

It intended to revise the strategy’s guidelines, and improve the application process and its own record keeping.

The Indigenous Australians minister, Ken Wyatt, said he “acknowledges the frustration we all share that we are not seeing quick enough progress on closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians”.

“This is why Coag has agreed governments – both commonwealth and states and territories – and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people will share ownership of and responsibility for a jointly agreed framework and targets and ongoing monitoring of the Closing the Gap agenda,” he said.