Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt listens to Prime Minister Scott Morrison delivering his statement on the Closing the Gap report (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

It’s a fool’s errand to get one’s hopes up about a more successful implementation of the Closing The Gap commitment but Scott Morrison has so far overseen a good start to a process for creating one.

Last year’s Partnership Agreement between the Commonwealth, state and territory governments and Indigenous peak groups established the basis for a substantial commitment toward co-design and co-implementation of Closing The Gap initiatives with Indigenous communities through a structure for partnership and commitments to resourcing the development of more capacity within Indigenous peak groups and community groups to steer design and implementation.

The Commonwealth Implementation Plan itself, released today, puts some meat on that with additional funding for the Coalition of Peaks Indigenous groups to oversee the process as part of the Joint Council on Closing The Gap. It also commits that the next 12 months will see a significant expansion of the number of partnerships in place to co-design programs, which will form the institutional structure for the next stage of establishing a full partnership process.

The main focus of overhauling government engagement with Indigenous communities is belated funding for the Northern Territory and ACT for compensation for victims of the Stolen Generations and the development of a “baseline for how the Commonwealth engages with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stakeholders”, developed in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

On actual implementation of target one — Close the Gap in life expectancy within a generation, by 2031 — next steps will focus on strengthening the capacity of Aboriginal Community Controlled Health services and, along with target two — By 2031, increase the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander babies with a healthy birthweight to 91% — will be the subject of a new Health Plan from Greg Hunt’s department.

The two educational outcomes — including one of the few targets that are on track, early childhood education — will see expansions of existing programs to new sites (the third educational target, Year 12 or equivalent education, which is not on track, is primarily under the control of the states and territories). A Student Equity in Higher Education Roadmap is being developed to improve Indigenous higher education participation.

The new targets 10 — By 2031, reduce the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults held in incarceration by at least 15% — and 11 — By 2031, reduce the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people (10-17 years) in detention by at least 30% — are the subject of the Joint Council’s highest priority work, a Justice Policy Partnership that is expected to be finalised this year.

Beyond existing programs, the Commonwealth is funding improvements to data collection to enable better assessment of target 13 in relation to family violence in Indigenous households.

Unlike the initial Closing The Gap strategy — where the annual report on progress became, usually, a report card on failure and earnest promises from both sides to do better — the new process takes seriously the fact that Indigenous engagement from the very foundations of program design through to delivery on the ground must be prioritised to make serious progress toward most of the targets, especially in relation to health.

It’s not quite that the process is as important as the results, but if nothing else Scott Morrison and Ken Wyatt have elevated the former, confident that it should lead to the latter.

That doesn’t address the other great challenge of Indigenous affairs, though — expanding that logic to incorporate an Indigenous voice in policymaking at all levels via a voice to Parliament. There’s no movement on that, even though time is running out in this term of parliament.