The NT Country Liberal Party has appointed controversial private British-Danish security firm G4S to provide “much-needed relief” in the corrections system.
It comes after the government was forced to pay $11 million in overtime to corrections workers struggling to cope with the load since the CLP’s draconian bail and sentencing changes last October.
Its “tough on crime” agenda, which includes lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 12 years to 10, means that record numbers of people are being incarcerated.
More than 85% of prisoners and close to 100% of children in youth detention are First Nations people.
The CLP is further privatising policing and prisons by giving special powers to the Corrections Commissioner to appoint private security guards to be corrections officers.
“Bringing in G4S is the beginning of replacing the entire corrections workforce with private security,” unionist and Justice not Jails member Olivia Conan-Davies told Green Left.
“If the CLP doesn’t want to pay workers overtime, it should avoid incarcerating so many people,” Conan-Davies continued. “The CLP’s mandatory sentencing reforms are basically a guarantee of profit for companies like G4S, because there will always be a steady stream of people going into NT jails.”
Successive NT governments’ “tough on crime” policies have been lucrative for private security companies, which have been given government contracts alongside new quasi-police powers.
Neptune Security, for example, patrols key public areas, with dogs, ostensibly to curb “anti-social behavior”.
In practice, this means policing First Nations people who are subjected to arbitrary searches, assaults and the loss of any personal liberties.
G4S is a multinational security company which, from 2007-2023, helped Israel service its prisons, military checkpoints and illegal settlements in the Occupied West Bank.
Palestinian political prisoners waged a major hunger strike throughout 2012, which led to a boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign being launched against G4S.
G4S was forced to divest its Israeli security business in 2016. It was forced to divest its remaining Israeli businesses, including running the Israeli police academy, in 2023.
Globally, G4S profits from the incarceration and racialisation of Indigenous and working-class populations.
In Australia, G4S plays a key role in the prison-industrial complex: It runs Mount Gambia Prison in South Australia and Port Phillip Prison in Victoria.
G4S previously provided the NT government with electronic monitoring services for people released on bail.
“It is unsurprising that the white supremacist and genocidal [CLP government] is hiring G4S to help run NT torture camps, known euphemistically as ‘correction’ and ‘detention centres’,” Palestine Action Group Garramilla (PAGG) told GL.
“Make no mistake, the [CLP government] is intending to deliberately inflict, within NT torture camps, conditions of life calculated to more effectively bring about the physical destruction of politically criminalised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, in whole or in part.”
PAGG wants all NT prisons to be abolished and First Nations people’s stolen lands returned.