Australia counts what it cares about. It is time food was counted too.
The National Agreement on Closing the Gap holds targets for the outcomes this country says matter: education, housing, health, land, language. Read the list slowly and you notice the absence. Food. There is no national target for whether First Nations families can reliably feed themselves. Yet food sits beneath every other target on the list. A child cannot learn hungry. A patient cannot heal hungry. A worker cannot work hungry.
Add a national target to the Closing the Gap framework: that every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander household has secure access to affordable, nutritious, culturally appropriate food, with community controlled food infrastructure counted and funded as the way to get there.
What gets measured gets funded. What gets funded gets built. Without a target there is no baseline, no budget line, no way to know whether a remote store is stocked or empty. A target does not lay blame. It creates a shared obligation, and something a nation can be held to.
Your name is not a gesture. Every signature strengthens the case we put in front of the Joint Council on Closing the Gap. Add yours and we will carry it there.
Your name, postcode and organisation are included in the petition we deliver to government. Your email is never published and never given to anyone.
The full draft policy is below and you can download it. It asks for four things. One: a new national target for First Nations food security, with a baseline drawn from national health survey data and progress reported every year. Two: a community controlled food infrastructure fund, so the path to the target is owned by communities, not departments. Three: procurement reform, so government and corporate buying counts toward community food outcomes. Four: a food security test for policy that touches remote stores, freight and essential services. None of this invents new machinery. It aims the machinery we already have.