The new Country Liberal Party (CLP) government is on the rampage in the Northern Territory, inspired by Donald Trump’s rapid-fire reactionary policy announcements in the US.
The CLP’s campaign to win government in August 2024 centred around a racist “law and order” campaign, with promises to change the law so children as young as ten could be incarcerated and to re-introduce barbaric “spit-hoods” in juvenile detention centres.
All 100 per cent of children in NT detention centres are Aboriginal and the CLP is boasting that adult prison numbers have also increased by more than 500 people since they took office.
Aboriginal people are the most jailed minority group in the world and skyrocketing NT incarceration rates are the highest in Australia.
An NT local court heard evidence in January that Aboriginal women prisoners were “hungry all the time”, crammed into filthy cells with more than 20 people and without regular access to water or working toilets.
Parliamentary sittings in early February have seen a series of attacks on Aboriginal rights and the environment movement.
Private security will now be hired to guard the prisoners overflowing from NT jails.
The CLP abolished the Aboriginal child-placement principle, enshrined in child protection law for more than 40 years.
Existing law has not stopped more than two-thirds of Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families being placed with non-Indigenous people.
But the change will empower racist case-workers and judges to remove even more children, at a time when removal rates mirror those seen during the Stolen Generations period.
The Arid Lands Environment Centre in Alice Springs and the Environment Centre NT in Darwin have been completely defunded.
These two organisations have operated for more than 40 years and played a central role in many campaigns that have stopped toxic development, including the Jabiluka uranium mine and the Muckaty nuclear waste dump.
The CLP are creating a new powerful role, the Territory Co-ordinator, who will be able to quickly push through industrial development, gutting existing environmental protections and consultation processes.
The previous NT Labor government opened the door for this onslaught, trying to match the CLP’s racism with their own “law and order” binge and pressing ahead with destructive developments like fracking, in breach of their own party policy.
NT communities need solidarity to fight back. The reactionary onslaught shows the threats posed by a potential Dutton government and the need to fight the shift to the right.
By Paddy Gibson
