The National Network expresses our absolute devastation and outrage at the announcement that Legal Aid Northern Territory (LANT) will immediately cease representing any child or adult who is not already in custody.
‘This is not a mere funding crisis, it is another profound betrayal of communities already being relentlessly over-surveilled, over-policed and mass incarcerated in some of the harshest prison conditions in the country,’ said Debbie Kilroy.
‘This decision is not occurring in a vacuum. It lands in the middle of a manufactured “law and order crisis,” whipped up by governments who refuse to invest in communities and instead funnel every political instinct into punishment, policing and imprisonment. And now, those same governments are standing by as the most fundamental human right, the right to legal counsel, is stripped away from the very people they are targeting,’ said Debbie Kilroy.
This is not a gap in the system.
This is the system.
‘Legal Aid and Aboriginal legal services in the NT have been pushed beyond breaking point for years. The demand created by punitive bail laws, the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility back to 10, and a political obsession with locking people up has made it impossible for Legal Aid or the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) to meet the caseload forced upon them,’ said Debbie Kilroy.
‘And the responsibility sits squarely with government, not with the overworked lawyers scrambling to prevent injustice, and certainly not with the children now left to face court without representation,’ said Debbie Kilroy.
The NT government’s response?
Finger-pointing, cost-shifting, and an astonishing lack of urgency as children as young as ten are pushed into courtrooms alone.
‘The idea that any government can call itself committed to safety and justice while knowingly allowing hundreds of people, overwhelmingly Aboriginal people, to be dragged through the criminal punishment system without legal representation is unforgivable,’ said Tabitha Lean.
‘It is a direct assault on human rights. It violates basic legal principles. And it will only compound the already catastrophic levels of wrongful imprisonment, child removals, police violence and prison harm in the NT,’ said Tabitha Lean.
‘The National Network have been warning for some time now that the NT justice system is structurally violent. We have warned that the government’s obsession with punishment over prevention would collapse essential supports. We have warned that Aboriginal legal services were being forced to do more with less while the NT government expanded policing powers and prison budgets,’ said Tabitha Lean.
Now that collapse has arrived.
‘Thousands of lives hang in the balance because governments chose punishment over people, surveillance over safety, incarceration over community. This “drastic action” is not a budget issue, it is the inevitable outcome of deliberate political choices,’ said Tabitha Lean.
‘If the NT government allows this crisis to continue, they are choosing a future where children, as young as ten-year-old children, stand alone before a magistrate, without a lawyer, in a system designed to break them. This government is choosing to pour petrol on the fire of mass incarceration. They are choosing harm.
The National Network will not allow governments to pretend this is anything but state-sanctioned abandonment,’ said Tabitha Lean.
The National Network calls for immediate action to:
- Fully fund Legal Aid NT and NAAJA to meet existing and projected demand
- Reverse punitive bail, policing and sentencing laws that have flooded the courts and prisons
- End the criminalisation of children and imprisonment of children immediately
- Stop manufacturing crises and start investing in communities, not cages
Our communities deserve safety, not punishment.
We deserve justice, not abandonment.
And we deserve governments who uphold human rights rather than destroy them.
For further comment, please contact Debbie Kilroy on 0419 762 474 or Tabitha Lean on 0499 780 226
