Peter Dutton’s success in holding the Liberal show together has been strictly limited. And it has come at the cost of deepening the division in the country.
In a simply worded question, Australians will be asked to approve altering the Constitution “to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice”.
In this podcast Michelle and Amanda Dunn canvass federal parliament's final sitting week of the year, including the House of Representatives' censure of Scott Morrison and the flurry of legislation
Labor holds the majority of Western Australia’s lower house seats for the first time since 1990.
Chairperson of AIATSIS Jodie Sizer, daughter of the late Sir Robert Menzies Heather Henderson, Jenny Morrison, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and CEO of AIATSIS Craig Ritchie look at Indigenous artefacts at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra.
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The Morrison government has claimed it has delivered on its commitment to co-design an Indigenous Voice, but the parliamentary term will end without any such Voice being legislated or in place.
The Morrison government will provide $378.6 million for a new redress scheme for Stolen Generation survivors as part of more than $1 billion for its Closing the Gap implementation plan.
The latest Closing the Gap agreement has been billed as ‘historic’ and ‘practical’. But the fine print is vague and the targets lack ambition. Meanwhile, one key word is missing completely.
The revamped Closing the Gap agreement is a significant achievement for Indigenous organisations. But we need more detail about who will be responsible for what.
The government will unveil 16 targets for Indigenous advancement, when Scott Morrison announces on Thursday a new national agreement on “Closing the Gap”.
The 12th Closing the Gap report shows disappointing results on key targets, including child mortality, school attendance literacy and numeracy, employment and life expectancy.
Morrison this week delivered to an audience of big business what was described as his most important speech for the rest of the year.
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Next week begins the year’s final parliamentary fortnight, and the main attention will be on the fate of two bills - the ensuring integrity legislation, and the medevac repeal.
There’s ample evidence that a government-led approach to Indigenous policy-making has not always led to good outcomes for Indigenous peoples.
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The Coalition government is stressing partnerships and accountability in its Indigenous policies, but PM Scott Morrison is actually taking a top-down approach and ignoring Indigenous advice.
‘It’s really an appalling story of lack of accountability [and] lack of oversight by this government’, says Michelle Grattan on the findings in the interim report from the aged care royal commission.
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As the first Indigenous federal cabinet minister, Ken Wyatt is widely respected in first peoples communities, but by the same token, the expectations on him are very high.
The process will also develop ways to get more Indigenous input to state and local decisions, especially on the issue of service delivery.
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Two prominent Indigenous Australians have been appointed to chair a senior advisory group to oversee an extensive process for developing options for an Indigenous “voice to government”.