Darwin’s own Scottish barrister John B. Lawrence SC will be contributing a regular column to the NT Independent starting today.John has lived and worked in Darwin for 40 years. His wife, a schoolteacher, has spent the same time working as an ESL specialist teacher. They have four grown children and four and a half grandchildren, most of whom still live here in the Territory. John will be writing on legal and political issues both locally and nationally. His column is called Se Acabo. He has witnessed how the NT has developed over the last 38 years and pulls no punches in his assessment of our current problems.
By John Lawrence
Today’s NT ‘Criminal Justice System’ is a shadow of what it once was. Back in 1987, the year I was admitted as a legal practitioner in the Northern Territory, although not without challenges and difficulties the ‘System’ was largely effective in striving for and achieving Justice, that being the purpose of all legal systems operating in a free democratic society. What we have now is a broken system in the process of collapsing.
Compared with then it’s a shambles and now operates almost solely as a ‘jailing machine’.
It deals in the main with Indigenous adults and children who are processed on their way to “Destination Incarceration”. Forget any notion of due process being accorded any of the Indigenous cargo that goes through this “process”. There is none. What’s more, the conditions of their incarceration have likewise deteriorated into worse than a rack-and-stack Indigenous warehouse.
Truth telling and history
A sinister and deceptive aspect of contemporary liberal democracies, including the NT and Australia, are the measures designed to discourage our knowledge of history generally and recent history in particular. That history, those facts, would inform us what the NT used to be like, how it came to be; what it is now and thereby how, why and who are responsible for the change.
George Orwell was typically onto this by having his ‘hero’ in 1984, Winston Smith, employed as a public servant in the records section of the “Ministry of Truth”, tasked specifically with rewriting history in order to prevent the truth coming out about the present and how it came to be. The governing principle was:
Who Controls the Past, Controls the Future:
Who Controls the Present, Controls the Past.
As it happens, Australia, created by Colonialism has always had a deliberate and effective policy of burying much of its early history due to its embarrassing nature. The central feature of Australia’s existence is necessarily the dispossession of and the destruction of the Indigenous peoples who had been in occupation of the land for 50,000-plus years.
This was the stealing of the land, the killings, rapes and destruction of Indigenous culture and people and subsequent blatant racist policies. “The Great Silence”, coined by Prof Stanner in his 1968 Boyer Lectures, applied because our history’s infamy outweighed its noble achievements. It was described by the High Court in Mabo, in 1992 as “a national legacy of unutterable shame”. “Best we forget” so to speak.
This loss of history undermines any effective analysis and scrutiny of where the NT is now at in 2025 and how it got here thereby protecting the current Ruling Class and fortifying a continuation of the same; “Business as Usual”. The problem with “Business as Usual” in the NT in 2025 is that it has now become clearly unsustainable.
I am positioned to bear witness as to what has occurred throughout the last 38 years within the legal system and Territory society generally; I have seen what it was like; I have seen what it has become; I have seen how this occurred including who done what; I have seen the effects; I have seen who has benefited and who has suffered.
Hannah Arendt talked about this in her 1972 essay ‘Lying in Politics’ concerning the paramount virtue of truth; “facts (my emphasis) need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs”.
As earlier stated, when I first started work as a Crown Prosecutor in 1987 the Northern Territory’s “Criminal Justice System” was healthy, vibrant and dynamic. It was truly a brilliant place to work.
It was not without problems, much of which related to Indigenous crime and incarceration levels. Nevertheless it was an extremely intelligent legal system, an impressive example being in its recent history our Supreme Court Judges had, by harnessing the genius of common law principles, addressed and acknowledged some of those Indigenous difficulties by applying Indigenous customary law if relevant and appropriate. All of that approach has now been, over time, disallowed by legislation. Popular legislation. Politics.
The Northern Territory criminal court system is now a broken shambles which, although appearing to function, is actually in the process of collapsing. It has become unsustainable. As a practicing criminal lawyer today, whether of junior, medium or senior rank it has become a truly dispiriting place to work. Those who would say otherwise are doing what so many need to do these days; kid themselves on; seeing what they want to see and not seeing what they don’t want to see; taking the blue pills not the red pills. We have all to a degree become fatally complacent and wilfully delusional.
Some data and hard figures
When I was admitted in March 1987, the Northern Territory population was 154,000, 28 per cent being Indigenous. The number of prisoners then was 400, the Indigenous proportion being 69 per cent. In April 2025, the population is now 255,000, 30 per cent of which are Indigenous.
The prison population is now 2,838 with 90 per cent being Indigenous.
The obvious difference revealed by those figures is we now have four times more people in jail per head of population and the Indigenous proportion is 20 per cent higher. That is a startling increase and a costly one. Of course it is just “data” and there are explanations as to how this has happened but the real explanation is politics.
