Former Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt says there is a real possibility of a future class action against all levels of government for their failure to close the gap.

Speaking on NITV's The Point, the first Indigenous Australian elected to the House of Representatives and the first Indigenous cabinet minister, said all jurisdictions signed off on the Closing the Gap agreement, including national and state cabinets, indicating broad consensus for the plan.

"20 years' time from now, I think it's quite feasible someone could go to a class action lawyer and say all tiers of government have failed, therefore could you take a class action on our behalf," Mr Wyatt said.

The latest Closing the Gap figures revealed just five of the 19 metrics are on target, with a backward slide in the rate of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care (OOHC), youth incarceration, and rates of suicide.

Young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are being locked up at 27 times the rate of non-Indigenous people, whilst OOHC, so often a direct precursor to contact with the youth justice system, sees Indigenous children removed from their families at 10.4 times the rate of non-Indigenous children.

In the past 12 months, Queensland has introduced laws which could see children as young as ten sentenced to life in prison; the NT lowered the age of criminal responsibility to ten; and Victoria and NSW introduced "tough" bail laws, which the Victorian premier accepts will see more children incarcerated on remand.

This is despite all states being a signatory to the latest Closing the Gap agreement, signed in 2020 and finalised the following year.

Mr Wyatt, who sensationally ended his Liberal Party membership over the party's Voice to Parliament stance, said governments would have a "problem" if they couldn't show they had "demonstrably attempted to address those targets".

"It's like the stolen wages, it's like the Stolen Generations, and many other programs for which governments have been sued," he said.

Minnie McDonald sued the Commonwealth in 2021 on behalf of many thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who worked in the NT and were paid little or no wages from 1933 to 1971, while they were subject to Commonwealth wage control legislation.

Last year, the federal government settled the class action, without admission of liability, following mediation.

Governments have also been sued for racial discrimination cases.

In 2018, 447 members of the Palm Island community involved in a class action, filed by Lex Wotton, which alleged police had committed acts of unlawful racial discrimination surrounding the death in police custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee in 2004, were granted a $30 million settlement and an apology by the Queensland Government.

Waanyi and Kalkadoon barrister Joshua Creamer, who was a part of the Wottons' legal team, told The Point, the "horse has already bolted" regarding Mr Wyatt's comments on class actions.

"Class actions are big cases, they're hundreds of millions of dollars, and sooner or later I think governments will have to acknowledge and accept they'll have to work differently," he said.

Mr Creamer, who was leading the Queensland truth-telling inquiry before it was shut down last year, said there were "several" class actions already taking place which were "dealing with issues relating to closing the gap, and there's only going to be more and more of those as time goes on".

"A lot of those are about discrimination and the delivery of services, and the negative impact that has in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities," he said.

Mr Wyatt also revealed the difficulty he had as the Indigenous Affairs Minister. He said funding for remote communities would often come out of the Indigenous affairs budget, regardless of whether other portfolios shouldered some of the responsibility.

"When I asked for infrastructure funding, I never received it because I was told to take it out of the Aboriginal affairs budget," he said.

"That's the subtle focus on Indigenous people: use indigenous money, as opposed to 'yes, this is a need in my portfolio, we should be addressing it'.

"You cannot say that ministers across this nation will embrace Indigenous issues within their portfolio and expend portfolio money on needs that are absolutely necessary."