Can Canberra Help Restore Safety in NT Communities?

In a world increasingly governed by slogans rather than standards, nowhere is the breakdown of order more glaring than in the remote communities of the Northern Territory. The headlines out of Alice Springs are no longer shocking, they are expected. Rampant youth crime, domestic violence, alcohol-fuelled assaults, and property destruction have turned once-functional towns into nightly battlegrounds. Arnhem communities face similar unrest. Yet the common thread is not the Indigenous identity of the residents, but the political identity of the policymakers tasked with doing something about it.

Australia’s political class has offered plenty of lip service. But the reality, as seen on the ground, is not the presence of governance, but its selective absence.

The Northern Territory’s unique challenges, sparse populations, vast distances, and socioeconomic disparities, demand a clear-eyed assessment of how political parties propose to restore safety and whether federal intervention can address local failures, including the influence of overly lenient judicial decisions. The NT Labor Government has largely embraced the mantra of "community-led solutions,” a phrase that in practice often means no solution at all. The policy playbook reads like a social science thesis, restorative justice, trauma-informed care, diversionary programs, and a range of provenly failed idea’s while actual communities are held hostage by emboldened offenders. Judicial decisions reflect this culture of leniency, where activist magistrates operate under the belief that consequences perpetuate trauma, and that restraint is more violent than violence itself.

The Labor-aligned Federal Government has been no more effective. Rather than supporting stronger policing or sentencing reforms, it has doubled down on vague platitudes about “healing” and “truth-telling.”  No one should ever forget the wasted Half a Billion dollars spent by Labor to divide the country. Meanwhile, the truth told by crime statistics paints a different picture, assaults in Alice Springs are up 38% over five years. Property damage and theft continue to rise, particularly in communities with high welfare dependence and limited deterrence. Their policies still focus on funding Indigenous-led diversion programs and community policing, with the Commonwealth committing billions to remote housing and education. Labor’s 2016 promise to reform youth detention faltered, and their recent “tough love” pivot, including support for snap curfews, failed to stem the 2024 election landslide loss to the CLP. Data shows crime rates in Alice Springs rose 10% annually under Labor’s eight-year rule, suggesting their approach lacked tangible results. While Labor’s emphasis on Closing the Gap aligns with evidence that stable housing reduces crime by 15%, their inability to translate funding into outcomes and houses has eroded trust, particularly in suburban centres like Darwin and Palmerston.

Calls to abolish Intervention-era programs such as alcohol restrictions and mandatory income management, policies which, though imperfect, led to measurable drops in violence, have been granted far more respect than the lived reality of law-abiding Aboriginal families begging for safety.

The Liberal Party and its NT counterpart, the Country Liberal Party (CLP), have returned to first principles, order before reform, protection before prevention. The CLP’s push for bail reform, stronger sentencing, and the reintroduction of alcohol bans has been met with predictable outrage from inner-city academics, but not from the families in Tennant Creek, Katherine, or Mutitjulu, who just want their children to sleep safely. However, critics note that harsh measures, like mandatory alcohol rehabilitation, have failed to reduce recidivism, with studies showing 60% of offenders reoffend within two years. The CLP’s reliance on punitive measures alienates vulnerable communities without addressing systemic issues like education and housing, where the NT lags, with only 20% of Indigenous students meeting national literacy standards. Their introduction of 6 new laws after the election fell flat with an activist judiciary actively rejecting, subverting or ignoring the legislation.

The Federal Coalition’s position has been firmer. They propose leveraging Section 122 of the Constitution, Canberra’s plenary power over territories, to introduce legislation that curtails activist judicial overreach and enforces minimum sentencing for violent repeat offenders. Critics call it a return to the Intervention. The reality is that it is a return to sanity.

Unlike the moral exhibitionism of Labor and the Greens, this approach puts the victims first, not the perpetrators. It reflects the core function of governance, to shield the innocent from harm, even if doing so offends the sensibilities of progressive lawyers.

