The CLP law-and-order agenda

Declan Laverty was 20 years old, working an evening shift at a Darwin bottle shop, when he was stabbed to death on 19 March 2023 by young offenders he had never met. His death did not create the Northern Territory's law-and-order crisis — years of alcohol-fuelled violence, break-ins and a youth remand system already buckling under its own caseload had been building for the better part of a decade before he was killed — but it gave that crisis a name people could not look away from. Eighteen months later, when the Country Liberal Party (CLP) swept Labor from office in the August 2024 Territory election, the new Chief Minister, Lia Finocchiaro, named her government's signature bail law after him. Declan's Law is now one strand in the most aggressive law-and-order agenda any Australian state or territory government has attempted this decade, and its costs, in dollars and in children's lives, are only starting to show up in the public record.

What the government did

The CLP's first act on justice reversed one Labor had only just taken. In 2023, the former NT Labor government raised the minimum age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 12, following years of pressure that traced back to the 2017 Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory, itself triggered by footage of a boy in a spit hood at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre. On 17 October 2024, in one of its first sitting weeks, the new CLP government passed the Criminal Code Amendment Bill 2024, taking the age back down to 10 — meaning a 10-year-old can once again be arrested, charged and, in principle, detained in the Northern Territory, a threshold no other Australian jurisdiction has returned to.

Declan's Law, a package of bail and sentencing amendments, followed within weeks. It created a presumption against bail for people charged with serious violent offences and for repeat offenders, required mandatory electronic monitoring for some of those who are granted bail, and reinstated breach of bail as a stand-alone criminal offence for young people — a charge that can itself become the reason a child returns to custody. It sat alongside mandatory sentencing for assaults on frontline workers and new ram-raid offences. A companion "post and boast" offence, carrying up to two years' imprisonment, criminalised sharing footage of certain crimes on social media for notoriety, joining similar laws in New South Wales and Queensland. The government's platform also promised to restore the use of restraint tools such as spit hoods on children in detention, a practice curtailed after the 2017 Royal Commission; the precise scope and safeguards around that commitment remain less settled in the public record than the bail and sentencing changes.

To hold the resulting rise in prisoners, the government committed to 1,000 new adult prison beds over four years, lifting total capacity toward 3,000 by 2028, and consolidated all children in detention at the newly built Holtze facility in Darwin, repurposing the former Alice Springs youth detention centre to house women. The 2025-26 Northern Territory Budget, handed down on 13 May 2025, included a record $1.5 billion for public order and safety, with Corrections funding rising to around $495 million (approx.), including roughly $176 million in operating costs and $70 million toward an infrastructure masterplan (approx.).

The evidence

Whatever the 2025 crime data shows, the medium-term picture in the Territory's corrections system is now the most extreme in the country by a wide margin. The Northern Territory's prison population reached a record high of more than 2,700 people in March 2025 (approx.), up from roughly 2,000 before the 2024 election (approx.), and the Justice Reform Initiative — an independent research body drawing on Report on Government Services and ABS costing data — estimates roughly one in every 100 Territorians is now incarcerated, a rate about five times the national average (approx.; Justice Reform Initiative, 2025). Among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults, the Territory's age-standardised imprisonment rate was 4,167 per 100,000 people at 30 June 2025, rising further to 4,704.7 per 100,000 by the March 2026 quarter — the highest Indigenous imprisonment rate of any Australian jurisdiction, ahead of Western Australia (ABS, Prisoners in Australia, 2025; ABS, Corrective Services, Australia, Mar-2026).

Youth detention shows the same pattern. Even after the age of criminal responsibility returned to 10, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare recorded the Northern Territory's rate of 10-to-17-year-olds in detention at 17 per 10,000 in the June quarter of 2025 — the highest of any state or territory, more than three times Queensland's rate and around twelve times Victoria's (AIHW, Youth detention population in Australia 2025). Aboriginal children make up around 90 per cent of that detention population (approx.; Office of the Children's Commissioner NT, reporting cited by National Indigenous Times, 2025), and almost 400 Aboriginal children passed through NT police watch houses — not built or resourced to hold children long-term — over a six-month period in 2025, with an average remand stay of around 56 days, most never convicted of the offence that put them there (approx.; NAAJA and National Indigenous Times reporting, 2025).

None of this comes cheap, and none of it is obviously working as rehabilitation. The Justice Reform Initiative's analysis of national costing data puts the direct cost of an adult prisoner in the Northern Territory at roughly $122,496 a year, or $335.88 a day (approx.; Justice Reform Initiative, 2025, drawing on Report on Government Services costing tables), while the cost of holding a child in detention runs dramatically higher again. Despite that spending, the Territory's own reoffending data, cited by the Justice Reform Initiative, shows almost three-quarters of people in NT prisons have been there before — a share that has been rising, not falling, even as the prison population has grown (approx.; Justice Reform Initiative, 2025).

A government can lock up more people than any other part of Australia and still not be able to show, in its own data, that fewer of them come back.

The critique

The government is entitled to point to the 2025 crime figures as a sign its approach is working, but the claim is more fragile than the topline numbers suggest. A fall in recorded offences during a period when several thousand more people, including juveniles, are being held on remand or under mandatory monitoring is at least as consistent with incapacitation — offenders who cannot offend because they are in custody — as with deterrence, and NT Police's own figures show real limits to the "crime is falling" story: adult sexual assaults rose 25 per cent in a single month in mid-2025, and between 6 January and 30 September 2025 courts refused bail to 4,587 adults, a 38 per cent increase on the year before (approx.; NT Police, Fire and Emergency Services, NT Crime Statistics, 2025). Incapacitating people while a law is in effect is not the same as proving the law reduces offending once those people are eventually released — the deterrence question the government has not yet answered with published evidence.

The Territory's own statutory watchdog has already found specific harm. In a report tabled in NT Parliament in September 2025, the Children's Commissioner, Shahleena Musk, found that Territory Families had acted unlawfully in isolating a teenage boy at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre for 84 continuous hours in a single cell — 12 hours beyond the legal maximum set after the 2017 Royal Commission — describing staff conduct as harmful to a child with a documented history of trauma. That finding did not happen in spite of the system operating as designed; it happened inside a detention system now holding more children, for longer, with a workforce the Commissioner's own reporting describes as short-staffed and subject to repeated lockdowns. Aboriginal Territorians and their elected representatives, including some within the Territory's own Parliament, have warned the bail and sentencing changes risk "locking up a generation" rather than making communities safer — a concern any government that inherited a genuine crisis should be able to answer with evidence rather than dismiss as noise.

The weakest part of the government's case is the one an evidence audit is built to test: proof the policy achieves its stated purpose. Three-quarters recidivism, a record and rising prison population, and a youth detention rate more than three times the next-highest state are not, on their own, evidence the crackdown has failed — crime rates were genuinely rising before it began, and short-term incapacitation is a real, if expensive, form of public safety. But they are also not evidence it is succeeding at the thing punitive justice is supposed to do: break the cycle of reoffending. Every dollar of the Territory's now-record Corrections budget is a dollar not spent on the alcohol treatment, housing and community-led diversion programs that the government's own justice agreement documents, and independent researchers including the Justice Reform Initiative, identify as the more evidence-based route to fewer future victims.