First Nations adults jailed at 16.8 times the non-Indigenous rate, Productivity Commission reports

The disparity between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander imprisonment and non-Indigenous imprisonment in Australia is not narrowing. It is widening, and the official body charged with measuring it has now put a number on how fast.

On 29 July 2026 the Productivity Commission released the sixth Annual Data Compilation Report under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. It records that at 30 June 2025 the age-standardised rate of imprisonment for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults was 2,500.2 per 100,000, up from 2,318.4 per 100,000 a year earlier and more than 550 above the 2019 baseline of 1,925.4. In a footnote the Commission states that the 2025 rate was 16.8 times the non-Indigenous rate, compared with 11.2 times in 2019. The agreed target, a 15 per cent reduction by 2031, is assessed as not on track.

The underlying count comes from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Its Prisoners in Australia release of 11 December 2025 put the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners at 17,432 on census night 30 June 2025, or 37 per cent of all prisoners, an increase of 1,561 people or 10 per cent on the 15,871 counted a year earlier. Eighty-nine per cent were male and the median age was 33.9 years.

The national figure conceals sharp jurisdictional divergence. The Commission reports that between 2019 and 2025 the age-standardised imprisonment rate in the Northern Territory rose by 1,609.7 per 100,000 adults, the largest increase of any jurisdiction. Victoria's rate fell by 101.3 per 100,000 over the same six years. The Australian Capital Territory was the only jurisdiction to record a fall between 2024 and 2025, of 11.9 per 100,000. There are no state or territory targets for imprisonment, only a national one.

Justice is one of four targets the Commission assesses as worsening. In 2025, 20,842 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children aged 0 to 17 were in out-of-home care, a rate of 52.2 per 1,000 children against 47.3 per 1,000 at the 2019 baseline. The suicide target has moved further still: 298 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people died by suicide in 2024 across the five jurisdictions used for national reporting, an age-standardised rate of 33.9 per 100,000, up from 23.6 per 100,000 in the 2018 baseline year. Early childhood development is the fourth. Of 19 socio-economic targets, the Commission counts one met, three on track, five improving but not on track, four worsening and six without progress data.

The target that was met is preschool enrolment, and that is what the Commonwealth led with. In a media release dated 30 July 2026, the Minister for Indigenous Australians, Senator Malarndirri McCarthy, said enrolment had passed 95 per cent from 61.3 per cent in 2016, and called it a significant milestone. The same release said it was very concerning that outcomes were worsening for early childhood development, children in out-of-home care, incarceration rates and suicide. Where the Commission's document is a scoreboard, the government's is a headline followed by an acknowledgement.

Separate official measurement points the same way. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, in its Health and wellbeing of First Nations people report of 9 July 2026, put the First Nations burden of disease at 2.1 times the non-Indigenous rate in 2022, and recorded suicide as the fifth leading cause of death for First Nations people, 5.5 per cent of deaths, against seventeenth and 1.7 per cent for non-Indigenous Australians. The Bureau's Causes of Death release of 14 November 2025 ranked suicide sixteenth across the whole population in 2024, a reminder that these rankings are drawn on different bases and should not be read against each other too literally.

Several of the numbers carry warnings from the bodies that produced them. Queensland's 2025 out-of-home care data is preliminary because of a client management system transition, and disaggregations for that year are unavailable. The Bureau cautions that changes in population size, self-identification and Indigenous identification in death records make life expectancy trends hard to read, and notes breaks in the suicide time series in 2022 and 2023. Life expectancy itself has not been updated since the 2024 report, which used 2020 to 2022 data showing gaps of 8.8 years for males and 8.1 years for females. The next assessment is not due until 2029.

What the report does not do is explain the widening. It measures the ratio without attributing it to bail law, remand practice, policing or sentencing, and the Commission's earlier three yearly review of the National Agreement, released on 7 February 2024, had already found that fundamental changes were required. Whether the 2026 numbers move any government to make them is not yet known.