What the report is

The Targeted Action Plans Report 2025 covers January 2025 to 30 June 2025 and runs to about 70 pages across three plans: Community Attitudes, Inclusive Homes and Communities, and Safety, Rights and Justice. Each has national actions and then a section per state and territory. Reports are produced on a financial year basis and published on the Strategy’s Hub by the end of each year, which is why a report covering to June appeared in December.

It should be said first that the document is honest about its own limits, and that matters for how harshly it is read. This 1st report covers a 5-month period, which is a short amount of time for actions to be progressed and for us to see much improvement. That is true, and the plans only came into effect in late January 2025.

What the Advisory Council asked for

The interesting part is that the reporting format was not simply inherited. After the second set of plans was released, the Strategy’s Advisory Council were consulted on what good reporting looks like and how reports for these TAPs should be structured and what they should cover.

Among the things the Council asked for, in the report's own summary, were better visibility of disability diversity and intersectional experiences, a stronger role for the Council in setting the framework for reporting, and this:

embedding mechanisms that will support the early identification of delayed and undelivered TAPs actions (such as a ‘check‑in point’ and monitoring)

That is the same concern the disability representative organisations raised in the implementation report, arriving from the body appointed to advise on the Strategy, and expressed as a specific mechanism rather than a complaint. The Council also proposed five themes for reporting to focus on, covering community voice, what to measure and how, how and why actions were chosen, implementation detail, and that reporting be meaningful and helpful to people with disability.

What the first report actually asked governments for

Against that, here is the instruction given to jurisdictions:

State and territory governments were asked to provide a Commencement Statement. They were also given an option to include a progress update on how each action is progressing.

A commencement statement is not a progress report. The report defines its purpose plainly: the statements explain how people with disability and the disability community will be involved in putting the actions into place under each TAP. It is a description of intended engagement, written at the start.

Twelve progress updates do appear across the document, so some jurisdictions took the option. Others did not, and because it was an option rather than a requirement, the report cannot be read as a picture of how the plans are travelling. That is not a criticism of the jurisdictions that declined; it is a consequence of how the request was framed.

The indicators the report says it contains

One sentence sets out the reporting plan across the three-year cycle:

The 2nd and 3rd reports will have more of a focus on progress of actions using a narrative approach, telling the story of what has been done. The 3rd report will also include end of period indicators which are different from the year-to-year indicators, providing different insights on outcomes. All reports will include an update on the year-to-year indicators.

All reports will include an update on the year-to-year indicators. We extracted the document in full, 835 paragraphs, and searched it. The word indicator appears exactly once, in the sentence above. There is no indicator section, no indicator table, and no standalone figures of the kind an indicator update would carry.

We are stating that as an absence we controlled rather than one we assumed, because absence claims are easy to get wrong. The contents run to page 70 and are organised by plan and then by jurisdiction, with no annex. If the year-to-year indicators are published somewhere else, this report does not say where.

Note also what the sentence commits to next. Progress reporting arrives in the 2nd and 3rd reports using a narrative approach, telling the story of what has been done. Narrative is not the same as counting, and counting is what the Council asked for when it sought early identification of delayed and undelivered actions.

A date worth having

The report also states the scope of the independent evaluation, which we have been tracking: First independent evaluation of the Strategy will cover the implementation period from 2021 to late 2025 and will adopt a mixed-methods approach.

Read that against the plans. The 2025-2027 TAPs commenced in late January 2025, so the evaluation's window takes in roughly the first eleven months of a three-year cycle. Whatever it concludes about the Targeted Action Plans, it will be concluding it from the commencement period rather than the delivery period.

Our view

We set this up as a test and it is only fair to say what it settled. It does not show the plans failing. It shows that, eighteen months after the criticism about completion rates was recorded in the government's own implementation report, there is still no published mechanism that would let anyone count a delayed or undelivered action, and the body that asked for one is the Strategy's own Advisory Council.

The defence is real and we would not dismiss it. Five months is genuinely short, the design was agreed with Disability Officials, the Council was consulted rather than ignored, and the report says what it is rather than dressing a commencement statement as progress. A first report that admits it cannot show much is more honest than one that pretends otherwise.

What gives us pause is the direction of travel in that one planning sentence. Progress reporting is deferred to reports two and three, it is to be narrative, and the promised indicator update is absent from the report that promised it. Each choice is defensible alone. Together they mean the question the community asked in 2025, how many of these actions actually get done, is not answerable from the public record in 2026 either.

The next report covers the 2025-26 financial year and is due, on this cadence, by the end of 2026. That is the one to read. We will check whether the year-to-year indicators appear in it, and whether the check-in mechanism the Council asked for has been built.

Primary sources

  1. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Australia’s Disability Strategy: Targeted Action Plans Report 2025 (DOCX, page last updated 22 December 2025, downloaded and read in full 30 August 2026): the reporting period of January 2025 to 30 June 2025; the three plans and their national and per-jurisdiction structure; the quoted statement that reports are produced on a financial year basis and published by the end of each year; the quoted acknowledgement that the first report covers a 5-month period; the quoted statement that the TAPs came into effect in late January 2025; the quoted account of the Advisory Council being consulted on what good reporting looks like, the quoted request for embedding mechanisms supporting early identification of delayed and undelivered actions, the quoted request for a stronger Council role in setting the reporting framework, and the five proposed themes including that reporting be meaningful and helpful to people with disability; the quoted instruction that governments were asked for a Commencement Statement and given an option to include a progress update; the quoted explanation of what commencement statements cover; the quoted planning sentence on the 2nd and 3rd reports, the narrative approach, end of period indicators and that all reports will include an update on the year-to-year indicators; and the quoted scope of the first independent evaluation.
  2. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Australia’s Disability Strategy 2021-2031: 2nd Implementation Report 1 July 2023 to 30 June 2025 (DOCX, dated 30 March 2026, read in full 29 August 2026): the quoted summary of disability representative organisations describing implementation as hindered by fragmented efforts and low completion rates, which is the claim this report was read to test.
  3. Disability Gateway, Reporting progress (read 30 August 2026): the Targeted Action Plans report series and the link to the 2025 report.
  4. The Scheme Brief, Australia’s disability strategy is halfway through, 29 August 2026: our own earlier reporting from the 2nd Implementation Report, including the disability representative organisations' description of fragmented efforts and low completion rates, which is the claim this report was read to test.

How we checked this. The report was downloaded as a DOCX from the Disability Gateway and extracted in full to 835 paragraphs; every quotation is from that text. The statement that the word indicator appears once is the result of searching that full extraction, and we have said in the article that we controlled the absence rather than assumed it: there is no indicator section, table or annex, and the contents are organised by plan and jurisdiction only. The count of twelve progress updates is a count of labelled progress-update entries in the document. We did not attempt to count total actions, because the word appears as a table heading rather than as a countable item, so no proportion is stated anywhere here. We have not contacted the department or the Advisory Council. The report is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence and is quoted here briefly, with attribution, for the purpose of reporting news.

Work on a Targeted Action Plan, or know where the year-to-year indicators are published? Tell us and we will check it against the report and log the outcome.