On a June morning in Alice Springs, a grandmother waits outside the watch house for a ten-year-old boy to be released into her care. He was picked up overnight for a break-and-enter, one of the first children processed under the Northern Territory's new age of criminal responsibility, lowered from 12 to 10 within weeks of the Country Liberal Party taking office in August 2024. She is raising him because his mother cannot. Down the road, the Australian Bureau of Statistics data published the same year shows an Aboriginal man in the Territory can expect to die more than thirteen years before his non-Indigenous neighbour across town, and an Aboriginal woman more than thirteen years before hers — the widest life-expectancy gap of any state or territory in the country. The boy she collects will grow up in the jurisdiction that promised, alongside every other Australian government, to close that gap by 2031. He will also grow up in the jurisdiction with the nation's highest and fastest-rising Aboriginal imprisonment rate. Two systems are meant to run side by side in the Northern Territory: a Closing the Gap partnership built on Aboriginal community control, and a law-and-order platform elected on a promise to crack down. This is the story of what happens when they collide, and who carries the cost.
What the government did
Lia Finocchiaro's Country Liberal Party won 17 of the Northern Territory's 25 seats at the August 2024 election, a landslide fought substantially on crime. In its first parliamentary sitting the new government began lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 10, reversing a change the previous Labor government had only recently lifted to 12 in line with medical advice. In October 2024 parliament passed "Declan's Law" — named for a bottleshop worker murdered in 2023 by a man on bail — which put serious violent offenders, adults and youths alike, on a presumption of no bail, reinstated breach of bail as a standalone offence for young people, and introduced mandatory electronic monitoring for repeat offenders released on bail. The government also confirmed the return of spit hoods to youth detention, the first Australian jurisdiction to do so since the Northern Territory itself banned them in 2017 after the Don Dale royal commission, and removed the principle that detention should be a last resort for children.
The infrastructure spend, and the Closing the Gap partnership underneath it
The 2025–26 Territory Budget backed the crackdown with money: roughly $250 million for the next stage of a Corrections Infrastructure Master Plan, on top of $176 million in operating costs and $70 million already committed, expanding Berrimah Correctional Centre toward 400 beds and completing the Holtze youth detention centre and Paperbark Youth Justice Precinct in Darwin. At the same time, the Territory remains a signed party — alongside Aboriginal Peak Organisations NT (APO NT) and the Local Government Association — to the second Closing the Gap Northern Territory Implementation Plan, which commits government to shared decision-making with Aboriginal communities and to strengthening the community-controlled sector as the vehicle for closing these same gaps. The two documents were written for the same jurisdiction in the same term of government, and they pull in different directions: one measured in prison beds, the other in community control.
The strongest case
A real crime crisis, and Aboriginal Territorians are its main victims too
The government's justification is not manufactured. Declan Laverty was a real man killed at work by someone who should not have been on the street. Northern Territory police data cited in support of Declan's Law showed that in the year to June 2024, 53 per cent of offences allegedly committed by young people were committed while those young people were already on bail — a genuine failure of the system the CLP inherited. The Northern Territory records the highest per-capita rates of assault and property crime in the country, and because roughly a quarter of the population is Aboriginal and lives disproportionately in the communities and town camps most exposed to that crime, Aboriginal Territorians are overwhelmingly its victims as well as, at times, its offenders — a public-safety agenda here is not automatically opposed to an Aboriginal-safety agenda. The prior Labor government's own bail and sentencing settings had already coincided with a rising, not falling, prison population before 2024, so responsibility for the underlying trend is shared, not new. The 2025–26 Budget also carried a record $36 million a year in ongoing funding for domestic, family and sexual violence services — a cohort in which Aboriginal women in the Territory are represented at rates far above the national average — and the government has continued, rather than abandoned, formal co-design of the Closing the Gap Implementation Plan with APO NT. A government that inherited both a crime wave and a stalled Closing the Gap trajectory has at least tried to name the first problem plainly.
The evidence
Judged against the Productivity Commission's Closing the Gap dashboard, the Northern Territory holds the record for the country's worst outcomes on the socio-economic indicators that matter most for daily life. Of the targets with Northern Territory data available in the 2024 update, roughly half are moving in the wrong direction — a worse split than in any other state or territory, most of which report improvement on a majority of their targets.
