Is 'Close the Gap' a useful approach to improving the health and wellbeing of Indigenous Australians?

Abstract

There is widespread enthusiasm for the Australian government’s commitment to ‘Close the Gap’ in Indigenous disadvantage, health status and life expectancy. Yet despite the rhetoric, the pursuit of statistical equality for Indigenous Australians is not a novel or particularly promising approach. It is also an approach that reduces Indigenous Australians to a range of indicators of deficit, to be monitored and rectified towards government-set targets. This illustrates a substantial imbalance in power and control over the Indigenous affairs agenda in Australia, which is the ‘gap’ that must be addressed for the health and wellbeing of Indigenous Australians to improve.