Northern Territory Deputy Chief and Corrections Minister Gerard Maley has introduced amendments to the territory’s Youth Justice Act which will give police the power to detain minors for 48 hours without a legal guardian present.
Police will also have the power to charge youth subjects within that timeframe.
These proposed amendments, which will be debated later in the year, have been claimed by advocacy groups as a means to which Aboriginal children will be channeled into prisons in a discriminatory manner.
Human Rights Law Centre’s Director of First Nations Justice, Maggie Munn, said First Nations kids deserve to thrive, not be caged in police watch houses and prison cells.
According to the Australian Government’s Institute of Health and Welfare, the Northern Territory has the highest youth offender rate in the country.
On an average night in the June 2024 quarter, the Northern Territory had the highest rate of youths aged 10-17 in a detention center, or about 22 individuals per 10,000.
The Northern Territory also had the highest rates of First Nation Youths in detention (about 46 people per 10,000).
Following the lead of Australian-based advocacy groups, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has also expressed alarm over the persistent overrepresentation of Indigenous children in Australia’s criminal justice system.
The Committee called on the Australian government to ensure that Indigenous children deprived of liberty have access to medical care, legal counsel, adequate food, social services and their families.
UNSW Professor Megan Davis said the warning from the UN was loud and clear, and “the time to act is now”.
The proposed changes can be seen in the context of previous controversial changes to the Northern Territory’s procedures regarding youth justice.
The last government of the Northern Territory, led by the Labor Party, raised the criminal age of responsibility from 10 years to 12 years and banned controversial spit hoods (a bag put over the head) for youth in police custody.
However, the Country Liberal Party, which was returned to power in August of 2024, reduced the age back to 10 years in October of that year and reinstated the use of spit hoods, in spite of protests from advocacy groups.
Senator Lidia Thorpe, who spoke last week at the Aboriginal Housing and Homelands Conference, said the Northern Territory government was the most racist government she had seen in her lifetime.
“I’m sorry for what you have to deal with in your country,” she said.
Featured image: “Darwin Correctional Center” by Bidgee, modified by C. Figgis, is licensed under CC BY 3.0