The incarceration figures are the starkest measure of how far policy and target have diverged. The National Agreement on Closing the Gap, signed in 2020, set a target of cutting the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults in incarceration by at least 15 per cent by 2031, measured against a 2019 baseline. Analysis of Productivity Commission and Australian Bureau of Statistics data by the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency and reported by the National Indigenous Times put the Northern Territory's Aboriginal adult imprisonment rate at almost 40 per cent above that baseline by early 2025 (approx.) — moving in the opposite direction, and faster, than any other jurisdiction. More than 88 per cent of everyone held in a Northern Territory prison is Indigenous (approx., NAAJA, 2025), in a population where Aboriginal people are roughly one in four Territorians.
Not every indicator has moved the same way, and the record deserves that nuance. The Northern Territory reports the lowest raw rate of First Nations children in out-of-home care of any jurisdiction — around 30 per 1,000 children as at June 2024 — and is the only jurisdiction to record a sustained fall in the rate of care-and-protection orders for First Nations children, down roughly 14 per cent between June 2020 and June 2024. But that lower rate sits inside a system where Aboriginal children still make up around 89 per cent of everyone in care, and where roughly one in three children in care were the subject of at least one alleged-harm notification in 2024–25 — a genuine partial improvement inside a still-disproportionate and, on some measures, unsafe system. Education and employment tell a harder story. Attendance for Aboriginal students in the Territory's very remote schools has been estimated at around 55 to 60 per cent, or roughly two to three days a week (approx., NT Department of Education and Productivity Commission Report on Government Services data), well short of the 96 per cent year 12 attainment trajectory the national target requires by 2031. The Aboriginal employment rate in the Northern Territory was 31 per cent at the 2021 Census, the lowest of any state or territory against a national 2031 target of 62 per cent.
The critique
Some of what the Finocchiaro government inherited is not its fault: remoteness, chronic housing overcrowding, generational trauma and a previous government that also missed its own bail and diversion commitments are not this government's invention. But the specific policy choices made since August 2024 are its own, made with the outcome data already on the public record, and they run directly against the framework the Territory is a signed partner to. Lowering the age of criminal responsibility to 10 puts the Northern Territory alone in the country moving toward, rather than away from, the age medical, legal and Indigenous peak bodies agree is too young to hold a child criminally responsible; the medical consensus cited against the change put the minimum defensible age at 14. Reinstating spit hoods on children returns to a practice a royal commission examined at Don Dale less than a decade ago, and one Australia formally renounced under its international torture-prevention obligations — the Territory's own Children's Commissioner has noted it is now the only Australian jurisdiction using them on minors. Declan's Law's bail presumption reaches children as well as adults, which means more of them held on remand rather than sentenced — a driver of exactly the incarceration numbers the National Agreement commits the Territory to cutting 15 per cent by 2031, and which have instead risen by close to 40 per cent. Budget priorities follow the same pattern: hundreds of millions of dollars for prison and detention infrastructure sit alongside reported cuts to rehabilitation programs and to Aboriginal ranger grant funding — the kind of community-controlled, self-determination-aligned employment the Priority Reforms in the National Agreement exist to grow. Indigenous members of the Legislative Assembly and Aboriginal legal services said publicly, when Declan's Law and the age change were introduced, that they wanted community-led solutions and were not meaningfully consulted on the crackdown legislation itself, even as the government continued formal co-design on the separate Implementation Plan document. That is the coherence gap: a Territory government that signs a self-determination partnership in one forum and legislates around it in another, while the numbers that partnership was designed to move keep moving the wrong way.
The Territory that promised to cut Aboriginal incarceration by 15 per cent by 2031 has instead watched it rise by close to 40 per cent.
The risk to the future
A crackdown and a closing-the-gap promise cannot both win on current settings
If detention and remand keep drawing more Aboriginal children into contact with the justice system before high school age, while investment in remote schooling, primary healthcare and community-controlled programs does not grow at the same pace, the Territory risks locking in the very cycle Closing the Gap was designed to break: more children removed or detained, poorer school attendance and employment outcomes for that same cohort as adults, and a shorter life expectancy that the data already shows is not narrowing. Each year the punitive settings outrun the community-controlled and preventive settings, trust in the partnership model that underpins the National Agreement erodes further — and that trust, more than any single program, is what the Priority Reforms depend on to work at all. Closing the Gap is already assessed nationally as off track for most 2031 targets; on current trajectories, the jurisdiction with the largest Aboriginal population share and the widest gaps to close is also the one furthest from closing them, which means the national project's credibility will be judged, in the end, largely on what happens in the Northern Territory.