…we will divest us both of
rule,
Interest of territory, cares
of state…
King Lear Act one, Scene one.
The publication of the NT Police Review (link
here) provides a useful opportunity to consider the policy underpinnings of
the role of policing in the NT. The review was undertaken by Vince Kelly, a
former NT police officer and former head of the NT Police Association and was
supported by a secretariat comprised of staff from the Chief Ministers
Department and the NT Treasury. It set out 18 recommendations. I don’t propose to
list them or summarise them.
The NT Government this week published the review,
announcing that it accepts 15 of the 18 recommendations (link here).
The Government has also announced a major boost to capital investment for
police related infrastructure of $125 million over the coming five years. In
the media release (link here)
the Chief Minister asserts that the 2024 NT Budget provides $570 million over
five years to implement the recommendations of the review.
My own take is that overall, the review is a major step in the
right direction, and if implemented effectively will improve the quality of
policing in the NT considerably. However, this is coming off a low base, with
serious pre-existing underlying governance and management issues ensuring that
the implementation task will be challenging. As Mr Kelly notes in his foreword,
the review follows ‘a decade-long period of organisational and, in many
instances, personal trauma for the institution of NTPF and individual members’.
The Executive summary provides useful context to the
challenges the review is seeking to address:
The current demands for
service on NTPF are unequivocally at the highest levels in the history of the
agency. Those demands are being serviced in an increasingly adverse operating
environment characterised by escalating levels of criminal offending across a
number of crime types, corresponding community concern and alarm around issues
of community safety and business confidence. … Historically, the NT has
consistently recorded higher rates of crime across the majority of crime types
and this pattern has continued with an overall crime rate more than double the
national average. In the period 2018-2023 assault rates in the NT rose by 44.5%
and crime against property rose by 16.8%.
Commensurately, in per capita
terms, the NT is the most highly policed population in Australia, with 730
operational police staff per 100,000 people, compared to a national average of
281. When examined in geographical terms, NTPF provides policing services
across a geographical area of approximately 1.42 million square kilometres,
servicing a population of 252,473 people, of whom some 30% identify as
Indigenous with approximately three quarters of that population living in
remote and very remote areas.
These contextual observations, which have been evident for
at least the past 25 years, suggest to me that while fixing the management,
resourcing and governance of the NT police is important (indeed crucial), it will
not of itself address the underlying structural drivers of this social dysfunction
(and I am not referring just to the Indigenous population of the NT when I use
this term). Unfortunately, our political system (in both the NT and nationally)
appears incapable of focussing on, let alone proactively addressing, these
deeper structural impediments. In essence, the NT (and arguably remote Australia
generally) remains overwhelmingly neocolonial in its institutional structures,
with substantial public and private investment available for commercial ‘development’
that extracts resources but leaves little in the way of ongoing infrastructure
(physical, social or cultural) once those investments run their course.
Notwithstanding this strategic perspective, it is nevertheless
important in my view that NT Police capabilities are progressively strengthened
and modernised. To this end I add a small number of comments (in no particular
order) regarding the review recommendations and the NT Government proposed response.
First, the recommendations that
were not accepted by the NT Government provide demonstrable proof (if
any is needed) that the NT Government is the prisoner of an ideology that
prioritises commercial interests over the public interest. In her media release
regarding the review, the Chief Minister states:
The Territory Government does not accept the
recommendation to reduce Police Auxiliary –
PALI – coverage on bottle shops in the Territory [recommendation 11] and
does not accept the recommendation to discontinue using private security
services in relation to reducing anti-social behaviour [recommendation 12].
There is no explanation or rationale provided for these decisions,
and in my view, in each case the review made a credible policy argument in
support of the recommendation. Yet in each case, they would have adversely affected
commercial interests, in particular the alcohol industry and the commercial
security industry. This blog has previously pointed to the overweight influence
of alcohol interests (link
here and link
here). The failure of the NT Government to prioritise the public interest
in the development of alcohol policy is both a massive health and social catastrophe
and is sowing the seeds of future social and economic dysfunction across the
whole community.
Second, while the review
recommendations relating to the Aboriginal Community Police Officer Program
[recommendation 16, page 87] appear to be moving in the right direction, it
seems well beyond time that the NT Government and the NT Police should bite the
bullet and do away with what are (within the NT police organisational hierarchy)
second class employees. There is no reason why Aboriginal Territorians should not
expect to be recruited and trained to fill ordinary police roles. Overall, the NT police employ only 10 percent Indigenous
staff in a jurisdiction where the population is 30 percent Aboriginal, and
where a substantial proportion of police efforts and activities are directed
towards Aboriginal citizens. Such a decision will require political leadership.
The continuation of the status quo (albeit with a strategy for incremental improvements
taking decades) merely serves to confirm the point I made above that the NT
remains a neocolonial outpost. I do not discount the implementation challenges
in making the shift I am advocating, but the status quo in not merely
untenable, it is corrosive of public trust, and thus makes the challenges of
ensuring public safety for all more difficult.
Third, the section on remote police
infrastructure (page 26) raises a more general issue not raised by the review (notwithstanding
the involvement of the NT Treasury on the review secretariat). I refer of
course to the principle of horizontal fiscal equalisation. The NT has been funded
since at least the 1980s for the cost of providing remote policing services via
its allocations of GST revenues as determined by the Grants Commission. There
is no link between the calculation of the funding due to the NT and the geographic
allocation of available funding. The fact that high levels of underinvestment
in police services have persisted over decades despite the NT being notionally
funded to provide those services serves to demonstrate (once again) that the
structural determinants of public expenditure and investment are exclusionary
rather than inclusionary (or even discriminatory).
Fourth, the case study on Gunbalunya
included in the review as an appendix is worth a look as it makes tangible the
impact of underinvestment in policing in remote communities. While the review
makes no comment, the clear implication (confirmed by my own anecdotal
knowledge) is that the levels of police resourcing in communities are
chronically low.
Fifth, there are several
fascinating data tables in the appendix to the review. To pick just one, section
#28 lists real recurrent expenditure per person in the population for police
services by jurisdiction over time. Over the past decade, the NT has
consistently spent three times the average of all other Australian jurisdictions
on policing per citizen. This is not just about remoteness but reflects the
severe underinvestment in the full panoply of social and physical infrastructure
necessary for building and sustaining viable communities.
Conclusion
This review and its implementation is a welcome step to
improving the capacity and capability of the NT Police to ensure community safety
across the NT. Unfortunately, it will not be sufficient to ensure that community
safety outcomes improve and don’t worsen. These basic expectations for a modern
democratic society have been progressively placed at risk over the past two
decades in the NT. The solution requires more fundamental reforms, which in turn
will not happen without the instigation and proactive involvement of the Commonwealth.
Unfortunately, the Commonwealth appears disinclined to do anything more than
offer band- aids. Both levels of government
appear to have divested themselves of the responsibilities of ‘ruling’ in the public
interest.
My pessimistic conclusion is that the social cohesion of
the NT will likely worsen over the coming decade. While the absence of social and
physical infrastructure (housing, education outcomes, health outcomes) will
be chief contributors, the trigger for flare ups will likely be the absence of
an effective regulatory regime for alcohol consumption in the NT. The role of
the police will become more visible and more important as they are given the
task of dealing with the consequences of long-standing policy ineptitude by the
NT political class.
11 April 2024
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