In August 2014, guards at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Darwin released tear gas into a locked corridor of solitary cells to subdue a disturbance involving six boys aged 14 to 17. One of them, Dylan Voller, was later shown on national television handcuffed to a mechanical restraint chair with a spit hood pulled over his head. When the ABC's Four Corners broadcast that footage on 25 July 2016 under the title "Australia's Shame," the reaction was immediate: the prime minister announced a royal commission into the Northern Territory's youth detention and child protection systems the following morning. The High Court would later rule, in 2020, that the tear-gassing itself had been unlawful.
Nine years on, Don Dale's old detention wing no longer holds children. They were moved in late 2024 to a new facility at Holtze, on Darwin's rural fringe, years behind schedule and with its budget blown out to more than $130 million, while the Berrimah site was converted to house up to 50 adult male prisoners. But in September 2025 the Northern Territory's own Children's Commissioner tabled a report finding that a child known only as "VC1" had been locked alone in a cell at a Territory youth detention facility for 84 continuous hours in April 2024 — roughly 12 hours past the legislated limit — denied food and access to basic entitlements, in a finding the Commissioner said breached the Youth Justice Act. The Royal Commission was meant to end this. The record since suggests it has not.
What the government did
The Country Liberal Party, led by Lia Finocchiaro, won the 24 August 2024 Territory election in a landslide, taking 17 of the Legislative Assembly's 25 seats from a Labor government reduced to four, with youth crime declared the CLP's first priority in government. Within weeks it began legislating a near-complete reversal of the post-Royal Commission youth justice settings. On 16 October 2024 Parliament passed the Bail Legislation Amendment Act 2024 — known as "Declan's Law" — introducing a presumption against bail for repeat and serious violent offenders including young people, reintroducing breach of bail as a standalone criminal offence for youth, mandating electronic monitoring for repeat offenders granted bail, and giving police wanding powers to search for weapons in and around schools. The following day, 17 October 2024, Parliament passed the Criminal Code Amendment Act 2024, lowering the minimum age of criminal responsibility from 12 back to 10 — reversing a change the Territory's own Labor government had made just over fourteen months earlier, on 1 August 2023, when the NT became the first Australian jurisdiction to raise the age in line with the Royal Commission's recommendations.
In its first months in office the government also restored the use of spit hoods on children in detention and by police, a practice banned in 2016 in direct response to the Voller footage; and, through the package it billed as "Reduce crime — new laws," introduced mandatory minimum sentences for assaulting frontline and emergency workers, a new offence for "posting and boasting" about crimes on social media, and expanded powers to address public drinking and knife crime. In 2025 it passed the Youth Justice Legislation Amendment Act 2025, expanding the powers of detention staff to manage children in custody — introduced, in large part, as the government's response to the Children's Commissioner's findings on the VC1 case, rather than as an adoption of the five recommendations the Commissioner had actually made.
The strongest case
A government elected on a real and Territory-wide crisis, not a manufactured one
The CLP's mandate on crime was not invented after the fact. Five months before the election, in March–April 2024, the outgoing Labor government itself had declared a state of emergency and a youth curfew in Alice Springs after a night of mass unrest and the death of a teenager — proof that alarm about repeat youth offending was shared across politics, not a partisan talking point. Territorians in Alice Springs, Katherine, Tennant Creek and parts of Darwin had lived for years with break-ins, car theft and assaults, sometimes committed by children well known to police who cycled back onto bail within days; for the victims of that offending, a system seen to prioritise a young offender's welfare over their own safety was not an abstraction but a lived and repeated harm. The CLP put its remedy to voters explicitly — lower the age of criminal responsibility, toughen bail, restore consequences — and won a landslide, taking 17 of 25 seats from a government that held only four afterwards. A government that reverses reforms it was elected specifically to reverse is doing what representative democracy asks of it, and it is entitled to argue that visible consequences, not indefinite diversion, are what a frightened electorate asked for and what some victims believe they were owed.
