The latest Closing the Gap Report shows limited progress, with four targets on track, but another four going backwards.

The report provides an update of ongoing efforts to reduce disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. 

Authorities are on track to meet four targets - healthy birth weights, the number of children enrolled in preschool, a reduction in the rate of young people (10–17 years) in detention by at least 30 per cent, and square kilometres of land ownership.

However, progress has not been made on four other targets - children's school-readiness, incarceration rates, suicide rates, and child-removal rates.

Eight other targets were not updated because there is no new data to assess their progress, including the number of students completing year 12, and a target to reduce family violence and abuse.

Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney says the government will focus on areas where targets are failing.

“There will be justice reinvestment across 30 communities in this country, which we'll look at community-wide ways of keeping young people out of the criminal justice system, increasing school retention, reducing domestic violence and reducing crime in those communities,” she said. 

“We are providing national leadership.”

The report deals primarily with data from the time the previous Coalition government was in power.

Ms Burney says next year's report will be more applicable to the new government.

“The first thing to acknowledge is that this is a report that's looking back,” she said. 

“What's going to be significant is whether or not the dial has moved on any of those targets next year.”

Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC) chief executive Catherine Liddle says the targets are not only a matter for the federal government.

“The message is to all layers of government, actually, and it is that the evidence shows [that,] where there is a genuine effort to empower communities and to transfer authority to Aboriginal community-controlled organisations, we see results,” she said. 

“But we can't sit down and wait for these results to happen. We need action and we need it to move faster.”

Ms Liddle community-controlled organisations can help, if they are empowered to do so.

“We know that the system was built to remove children. The system is administered by non-Indigenous entities,” she said. 

“Where we see it halted is where Aboriginal communities and Aboriginal community-controlled organisations have worked with their own families to say: 'What is it that you need?'

“The evidence shows Aboriginal community control has the potential to hold the over-representation of our children in out-of-home care.”

Victorian Greens senator Lidia Thorpe says the gaps were forged by colonisation.

“These injustices are a symptom of a bigger issue that we face in this country, and that is colonisation,” she said.

“If we address racism in this country, we will see these rates go down. We confront racism in everything we do to survive as a people. It's systemic racism that continues to hold us back.”

Senator Thorpe says the government has the answers on how to Close the Gap, but need to take action. 

“Practical action has been sitting there for 30 years with the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody … and also the 20-year-old Bringing them Home report which, again, provides solutions through the recommendations on how to stop this new stolen generation, which is outnumbering the old Stolen Generation,” she said.