By John Lawrence

OPINION: There were two significant political stories during the week ended August 21, which provided, in combination, a revealing and accurate “report card” on the health of the Northern Territory’s Polity. Once again it showed beyond any doubt that the NT is no longer even near being a functioning jurisdiction; quite the opposite.

The two stories highlighted the fact that the NT now operates under the power and control of a combination of “elites”. They are members of the “political class” who exist within our two-party system along with their attached high level NT Public Service “bureaucrats” and senior management.

They, in turn, operate through symbiotic relationships with many co-opted enablers including, in part, the media. This “apparatus” employs, involves and implicates many people who, to some extent, work for it or are dependent on it, and who thus have little interest in changing anything.

This “combine” is a very strong web and therefore difficult to change, however, over the last twenty years, it has poisoned itself, and us with it, by prioritising within itself incompetence and cronyism over merit, quality and professional standards. This in turn has predictably and inevitably produced, in time, regular and growing instances of managerial incompetence and errors which have broken our systems and institutions thus placing us now in a state of collapse.

Story One: Two New Prisons

On Monday August 17, part of this apparatus, being Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro, Minister for Corrections Gerard Maley, the CEO of Corrections Matthew Varley and the Treasurer Bill Yan (“The Four Spruikers”), announced the CLP Government’s new Corrections policy, being the building of a new privately funded 1200 bed remand centre adjacent to Holtze Prison, plus a new publicly-funded 200 bed Women’s Prison. Two new prisons.

The “official capacity” of the NT’s main prison, Holtze, is 1048 beds which means the new Remand Centre, holding men yet to be found guilty or sentenced of anything, will be larger than our actual prison. That feature alone shines a light on the dysfunction and inefficiency of our presently resourced NT Court System. It’s drowning.

Let’s remind ourselves that the NT has the second highest level of imprisonment per head of population in the World, with 90 per cent of inmates being Indigenous and 50 per cent of them on remand. For years now, as a method of reducing crime levels, increasing jailing has been failing, but as a vote winning policy it’s still the one that just “keeps on giving”.

The Four Spruikers went on to explain to the invited assembled media, and thereby we residents and voters of the Northern Territory, that the new Remand Centre is going to be a private jail: i.e. a creature of private enterprise, meaning the corporate entity running it will have as its main driver the making of profit.

The Chief Minister went on to say, what must have been music to the ears of any enterprising businessman, that in the Northern Territory: “There will always be an increase in prisoner numbers and we need a Corrections System that does the job it needs to do.”

This means a growing and attractive market for any astute entrepreneur and likewise prospective shareholders. Prisoners in the NT will continue to be “a growth industry”. So much for this “mandated” Government’s claim of reducing crime, thereby victims, criminals and prisoner numbers. “Boom Times” lie ahead with “profits made from prisoners” in the NT.

As to paying for all of this, the Four Spruikers treated us to some of their usual “material”; namely weasel words, mirrors, smoke, baloney, and good old-fashioned lies. At one point in their performance it almost sounded like we taxpayers were going to get all this for free! That old pitch: “Don’t Send Any Money!” came to mind.

CEO Varley even chimed in to assure we taxpayers that the new private prison would be his responsibility, which would mean the standards and quality would be high! He told us our private prison; “would fall under his remit so the community can rest assured that the quality and safeguards are high.”

Modesty clearly becomes Mr Varley, this being the same Mr Varley who has for years overseen NT Corrections which enjoys the worst reputation in Australia; lockdowns, dysfunction, fires, escapes, riots, and grossly unlawful conditions being the regular order of the day.

The same Mr Varley was famously seen on the front page of the NT News in September 2024, gazing out of a broken window looking for his escaped domestic violence prisoners from his facility at the NT Police Watch House.

The accompanying headline was: “Oh Sheet!” describing the methodology employed by the two escapees. As Mr Varley looked out perplexed at the ones that got away, no doubt the escapees’ partners were feeling more than anxious at their fate.

The NT News, another part of The Apparatus, and invariably supportive of the current CLP government [owned by Newscorp with two of its senior journalists, Camden Smith and Gary Shipway both former senior advisors to previous CLP Governments], gave CEO Varley another platform to spruik the private prison with a full column in the Sunday Territorian of 23 August 2026.

It consisted of classic political post truth nonsense and deceit, including the claim that his Department had, to date, “increased education and training for prisoners.” Absolute rubbish and he knows it.

This is the kind of vote winning messaging that the symbiotic combination of NT News and whatever Government of the day (all NT Governments pay large amounts to the NT News in advertising) have been disinforming and misinforming the community for the last two decades.

We, the community, who pay for these prisons, prisoners and the roughly 1600 employees within NT Corrections, have all been played.

For years now crime has risen, especially in the most serious area of domestic violence, as well as youth crime, while the cost of prisons and appendages has gone through the roof. Meanwhile, the political class and their immediate entourage (advisors, high level bureaucrats, and their senior managers) continue to thrive in this unmovable status quo, while the newspaper sells stories which concentrate on the negative by exaggerating the level and seriousness of crime.