For the last 30 years politicians have benefited on running ‘tough on crime’ policies which have won them votes and power. They would then use their ‘mandate’ to change the laws to increase imprisonment levels. Democracy in action you might say. But to no good effect. It has been, on the clear evidence counter-productive. Not that the politicians care. What needs to be appreciated is that consistent with the increase in imprisonment there has been a commensurate increase in the level of crime and the seriousness of those crimes. Further, in recent times the conditions that prisoners ‘enjoy’ in the current overcrowded prison system are inhumane, cruel and unlawful.
We currently have prisoners sleeping on floors in Police Watch Houses as well as in Holtze Prison itself. Similarly, over a further 400 prisoners are now occupying what was condemned for demolition in 2012, namely Berrimah Prison. It was reopened this year in order to accommodate a tsunami of growing adult prisoner numbers. Further, the Prison Service, due to a lack of resources, has prisoners spending significant portions of their time in what is known euphemistically as “Lockdown”. This involves prisoners spending up to 23 hours a day in their overcrowded cells because there are no staff available to allow them release into general areas, to facilitate courses, library visits, rehabilitation and counselling.
Further to this, 52 per cent of the current prison population are actually sitting out on remand with the NT having, predictably, the highest level of recidivism in Australia.
Consecutive NT Governments have dealt with the national issue that is youth crime by placing more and more young Indigenous males and females who already, like their parents’ generation, don’t belong, nor have any future, in the NT Community, into medieval jail conditions which make them upon their release more alienated and angry. More jail more crime. How’s that for ignorance? This is a total failure in our legal system.
In any man’s language it has clearly been a palpable decline into decrepitude. We have gone backwards. This decline is not limited to the criminal legal system. The Territory Health System is likewise a shambles and once again it’s Indigenous patients and families who suffer the most due to the dysfunction. Like our prison system, the RDH is grossly overcrowded with insufficient beds for patients and inordinate delays. The Indigenous population still has a life expectancy at least eight years shorter than non-Indigenous Australians and they are still bedeviled with horrific levels of diabetes, renal failure, and the NT’s greatest of all shames; gross levels of Rheumatic Heart Disease.
This disease is preventable and yet has grown in a terrifying way in the NT to now affecting 3,005 people per 100,000 which is 60 times higher than in any other State or Territory in Australia. Its current levels are now much higher than in any Third World Country! Similarly for Indigenous children, NT Education has declined to become an abject failure. A recent poll reveals that 50 per cent of school Principals want to quit. Literacy, numeracy and attendance levels are all at record lows. Part of this decline during this period includes the cutting of bilingual education.
Further, the NT now no longer has a genuine and effective media. The NT Independent, currently uncovering the grubs and worms under every stone with its Darwin Waterfront Investigation is, thankfully for the community, the only real Media providing for the citizens of the NT. It challenges whoever the incumbent Government is and informs the people the truth of what is actually happening. Contrasting this we still have the decrepit NT News, and the woefully diminished NT ABC. They have all been castrated.
Instead of testing the Government of the day and informing the community of what the facts are, these news outlets, in the main, just churn out Government Department and Police media releases. Their days are numbered which will be no great loss.
Our Police Force has been for years now an embarrassment. It has turned into a Force whose main feature seems to be a gaggle of high level officers more intent on stabbing each other in the back to achieve their toxic ambitions. Police Commissioners have come and gone, usually in disgrace; jail no less for Commissioner McRoberts and most recently Commissioner Murphy sacked following another corruption scandal. Further, the whole of Australia now sees it as a Force riddled with systemic racism.
Officers still employed have been exposed in the Kumanjayi Walker Inquest referring to Indigenous people as “coons”, “niggers” and “neanderthals”. None of them have been dismissed and all are still working, with the exception of Zach Rolfe, who was dismissed for other reasons. Throw into this mix the levels of domestic violence which have gone through the roof and the NT road toll being 100 per cent higher in 2024 than it was in 2023. All of this decline is further reflected in the NT political system and its political class. Although most people still have a preference for democracy they also say they don’t trust democracy and the politicians and their malignant class of advisors (“spin scum”) who run it.
Because of the consistent ubiquitous decline throughout this period, decline itself has now graduated to collapse. The status quo and its trajectory is totally unsustainable.
Tragically the NT seems to be illustrating the first world trend. The Darwin Local Court aside, the Earth’s Biosphere and Western Democracies are themselves collapsing. Concomitant, causative and symptomatic throughout this period has been a clear decline in the moral and ethical values that people and society adhere to. Moral decline. We have become lesser.
Many of the regressive changes brought into the NT Criminal Legal System were met with a failure in moral resistance. It has been an age of sell outs and hypocrites. During the period of this decline, I have been President of both CLANT and the NTBA who offered some resistance to the regressive new laws. Not so now. They, like NAAJA, are essentially ghosts. Voiceless bodies whose constituents are languishing in the Territory’s swelling Indigenous Warehouses.
All of this combined makes it clear that on any objective analysis the Northern Territory in 2025 is a complete and utterly Failed State. It clearly presents now as a matter for the Commonwealth of Australia.
