The Northern Territory’s soaring imprisonment rates, punitive youth justice policies and rejection of expert advice reveal a system failing Indigenous communities and strengthening the case for urgent Commonwealth intervention in justice.
We live in a dangerous age in Australia if you care about evidence-based policy. Governments make a point of ignoring or slurring those experts with whom they disagree.
And so it is in the Northern Territory, where relations between the CLP government and the phalanx of groups and offices in the justice space are non-existent. That hard-right government thinks detaining offenders and those accused of offences on an industrial scale, and arming the population with capsicum spray, will reduce crime in the NT. Of course, throw in the usual diet of mandatory sentencing, tougher bail laws and boastful announcements about more prisons. Then there is new child protection legislation that became law in July, which reduces the importance of Indigenous children’s connection to Country, culture and family when assessing the protection of a child.
And let’s not forget the misleading of the community about crime figures. The chief minister, Lia Finocchiaro, and her deputy, Gerard Maley, last month both, at the very least, fudged the truth in statements trumpeting supposed reductions in crime rates to levels not seen since 2017. But they knew that the data was not comparable.
Talking about statistics, the latest (March quarter 2026) data from the ABS includes a staggering bar chart. The NT, on a daily basis, has 1,444 people per 100,000 locked up. The next highest is Western Australia at 360 per 100,000.
In youth detention, nearly 100 per cent of those detained are Indigenous children and youth. The latest available data shows 70–80 per cent of those detained are on remand. And there are a number of children in detention under the age of 14. Remember too the CLP government reversed the ban on the use of spit hoods in youth detention, despite it being a form of torture, and an emblem of the abuse of vulnerable young people at the scandalous Don Dale detention centre which Four Corners exposed in 2016 and which led to a royal commission.
This is all bad enough, but the attitude of the CLP government to systemic state-sanctioned child abuse and its addiction to imprisonment suggests it doesn’t care that these policies don’t work. They simply want to perpetuate poverty and racism in order to win votes from the generally redneck European majority in the NT.
As The Guardian reported on 4 September, “seven members of the Northern Territory Justice Policy Partnership (NTJPP) – a non-government panel of independent justice experts and representatives of Aboriginal community-controlled organisations – announced they would suspend their participation for a period of six months due to ‘a breakdown in genuine dialogue, partnership and shared decision-making’”.
And the children’s commissioner Shaleena Musk resigned in July over what could be said to be the latest iteration of the Stolen Generation – the CLP government’s child protection laws.
In late 2024, a senior Larrakia and Warramunga man, Dr Richard Fejo, who resigned from a government position in protest against the CLP’s reversal of a Labor government decision to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 12, told The Guardian that “the feeling on the ground in the community is one of fear, because while we don’t blame the police, who are doing their jobs, it’s the way the police are being directed”, and that “it appears to me the CLP strategy is to remove anyone who opposes them, and that includes myself”.
But the CLP government is glad to be rid of those who question it and who provide inconvenient truths. When the seven groups resigned from the NTJPP, the attorney-general Marie-Clare Boothby, said: “What these organisations – funded by taxpayers – choose to do is a matter for them, but Territorians have demanded loudly and clearly: no more coddling criminals, no more talk-fests, and no more identity politics.”
Equally telling was Ms Finocchiaro’s recent comment, in the context of protests over a new gas pipeline, that protestors are not welcome. And Mr Maley essentially says if you don’t back the CLP policies, why would you live in the NT.
And when there were protests planned against a resources conference in Darwin earlier this month, Ms Finocchiaro said about protests: “Their ideological, anti-development agenda is not welcome here.”
This is an intolerant and authoritarian government. It would, if it could, stack courts with cronies. It would, again if it could, starve Legal Aid of funds.
When it comes to the criminal justice system, the NT is a failed state. Despite the resistance by the Aboriginal legal service (NAAJA) and outspoken, courageous lawyers like John Lawrence SC, the system remains a bastion of structural racism and police and corrections brutality. If you are a vulnerable Indigenous child, your chances of a life that is fulfilling are virtually zero once you are swallowed up by the justice system.
If there was ever a need for Commonwealth intervention in the NT justice space, now is the time. But it won’t happen because it would mean the Albanese government showing the capacity to do the right thing on human rights and stick at it no matter the ‘soft on crime’ shrieks from the conservatives in the NT and across this nation.
Greg Barns SC is a former National President of the Australian Lawyers Alliance and Deputy Chair The Information Rights Project