The Greens advocate a human rights-based approach, opposing curfews and punitive measures as discriminatory. They call for decriminalizing minor offenses and investing in cultural rehabilitation programs, citing evidence that on-country initiatives they have cited may reduce youth offending by 25% (an attempt to validate this evidence disputed the results). Their 2024 NT election gains, breaking 20% in some seats, reflect suburban support, but their policies cause harm in remote communities, where practical safety concerns outweigh ideological appeals. Past attempts at decriminalization elsewhere, like in Victoria, saw property crimes spike well over 12%, raising doubts about scalability in the NT’s volatile context. The Greens offer no real solutions, only slogans. Their vision of justice seems to begin and end with dismantling every institution that enforces it. In their worldview, the police are oppressors, the courts are colonial constructs, and incarceration is inherently racist. Yet it is precisely the absence of enforcement that allows predators, black and white, to thrive.

Phil Scott, the Teal independent backed by southern money and eastern virtue, brings the same sanctimony dressed in solar panels and diversity banners. His “inclusive justice” vision would leave the most vulnerable unguarded, replacing police with social workers and criminal records with apologies. The problem with this thinking is that it assumes everyone operates in good faith. But criminality is not cured with empathy. It is deterred by consequences.

Then there is One Nation, whose tough-on-crime rhetoric often resonates with disillusioned locals but suffers from oversimplification. While the party correctly identifies the decay of deterrence and the failures of judicial activism, it often proposes blanket solutions, military-style boot camps, mandatory incarceration for minors, that ignore the nuances of remote communities and alienate the very people who need protection. They point to cases where repeat offenders, released on bail, committed violent crimes or murders within weeks, with NT recidivism rates at 58%. Their call for federal intervention echoes past Coalition policies like the 2007 NT Emergency Response, which reduced alcohol-related violence by 6% but was criticised for disempowering communities, with long-term crime rates unchanged.

Still, their political value lies in shifting the Overton Window, forcing others to take law and order seriously by highlighting what happens when it is ignored.

Canberra’s role in reining in local judicial leniency through federal laws is contentious. The CLP and One Nation support overriding NT courts, citing judges’ failure to enforce bail conditions, with 30% of NT offenders breaching bail in 2023. Just over 56% of Territorians feel that Judges in the NT are either inept, incompetent or corrupt. Labor and the Greens argue this undermines judicial independence and local sovereignty, pointing to the 2007 intervention’s mixed results. A federal framework could standardise sentencing, but risks cultural insensitivity, as seen in past policies that ignored Indigenous customary law, leading to community backlash. The idea that Federal legislation can override local judicial leniency is not without precedent. The Northern Territory is not a state. It is a legislative child of Canberra, and Canberra has acted before, during the Intervention, with alcohol bans, and through court-mandated reforms to sentencing.

The challenge lies not in authority, but in will. Will the Commonwealth Government use its powers to ensure that justice serves victims before ideologies? Or will it, like so many before, hide behind the myth that “local solutions” will spontaneously arise while the fires burn?

From Alice to Arnhem, the verdict is already in, that safety is not a cultural construct. It is a legal guarantee, enforced by the courage to act, even if it is unpopular with elites.

And if local governments can’t, or won’t, do their job, it falls to the Commonwealth to step in. Not because it is ideal, but because it is necessary. From the author.

The opinions and statements are those of Sam Wilks and do not necessarily represent whom Sam Consults or contracts to. Sam Wilks is a skilled and experienced Security and Risk Consultant with 3 decades of expertise in the fields of Real estate, Security, and the hospitality/gaming industry. Sam has trained over 1,000 entry level security personnel, taught defensive tactics, weapons training and handcuffs to policing personnel and the public. His knowledge and practical experience have made him a valuable asset to many organisations looking to enhance their security measures and provide a safe and secure environment for their clients and staff.