Aboriginal Affairs Minister Ben Wyatt has expressed disappointment that today’s Productivity Commission report on Indigenous Expenditure has found that direct expenditure on indigenous Western Australians by the Federal Government has fallen.
In total, the Western Australian Government spent $3 billion on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander residents in 2015-16, which was an increase of 7.6 per cent from 2012-13. This is in contrast to a 2.6 per cent reduction in Commonwealth funding.
The McGowan Labor Government is committed to getting better outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Western Australia.
To achieve this, the State Government is progressing a number of key initiatives including:
- an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Warehouse in the new Aboriginal Policy Unit, which will provide a clear line of sight between Closing the Gap targets and performance against those targets; and
- ongoing work by the Regional Services Reform Unit to map outcomes and service expenditure in the Pilbara and Kimberley, the first comprehensive and publicly available combined expenditure and outcomes analysis at a sub-regional level.