For the first time since the National Agreement on Closing the Gap was signed, a target has been met. More than 95 per cent of First Nations children are now enrolled in preschool, up from 61.3 per cent in 2016. A decade of early investment, delivered through Aboriginal community-controlled organisations, closed a gap.

The rest of this week's Productivity Commission data is a warning. Halfway through the agreement, three of the 15 targets assessed are on track: employment, land and sea rights, and legal rights and interests. Four are going backwards: suicide, adult imprisonment, children in out-of-home care, where First Nations children are removed at 52.2 per 1,000, 11.5 times the rate for other children, and the share of children developmentally on track. Sit with that last pairing for a moment. Australia has achieved near-universal preschool enrolment while the development of the children walking through those doors goes backwards. We are getting our kids to the door and failing them inside it.

Sue-Anne Hunter, the National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People, said: "Governments do not need to design something new. They need to fund and follow what is already working in the areas where our children are still being removed, still being detained, and still going without."

Australia knows how to close the gap. The harder question is why so much of corporate Australia, and so many of our governments, have eased off.

Part of the answer is fear. When I gave evidence to the federal parliamentary inquiry into racism, I told the committee what our newsroom has seen since the Voice referendum: too many Australians took the result as permission to be openly racist. Every day our platforms receive racist, abusive and threatening comments. Elders who survived the Stolen Generations share their history, then read comments calling them liars. A young business owner appears in our pages and spends the following week defending her identity to strangers. Racism is shrinking the space in which Aboriginal people are willing to speak publicly. That silence is its purpose.

Corporate Australia has sensed the same mood and drawn the wrong lesson from it. Since the referendum I have heard the same worry from senior executives again and again: anxiety about being seen as too supportive of Indigenous initiatives, for fear of a racist backlash from certain corners of Australian society. The anxiety is about visibility. Companies keep the partnerships and do the work behind the scenes, and drop the press release.

In my role, I see the good work being done by many of Australia's biggest companies when it comes to Indigenous affairs. Employment, procurement, cultural change, education, consultation and genuine community partnerships. Dragging the information out of these companies is often hard because they're worried about public backlash. That caution hands the abusers exactly what they set out to win. Their goal is silence, and every shelved partnership, every lapsed sponsorship, every reconciliation commitment left out of the annual report delivers it for free.

The retreat also fails the most basic commercial test. This month the Northern Territory Indigenous Business Network released the BlakPrint Report, the first comprehensive measurement of an Aboriginal business economy in any Australian jurisdiction. Aboriginal businesses added $3.4 billion to the Territory economy in 2024-25, 10.1 per cent of Gross Territory Product, and employed 11,600 full-time equivalent workers, more than the Territory's entire construction industry.

The modelling behind the report, Australia's first computable general equilibrium model of an Indigenous economy, found that Indigenous ownership itself is worth $542 million a year to the Territory and 8,701 Indigenous jobs, and that growing the Blak economy to match the Indigenous share of the Territory's population would add $6 billion a year by 2035. As NTIBN chief executive Naomi Anstess wrote in the report's foreword: "The question is no longer whether Blak businesses contribute to the economy. The evidence is now clear." The Territory's figures are its own, but the direction of the evidence does not stop at its borders. Companies stepping back from Indigenous partnerships are walking away from one of the country's fastest-growing markets.

Governments have their own version of the retreat. This weekend the Garma Festival, the country's largest Indigenous gathering, proceeds without the Prime Minister, despite his promise to attend every year. Penny Wong and Malarndirri McCarthy will lead a substantial federal delegation instead. The government will be at Garma. The Prime Minister chose to be elsewhere. "I haven't had a day off all year," he said when asked.

At Garma, the call for ambition will also come from the opposition benches. Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians Julian Leeser will tell the festival "it is time to get off the mat" and call for a post-Voice agenda built on school attendance and completion, Indigenous suicide prevention and economic development. His party carries its own baggage here: it campaigned against the Voice and opposes the truth and treaty processes our communities continue to call for, and Leeser, who resigned from the shadow cabinet to back the referendum, knows that better than anyone. Still, when he asks "Why shouldn't we support the development of Indigenous investment institutions that partner with local communities to generate wealth?", BlakPrint has already answered him, in billions. A contest between the major parties over who can do more for Aboriginal people would serve communities far better than the drift both sides have allowed since October 2023.

None of this requires a new framework, another review or a further decade of consultation. As Productivity Commissioner Selwyn Button said: "Where governments have started sharing power with communities, progress has followed." The preschool milestone proves the formula. Invest early, back Aboriginal community-controlled organisations and Indigenous businesses, hold your nerve when the trolls arrive, and the numbers move.

So here is the ask. To governments: fund what works, at the scale the data demands. To corporate Australia: your Indigenous partnerships, procurement targets and reconciliation commitments matter most at the moments they attract flak. Our newsroom receives that flak every day, and we keep publishing. The gap will close when the rest of the country makes the same decision to keep showing up.

Reece Harley is the Managing Director and Business Editor of National Indigenous Times.