Dr Tracy Westerman AM

Why isn't the gap closing? Because proximity to government gets funded; not outcomes. That has arguably been a flaw in the Closing the Gap model since it began. The same small group of government advisers sits on committee after committee. Few of them look objectively at who is actually getting results. Once government funds you, it tends to keep funding you because you're already there. Outcomes rarely come into it. So the question I've always asked is this: if everyone around the Closing the Gap table is funded by government, who is holding government to account? The gap will never close while governments don't fear us. Governments fear what they cannot control. They fear what they cannot defund. The most significant advancements ever achieved for Black people, here and internationally, were built despite government, not because of it. Martin Luther King and Al Sharpton built movements that never depended on government money; funded by the people they were fighting for rather than the systems that fought them. That doesn't let government off the hook. It has a responsibility to fund critical programs. But you can't defund something you never funded in the first place. Very few people have been prepared to put their own time and money into what needed to be done. I made that decision a long time ago. Because leadership doesn't wait around for the comfort of government funding before it acts. It acts because it cannot stay comfortable any longer. And if you’re a true activist and you haven't made people uncomfortable, or even annoyed a few, you don't understand the assignment. In my most outspoken moments, my mum always reminds me: “Well Tracy, what are they gonna do? Cut your (nonexistent) government funding?” That always makes me laugh. But the reality is serious. As Aboriginal people we are a deeply vulnerable population, and governments have never genuinely feared us. Great change doesn't happen in a place of comfort. It happens in a place of discomfort. My very existence no doubt makes a lot of people in government uncomfortable. It doesn't surprise me that governments have never funded my work, despite my track record in this field. Of course, calling government out and holding it to account does comes at a cost: but when it comes to my people, it's a cost I have been more than prepared to pay every single day. And that is exactly what building a successful business has bought me: the freedom to speak my truth every day, and to build two successful organisations that aren’t vulnerable to the whim of a change of government. I have seen too many incredible grass roots programs fail to exist because they lose government funding. So I built both of my organisations so that would never happen. People often say to me, “Tracy, you have your critics”- as if that’s a surprise to me. My answer is: have they self-funded a scholarship program? Have they self-funded a string of Australian firsts in the field because the work needed doing? Have they volunteered every single day for the past seven years for the sole outcome of ensuring that children aren’t dying because they don’t have access to the things that most Australians take for granted? When someone can match that record, I'll openly and warmly welcome the criticism.