07/08/2026
We can close gap within a generation says Fiona Jose Kirstyne Davis
For more than two decades, Cape York communities have been grappling with Indigenous reform. We have learned enough to know that if family responsibility is backed by real opportunity, the gap can close within a generation.
Our reforms have supported 225 young people to complete year 12. They have proved how to close the gap on education, employment and income. When babies receive quality early childhood education, primary school builds numeracy and literacy, they attend boarding schools that support them to year 12 completion, and the minute they start further learning, vocational training and employment they are no longer in the bottom million Australians.
The lesson from our two decades of pilot reforms on Cape York is clear. You cannot close the gap without personal and family responsibility, and you cannot close it without government guaranteeing real opportunities.
But we have been trapped in pilot mode for years. The time has come for our Cape York reform agenda to become the standard framework for the social, economic and cultural development of what Pearson calls the “blue-dot communities” of remote Australia.
We call them blue-dot communities after the post-voice map of Australian Electoral Commission data from referendum day in 2023. That map clearly marks how remote First Nations townships stand out as blue dots in the deserts, Central Australia and the far north where Aboriginal people voted decisively for structural reform.
Pearson’s Garma address at the weekend exposed the central failure of Indigenous policy in those places. Responsibility for remote Australia is hopelessly fragmented across a federated system where accountability is so diffuse that no government is able, or compelled, to drive sustained reform.
While a growing Indigenous middle class has emerged in urban and regional centres, remote Australia remains trapped in mass unemployment, educational failure and deep welfare dependence. Capital city bureaucracies have a stranglehold on decision-making over remote problems they neither experience nor understand.
The Closing the Gap agreement that all governments are signed up to treats remote disadvantage as a service delivery problem. Aurukun shows what this looks like in practice. A single remote community has 115 separate grant-funded programs operating in its name. Local leaders do not know what half these programs are, who runs them, or what they achieve. They are an expensive mystery. It is a microcosm of a national system that funds more than 2000 disconnected initiatives across Australia – a maze of public expenditure that excels at administering disadvantage while failing to overcome it.
For almost 60 years after the 1967 referendum gave the commonwealth joint responsibility with the states for Aboriginal affairs, remote Australia has been stuck in a game of pass-the-parcel. The commonwealth provides funding while states and territories administer delivery systems. Communities live with the consequences of institutional dysfunction.
A child’s at-risk circumstances may be known to multiple state and federal departments, yet nothing effective happens until the damage is done. Each agency followed procedure. Each government points to its funding contribution. Activity is the measure, not outcomes.
Pearson’s call for the commonwealth to establish a direct administrative and funding relationship with blue-dot communities and their leadership is the urgent reform needed. States should continue delivering constitutional obligations for mainstream schools, hospitals and policing, but the duplicated machinery of state Indigenous affairs departments must end.
With respect, Marcia Langton and Tom Calma in this newspaper have misunderstood Pearson’s proposal. The Langton-Calma process proposed legislated advisory structures. We propose a fundamental reform of Australian federalism – a direct commonwealth administrative and funding relationship with remote blue-dot communities, so responsibility and accountability finally sit in the same place.
The small-scale Empowered Communities model established in 2013 is the proven fundamental shift in governance required. It works for government and the 10 communities involved – together they decide priorities, co-ordinate investment, and enforce strict accountability for results. Pearson’s proposal for a new federal settlement needs a single, clear piece of commonwealth legislation to lock in the deal.
We call this the Personal Responsibility and Opportunity Act. It is a nation-building compact, guaranteeing structural opportunity in return for personal and family responsibility. Families commit to doing their part and government is bound to provide the opportunities that make that effort meaningful. Programs come and go, ministers come and go. Statutory obligations remain. That’s why we argue legislation for accountability.
Year 12 completion is key in this proposed legislation. Teenagers who stay in Cape York for secondary school have only a one-in-100 chance of finishing year 12. By contrast, students in our Cape York Leaders Program, supported through quality boarding schools outside Cape York, complete at a rate of 94 per cent and reach economic parity with mainstream Australia. That proven structural opportunity must be backed by an education guarantee in federal law – if children attend school, they should receive a real opportunity to complete year 12, not be stranded by capped scholarships and failing local systems.
History shows that societies are transformed not by short-term programs but by long-term investment in human capability. Singapore’s rise was built on disciplined investment in education, skills and opportunity over decades. As Lee Kuan Yew understood, a nation’s greatest resource is the capability of its people. Our circumstances are vastly different, but the lesson is the same.
In the aftermath of the referendum, Australia’s remote communities were cast into political exile. A timid political class made a hasty retreat, burying the Indigenous agenda to save its own skin, leaving our people trapped in the same crushing, systemic paralysis.
It is time parliament honoured its basic, foundational obligations to those communities with the most at stake and that overwhelmingly voted for change. Legislate the Personal Responsibility and Opportunity Act, bypass state middle management and deliver a framework rooted in subsidiarity.
We’ve earned our wings over 25 years, and it’s time for government to let our people take the stick and fly by committing to closing the gap within a generation, 21 years, instead of leaving it to another century of reports and regret.