John Lawrence first started 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 Lawyer’s 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.
Finally an honest, courageous professional experienced white man as compared to the usual weak NTG MLA’s, senior public servants and mainstream media who are networked, protected, morally bankrupt, greedy and ‘fatally complacent’ in the downfall of the NT. Need more articles like this to understand the historical downfall of the NTG Judiciary and police who use the DPP for self-interest.
john i live near the cbd, my house is frequently broken into by people who deserve to be in jail.
the inmates are not accidently in jail by mistake. they booked their own tickets.
a crime weary public would prefer them in jail than visiting their houses at 2am.
then theirs the police clear up rates.
police not detaining a suspect who the home owner chased out of his house and down the street with the luck of running into a
passing paddy wagon, despite having the power to detain them under suspicion.
videos of kids in stolen cars, spending stolen cards results in no conclusive proof?
clear video of assault at a home results in no conclusive proof?
methinks the detectives are taking people for a ride.
We were with you right up to the last sentence John.
Knowing and understanding history, depending on who recorded it of course, is not a panacea to affording justice nor acting ethically in the present day. White settlers were racist then, some would argue that some current members of Government are now with their refusal to act on clearly racist Police officers who lied in statutory declarations. They may know about the massacre and resultant court case at Myall Creek in NSW but it all depends on which side they stand.
However, generally speaking, an uninformed population’s consent is definitely more easily manufactured.
Our household has waited with baited breath to see the sparkling gems of evidence to support any of the policies feeding into the Prisoner Production Line but we are continually disappointed.
‘Tough on crime’ is short ,sharp and delivers the message easily without any deep thinking required for most people. Politicians know it usually wins them votes and they know it doesn’t work. How do we know they know this? Because if it actually worked then no country would have a high crime rate due to their tough on crime policies.
Now to your last sentence: assuming most of the Government decision making infrastructure wouldn’t change much from the Feds taking control, the only main difference would be a change of the people within it.
So our argument is: new people with new ideas, working ethically and morally, to begin the change for a better Territory.
Just as an example for discussion’s sake: Dr Don Fuller as Treasurer also working with Health, yourself as Justice Minister/Attorney General, real whistleblowers and accountability warriors rewriting FOI and ICAC legislation, offering financial incentives for blowing the whistle instead of years of petty retaliation, Mark Yiniya Guyula in charge of Indigenous Affairs and Housing.
Completely gut places like the Darwin Waterfront Corporation and prosecute anyone who has committed an offence in relation to its operation. Clean out the Office of the ICAC from having high level NT public servants running it. Or any for that matter.
Sack forensic accountants onto the full range recipients of the IEPS fraud.
Put someone in charge of Indigenous education like professor Mary Kalkiwarra Nadjamerrek.
Put someone in charge of non-Indigenous education like professor Martin Westwell in SA, who knows what he’s doing, instead of a hairdresser from Katherine choosing who runs the show.
You get our point I’m sure.
There’s no guarantee that Commonwealth people would be any better at running the Failed State/Territory than what we have at the moment, policy wise at least.
We would also argue that the impotence of media is deliberate. Again, that could change if you had people in Government who welcome sunlight instead of shying away from it like vampires. It’s all about the staffing there too. If you fill your newsroom with determined and properly resourced investigative journalists then you get a better quality product. Change the advertising revenue stream away from Government advertising and paid for puff pieces and you automatically change the focus of the reporting, see NTIndependent for details.
If people in power don’t have a clue of the root causes of decline, and are only able to clumsily put band aids over the symptomatic gaping wounds, then the predictable outcome of that will be what we see today.
We don’t test prospective politicians on their analyses and solutions outside of a few jingoistic soundbites while campaigning. We accept deflection and distraction as answers to tough questions stemming from difficult problems. Therefore, if the cultural expectation of how politicians should be and should act is low, then we get the kind of politicians we have now. Without any mechanism to oust them for continually failing other than once every 4 years there is no real incentive to do the right thing.
Just listen to the current Attorney General! The decision to exclude anyone with a law degree/background from that job and to fill it with such incompetence is very telling. It’s set up to fail and it was set up to fail purposefully.
That alone should be enough for you to lose your position as Chief Minister in our view.
Imagine what the place would be like if that was a consequence of choosing the muppets we have in charge of ministries now.
Well . . . what an overall emotional ‘dump’. Hopefully clear the air. Sending troops into battle sans leadership almost a certainty to fail. And that is what we have done from day one. And whilst it is sobering to be ‘saturated’. Made aware of. Actual realities have kept eating away the very foundation’s of community. We have yet to secure Leadership! Neither ALP / CLP / Public Service shown territorian(s) that “WE” ARE THE FOUNDATIONAL STONE. As an example: Reflect upon the role of ICAC as delivered? Lack of Leadership, corruption and incompetency that’s where we begin?
The problem is that those in power have been listening to John and his ilk for the last 30/40 years, which has lead us to todays problems