Around that time, it was generally estimated that building 40,000 dwellings would do the trick. The Department of the Northern Territory organised something like this – with better quality housing than had been envisaged for Aboriginals – in a two-year period after Darwin was blown down by a cyclone in December 1974.

In the decade after the Whitlam promise, houses were built for Aboriginals, but not at a rate that ever much allowed the shortfall between need and supply to be reduced. The number and size of Aboriginal families was increasing each year faster than the supply; moreover, government and housing associations were diverting money from maintenance and repair in a way that often meant that the quantity, as well as the quality, of usable housing stock was actually deteriorating even as new houses were being put in the mix.

The effects were not only obvious in the most remote and traditional Aboriginal settlements, but in mission housing around country towns, or in urban environments, where, often, there were up to 20 people living in a three-bedroom house.

A little more than a decade after Whitlam's promise, the federal government, by now under Bob Hawke's prime ministership, was making one of its periodic restructures of Commonwealth housing programs, as well as housing for Aboriginals. More money was promised, and the building of houses at a much faster rate.

I reminded the then minister for Aboriginal affairs, Clyde Holding, about Whitlam's promise and its manifest failure, given that the shortfall was now about 60,000 houses. I asked him if he would set a target date by when he hoped or expected that every Aboriginal family would be decently housed. Would it, for example, be by 1994, a decade hence? Or 2004, two decades hence?

Holding refused to set or predict a date, and indicated no great confidence that the problem would be addressed within 20 years. Well, I asked him, what about 2014, or 2024? Surely government could at least have an aspiration in the matter – something against which progress, or lack of it, could be measured. Holding wouldn't bite. He knew, or thought he knew, that any such promise would come back to haunt government.

He was probably wise. The gap between need and supply of housing, or beds, is bigger than ever. The government has never narrowed the gap. At present rates, Aboriginals will remain the poorest, sickest, least employed and least educated group in the community 80 years from now – and still without a plan, as opposed to a vague hope and intention, to make it different. By then, perhaps, some prime minister may have relented and given Aboriginals a cheerio call in the constitution, if only as a consolation for the latest budget cuts.

Holding's reluctance to adopt targets was in part because it was obvious even then that the host of agencies – federal, state and local – were incapable of providing efficient or effective services, including housing, to Aboriginal communities, whether in the outback, in slums, on the fringes of towns or in urban environments, where most Aboriginals lived. He knew that only a massive upfront investment could narrow the gap between supply and demand. The Commonwealth was willing to spend more, but never at a rate that would break the problem's back. Never, for example, at a rate that would provide, in a decade, as many beds as were provided in the rebuilding of Darwin as Australia's northern white oasis.

Hawke did not have the same shyness about targets. In mid-1987, he promised Australians that, by 1990, no Australian child would be living in poverty. It was a nice thought. Halfway from there to 1990, I remarked that there were at least 30,000 Aboriginal children living in desperate poverty, with umpteen more in mere poverty. There was not then in train a plan or a project to change that fact in the next 19 months, nor, for that matter, in the next 19 years.

Those next 19 years, indeed, saw many further re-organisations of Aboriginal affairs, particularly in Canberra, and any number of new plans to make a breakthrough with housing and service delivery. The bureaucrats, like the politicians (white and black) were generally well-meaning, and all were capable of producing flowcharts, reports and expressions of earnest intention that showed that even if the situation was not ideal now, it was about to be.

The high point of this approach was perhaps in 2010, when the Labor minister responsible for a so-called strategic-housing initiative was able to announce that the spending of several hundred million dollars, and 3½ years of meetings, had so far delivered seven new houses. A recent review of the program showed everything was on track to deliver 750 new houses and several thousand refurbishments by 2013.

I commented at the time that Jenny Macklin and her department often redefined what they were pretending to be doing, or used weasel words and vagueness. She used anecdotes to contradict evidence.

"This time 10 months ago, for example, a number of newspapers ... were insisting that tens of millions had been squandered on planning to build houses, on talking about building houses, on consulting about building houses and liaising with each other about it. No actual houses, as such, had been built," I wrote.

"This was hotly denied by the minister and the department, who used houses completed under other programs, redefinitions, hopes, expectations, plans, targets, timetables, anecdotes and blah, to insist that all was well ...

"At that stage, one might have said that nothing had been finished, but much was on the way. A year later, we learn that 'much' is not much ...

"From time to time, COAG, or the federal government, will talk about the money spent as though the supposed recipients received it personally, and personally wasted it. At last guess, the 'strategic Indigenous housing and infrastructure program' was budgeting about $800,000 per ramshackle and environmentally unsuitable dwelling worth, were it at Forbes in NSW, or Echuca in Victoria, about $100,000."