This is the symbiotic destructive relationship which has taken the NT to the brink of collapse. We could now reasonably be named The Gulag Territory, rather than the Northern Territory.

We were also told during this “performance” that the cost of the new women’s prison, which will be publicly funded, has been estimated, at this stage, at $300 million. From experience that normally ends up being $500 million or more.

As for the cost of the larger privately-funded prison, that is, according to our Treasurer and former prison officer Mr Yan, at this stage, “unknown”. The spin and weasel words were employed with vigour on this rather crucial point. Mr Yan said a recent similar private prison in Queensland had cost $1 billion and we do know the present Holtze prison, which won’t be paid off until 20 years from now, cost taxpayers $1.8 billion. All things considered it looks like it will cost taxpayers $2 billion.

This decision to go private is being made by this Government who like reminding us that they have “the mandate” and “will not apologise” for punity over everything else at a time when several previous interstate governments had tried out private prisons only to discover they failed miserably and so returned them to public ownership and control.

The whole performance put on that morning by The Apparatus was in fact the old Illusionist’s trick of grabbing the media, and saying; “Hey! Don’t look over there! Look over here!”.

Story Two: Code Yellow

That was because the “over there” was the NT Department of Health and specifically Royal Darwin Hospital. Back in the real world that most people live in, we learnt this week that the RDH has been operating for the last three weeks under its Sixth Code Yellow for the year! That is no Illusion. That is not “fake news”.

The ongoing Code Yellow crisis means our hospital and its heroic staff have been for too long operating and functioning “on their knees”, caused by years of incompetent management resulting in gross inadequacies of resources, personnel, and infrastructure.

No other jurisdiction in Australia experiences anywhere near this level of dysfunction. Health workers have stated; “the situation is desperate”, and; “they don’t think the public know how close we are to a health disaster in the Top End”.

Patients in the RDH are not being properly cared for. They are suffering, and their health and lives are being jeopardised. People who are ill and in need of hospitalisation, for whatever reason, cannot enter our hospital because there is no room or capacity to treat them. This goes across the board, from the maternity ward to the ever-increasing need for care and treatment for our elderly. And this is Australia, the second richest country in the world.

The Health Department’s current senior bureaucrat, Susan Bowden, being a member of The Apparatus, from behind her desk has been issuing memos attempting to rally our frontline heroes who, despite their physical and mental exhaustion, continue to work exorbitant hours under inadequate and unforgivable conditions. The Apparatus deliberately exploits the incredible dedication that we all know health workers bring to their workplace and thereby treats them with contempt. That is truly immoral.

This is the same Health Department which through gross governance failure has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on an IT system that proved “not fit for purpose”. Now there is an expression that comes to mind. This is health. Our health. This is what counts in a society and it has been deteriorating on this path for years, all beknownst to those same political leaders, their advisors, and their top-level bureaucrats: The Apparatus.

$300 million plus for a women’s jail and another $1 to 2 billion dollars for a Remand Centre are seen to The Apparatus as vote winners, and therefore the health of citizens, taxpayers, and voters, being our young, middle aged, and elderly, are ignored.

We have a Health “System”, along with a Corrections “System”, that is now broken and the people who run it are directly responsible for this. They are to blame but part of this “system” includes the lure that no one in The Apparatus will ever be held responsible for the damages they have caused.

Accountability doesn’t exist in the world of The Apparatus.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Other jurisdictions in Australia and overseas have and are now pursuing policies that actually work in reducing crime. Such policies don’t have the superficial vote winning allure. They take time and resources but they work. In Scotland they have pursued combined policies over the last ten years which include health, police and education and which have reduced serious violent crime and juvenile crime. Their approach has now been adopted by the Victorian Government.

The methodology largely employed in those policies currently lies dormant in the large number of recommendations and findings from countless NT and Australian Coronial Inquests, Inquiries and several Royal Commissions. Our leaders who make the decisions have, on behalf of us, in their own personal interests, steadfastly refused to pursue them. They have benefited. We have lost.

We now live in an era of governance and managerial incompetence. If you think everything is falling apart, that’s because it is. If you think you are powerless to change this that’s because you are. At least for the time being. Unless the time for doing nothing is now over.

John Lawrence is a legal practitioner whose career began in the Territory in 1987 as a Crown Prosecutor, five years later becoming the Solicitor in Charge of NAALAS, now NAAJA. He later joined the Independent Bar where he has remained for 28 years. He was appointed Senior Counsel in 2010 and has featured in many high-profile cases, including several Royal Commissions of Inquiry. He has served as President of the NT Bar Association as well as the Criminal Lawyers Association NT (CLANT) and as a Director of the Law Council of Australia.

John has written numerous articles for various national publications over the years, mostly on justice issues. He has been a passionate advocate for human rights, the rule of law and the rights of all Territorians, having spent a large part of his career representing Indigenous people and organisations in their struggle against disadvantage and injustice.

His regular column for the NT Independent is called Se Acabo.