The evidence
Whatever the government's mandate, the data available since the changes began is not encouraging. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's 2025 national youth detention report found the Northern Territory has the highest rate of 10-to-17-year-olds in detention of any state or territory — 17 per 10,000, more than three times Queensland's rate of 5.1 per 10,000 and around twelve times Victoria's 1.4 per 10,000 — a position the Territory has held, at rates ranging from 10 to 23 per 10,000, throughout the four years to mid-2025. Aboriginal children make up around 95% of that population (approx.), against a Territory-wide population that is around 30% Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander overall (approx.) — a gap the national Closing the Gap justice target is explicitly meant to close and which has not moved in the direction the target requires.
Two further figures from the same reporting period complicate the government's "consequences" framing. On an average day in 2024-25, 100% of the Northern Territory's youth detention population was unsentenced — meaning every child held was on remand, awaiting a court outcome, not serving a sentence for a proven offence — the highest proportion of any Australian jurisdiction, against a national average of around 80%. Of the remand periods young Territorians served, only about 15% ended in release on bail, again the lowest release rate of any state or territory. Reporting on the Productivity Commission's youth justice data also puts the Territory's reoffending rate above 50% (approx.) — meaning more than half of children released from detention return to the system, a figure the tougher bail and sentencing laws introduced since October 2024 have not yet been shown to move.
The Northern Territory is the only Australian jurisdiction to have raised the age of criminal responsibility and then, just over a year later, lowered it again.
The critique
The government's own figures are the strongest argument against its theory of change. If a lower age of responsibility, tougher bail and restored spit hoods were driving down youth offending, the Territory's detention numbers should be falling; instead the NT holds children at a rate roughly three times Queensland's and around twelve times Victoria's, a gap that predates the 2024 laws and has not closed since. Reversing the age of criminal responsibility does not create new offenders — it exposes 10- and 11-year-olds already known to police and child protection to arrest and detention, rather than to the family support, diversion or care pathways the Royal Commission found actually reduced reoffending among children that age. And a system in which every single child held in detention is legally unsentenced — awaiting trial, not serving punishment for a proven crime — cannot coherently be marketed as delivering "consequences" for offending; on the government's own data, it is overwhelmingly a system of pre-trial containment.
The Aboriginal overrepresentation the Royal Commission was convened to address has not improved under the reversal; at roughly 95% of the detained population against a Territory that is around 30% Aboriginal overall, the NT sits well above the 60% national First Nations share the AIHW records nationally, meaning the Territory single-handedly drives much of Australia's Closing the Gap justice-target shortfall. The Children's Commissioner's 2025 findings on the 84-hour isolation of "VC1" — food withheld, entitlements denied, a legislated time limit breached — describe conditions of the kind the 2017 Royal Commission specifically found and specifically recommended against; the government's legislative response was not to adopt the Commissioner's five recommendations but to expand detention staff's powers further, the opposite direction to the one an independent statutory officer prescribed. Restoring spit hoods compounds the concern: the Territory's own Ombudsman had already reviewed 30 police uses of the device on children in 2020–21, found it was often applied improperly with inadequate de-escalation, and recommended it not be used on children at all. The Territory's new bail laws are also now before the courts on a High Court challenge, and the age-of-responsibility reversal has drawn criticism from the Law Council of Australia and from international bodies for falling below the minimum age of 14 recommended by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child — criticism the government has, to date, treated as a cost of doing what it was elected to do rather than as evidence its approach needs adjustment.
The risk to the future
A more expensive system, still mostly holding unsentenced Aboriginal children, with no evidence yet that it is safer
National youth detention spending passed $1 billion in 2023-24, an 84% real increase in the unit cost of detention since 2014-15, and the Territory's own figures — the highest detention rate in the country, a 100% remand population, reoffending reported above half — give no sign that its steeper share of that cost is buying a safer community rather than a fuller detention system. If the CLP's laws hold detention numbers at or above their current record levels while reoffending stays where the Productivity Commission's data has it, the Territory risks entrenching the same cycle the Royal Commission diagnosed: children cycling through remand rather than court-tested sentences, disproportionately Aboriginal, held in facilities now shown capable of the same unlawful treatment — extended isolation, food withheld, restraints reinstated — that a national broadcast and a royal commission spent 2016 and 2017 forcing the Territory to confront. A government that wins re-election on visible toughness but produces another Four Corners moment, another High Court finding, or another Children's Commissioner report describing conditions the last royal commission already condemned, will have spent the credibility of its 2024 mandate rebuilding the exact system the Territory was told, in 227 recommendations, to dismantle.