This annual report describes the ongoing challenges and tangible solutions needed to close the health and wellbeing gap for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The report makes recommendations across a range of areas, including calling on the Australian Government to implement the recommendations of the Productivity Commission's 2024 Closing the Gap review and the four priority areas in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap.

This year’s themes of agency and self-determination, leadership and solidarity, and reform and transformation underscore the pivotal role Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders and communities continue to play. The report highlights the importance of government action in key areas to advance progress across the socio-economic targets in the National Agreement:

• building an enabling environment at the departmental and agency level
• adopting rights-based policy approaches, providing long-term funding, and engaging in shared decision-making with Indigenous communities
• establishing genuine, collaborative partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples at all levels of decision-making; including co-designing policies, programs, and services that reflect the needs, aspirations, and rights of Indigenous communities
• embedding the priority reform areas to address the structures, policies, and practices that marginalise and disenfranchise Indigenous peoples.

The report makes recommendations across the following areas:

• progressing voice, truth and treaty
• embedding Australia's human rights obligations under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)
• health, workforce and cultural safety
• aged care
• suicide prevention
• justice
• Stolen Generations
• responding to the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC).