The Northern Territory Country Liberal Party (CLP) issued a media release on November 8, demonising six children inside Darwin’s newly opened Holtze Youth Detention Centre.
Deputy Chief Minister and Minister for Corrections Gerard Maley MLA said: “In a deliberate act of vandalism, six youth detainees aged between 13 and 17 damaged seven individual bedrooms … it is calculated destruction.”
Maley listed a string of accusations against incarcerated children from the week, including that two children had spat on and bitten a youth justice officer in Alice Springs.
His government’s plans to forcibly transfer incarcerated children from Alice Springs to Darwin, more than 1000 kilometres away from their families, may have had something to do with this behaviour.
The youth detention statistics indicate that, in all likelihood, these children are First Nations. Describing them as deliberate vandals interested in causing calculated destruction deploys a racist trope and obscures the role state violence plays in their behaviour.
The government’s media release included a photo of an alleged injury to an officer and a trashed room — a ploy to help the government’s destructive “tough on crime” campaign. Maley pledged to “ensure offenders know there is a consequence for their actions”.
The CLP, elected in August, gave itself a mandate to push “law and order”. In the first two weeks of sittings, it lowered the age of criminal responsibility back from 12 to 10, made bail for children harder to obtain and reintroduced mandatory sentencing for assaulting or spitting on frontline workers.
The punitive measures will lead to more First Nations children and adults being placed in a prison system that is already notoriously overcrowded and with First Nations people over-represented.
The more people incarcerated, the more entrenched the cycle of poverty and trauma that preclude community safety becomes.
The Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory indicated more than 75% of children in detention centres had a diagnosable psychiatric disorder.
Maley acknowledged that “youth detainees can have significant behavioural problems”. But instead of allocating funding and support for these young people, he made it clear the CLP is not interested in rehabilitation. “For too long, the previous Labor government put ideology ahead of victims and public safety. Labor focused too heavily on the therapeutic model.”
This is the opposite of what the NT Children’s Commissioner said when Labor was in government. It found that Don Dale Youth Detention Centre “lack[ed] a therapeutic framework” to guide its operations and staff.
Both major parties in the NT are wedded to a “tough on crime” agenda, ignoring desperate pleas to empower First Nations voices and solutions to the mass incarceration crisis.