On Tuesday last week – less than a fortnight after A Current Affair aired a 15-minute expose on “youth crime” in Alice Springs – the Northern Territory government announced some of the harshest youth justice measures in the country. The chief minister, Michael Gunner, announced plans that would drag the Northern Territory back to the ineffective, “tough on crime” measures that predated the NT royal commission.
Unwinding reforms
If there was one message that came from the NT royal commission, it was that decades of punitive law-and-order policies had failed. They had failed children in the territory, and they had failed the whole community.
After the initial flurry of good work in response to the royal commission findings and the shocking Four Corners footage of children abused in police and prison cells, the NT government has been steadily unwinding the reforms it put in place to improve the lives of children and the entire community.
In recent weeks, a political scare campaign and the tabloid press appear to have driven the NT government to shift away from 30 years of evidence that informed the royal commission and the countless children, families, youth justice experts and community members who entrusted the royal commission with their stories. The Strong Grandmothers Group from the Central Desert Region issued a statement on Sunday condemning the NT government for only listening to what “the police want to do ... [not] what the grandmothers want to do”. Grandmother Pamela Kngwarre Lynch said: “They’re our kids at risk but nobody’s worrying about the risk to our children.”
The harshest measures in the country
The NT government announced a range of measures that would see the number of Aboriginal children locked up skyrocket. They all but conceded this, committing $5m to expand youth remand centres to warehouse children as they wait for their day in court.
The NT government intends to:
Remove the presumption that children be granted bail for a number of offences.
Expand the circumstances in which bail will be automatically revoked without court or judicial oversight.
Expand the circumstances in which children and young people will be refused bail.
Reduce the court’s ability to place children and young people on diversion.
Expand police powers to put electronic monitoring devices on children and young people.
The NT government says these measures will cut crime, improve policing and put victims first. But it is perhaps not clear from first glance just how dangerous and damaging these reforms are without understanding just who fills the territory’s police and prison cells.
Denying children bail
When I worked as a youth lawyer in Alice Springs, every single child behind bars in the youth detention centre was Aboriginal. I understand the situation is much the same now. Aboriginal children are 48 times more likely to be arrested and imprisoned than their non-Indigenous peers. The vast majority of these children – children as young as 10 years old – are held in prison on remand. That means they are locked away before they have had their day in court, and before they have been found guilty – or not guilty – of committing any crime.
We have heard a lot about the presumption of innocence until proven guilty recently, but that seems to fly out the window when it comes to Aboriginal children.
Children and young people who are denied bail are held in some of the very worst conditions in youth prisons. They are frequently denied access to therapeutic programs and supports because staff have no way of knowing how long they will spend there. They are often housed in overcrowded and inadequate conditions.
Locking young people out of diversion
One of the most shortsighted parts of this announcement is the plan to curtail the court’s ability to refer a child or young person to diversion programs – programs designed to keep young people out of the criminal justice system.
There is comprehensive evidence that the earlier a child comes into contact with the criminal justice system, the worse the outcomes are for the whole community. The young person is more likely to reoffend, their reoffending is more likely to be serious and they are at risk of developing a raft of long-term mental and physical health complications. The royal commission found that diversion programs were underfunded and underresourced in the territory. It recommended that laws and policies be changed to make it easier for courts and police to refer young people to diversion programs.
Instead, the government’s recent announcement will prohibit courts from diverting a young person if the young person has already attempted a diversion program in the past.
Beefing up police powers
And finally, in perhaps what is the most alarming and anti-rule-of-law (another concept that seems to only apply to the stale, pale males of our society) proposal in the suite of announcements, is that the police be empowered to slap an electronic monitoring device on a child before that child has even been convicted of a crime. In a jurisdiction where police and community tensions run high, and where numerous reports and complaints of harassment, racial profiling and assault of Aboriginal children and young people have been made, the idea of police being able to tag and track Aboriginal children is both alarming and disturbingly colonial.
Royal commissions should not be ignored
Royal commissions are reserved for the most serious matters deserving of public inquiry. They are called in response to gross breaches of public trust, abuses of human rights and grave social harms.
When the NT royal commission handed down its findings in 2017, the minister responsible described the report as “possibly the most important document that our government has received”.
Now that same government is proposing legislation that directly contradicts its recommendations and threatens to undermine any progress that has been made. As the former royal commissioner Mick Gooda said: “I don’t know how they actually get up and look at themselves in the morning.”
• Sophie Trevitt is the executive officer of Change the Record and worked as a youth lawyer in Alice Springs, Northern Territory