I quote myself neither to say I told you so, nor to confirm being a smart-arse, but to underline the fact that not much ever changes in the administration of Aboriginal affairs, regardless of the minister or the prime minister, the agency in charge of saving Aboriginals, or the officials in charge. Nor in the delivery by state and local government administrations, which themselves have substantial legal obligations to provide services to Aboriginal Australians, but continue, without sanctions, to fail to do so.

Almost the only thing that has changed is the amount of time and money spent recording these failures, and their effects on the lives and the futures of Australia's most disadvantaged citizens. Naturally, every political or administrative commentary on events recognises that the failures of the past and the present owe a good deal to inadequate consultation, but they act as though this problem is now being addressed. The role of administrative incompetence, poor leadership, timidity, fraud and waste (from mostly white contractors) and a complete lack of accountability for results, or a lack of them, hardly ever gets a mention.

On Monday, Malcolm Turnbull will deliver the 10th "closing the gap" statement, at which he will table yet further glossy reports showing very disappointing results in advancing 10-year-old goals of reducing measurable Aboriginal disadvantage in fields such as health, education, employment and welfare. In just a few areas, such as high-school literacy, statistics will suggest slight improvement, even if most Aboriginal kids are still well behind their white cohorts. In others, there will be the appearance of marking time, with failures to match early improvements, and such improvements as have occurred not changing the chasm because non-Aboriginal improvements have been occurring at a faster rate. In some other areas, such as school attendance, the figures will show actual decline. It is, in short, situation normal in Aboriginal affairs, with things going backwards, Aboriginals more out of the loop than ever, and, as ever, the innuendo being that the lack of progress is the fault of those whom the well-intentioned bureaucrats in Canberra have been struggling to "improve".

As ever when this occurs, it's time to change the goalposts. The states and territories (including the ACT) whose performance has been abysmal are arguing in the Council of Australian Governments that the goals set in the original "closing the gap" program are "too prescriptive". What that means is "tied to outcomes that can, at least up to a point be measured, such as Aboriginal bums on school seats, mortality and life expectancy, and employment rates". Actually, all of these figures can be, and often are, manipulated, in much the same way that police statistics can be, but it would take ingenuity even beyond the wit of federal bureaucrats to find figures showing much to be improving.

The Prime Minister and his department are talking about "refreshing" the goals of the closing the gap program, as if perhaps the targets had been reached and it were time to mop up. There are rounds of consultations or "engagements" with Aboriginal folk around the continent, and some encouragement to put in pie-in-the-sky aspirations that, however worthy, are harder to measure, or, if capable of being measured (for example, spending on Aboriginal health or housing), are unable to be convincingly associated with any particular outcomes.

With any luck, from the political point of view, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet can get back to the year-zero approach pioneered by Mal Brough when he took the Commonwealth intervention plan to cabinet a decade ago. All of the old measures were discarded, in much the same way that most of the experience and accumulated wisdom, such as it was, was thrown out. After all, everything to date had been a manifest failure. New minds, and new zeal, from Brough down would address the problem and, because they were keen and zealous, this time they would succeed. Particular efforts would be taken to disparage, disempower and ignore the views and desires of local Aboriginal communities and their representative organisations, because they, too, were apparently a part of the problem.

Macklin made some cosmetic changes to this approach during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments. Reports and reviews admitted that consultation had been a big problem, but there would now be "engagement", which, as it turned out, meant Aboriginals would be told what was decided for them but not invited to give their opinion or consent. Tony Abbott and Turnbull have used a slightly different set of hand-picked but unelected Aboriginal brokers to confirm their prejudices. The eccentricities of the actual Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Nigel Scullion – a man from Darwin who, by definition, understands the Aboriginal "problem" very well – have added further lubrication to the slippery slide. Though Turnbull has brought a certain charm in having learnt some Ngunnawal phrases by heart, he has proven to have the tinniest ear for Aboriginal hopes and aspirations, and what is needed for progress, of any prime minister for more than four decades.

It has often been remarked that Australian governments have been removing Aboriginal children from their parents and their families at greater rates, and in greater numbers, since Kevin Rudd apologised to the stolen generation a decade ago. Only now, of course, it is not being done, as of old, because those the state has been rescuing have been black or part-Aboriginal, but because an entirely dispassionate and detached police, judicial and welfare establishment has decided that the children are at risk or neglected. Yet it would be wrong to regard this cohort as the next stolen generation. The true stolen generations of today are the lives and futures, the hopes and the disappointments, of those being so ill-served by policy and programs, politics and pointless coercive and punitive systems focused not only at entrenching and institutionalising poverty, but on reminding the victims who is in charge.

It isn't goals, targets, or gap-closing announcements that are the problem. It's the want of plans to achieve them. Muddling along, ceaseless reorganisation and repackaging of programs, and glossy pamphlets are not the same thing.

Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times. jwaterfordcanberra@gmail.com