Cuts to Legal Aid NT Adult Services Will Disproportionately Impact First Peoples

Legal Aid Northern Territory last week announced that it would be cutting new applications for services to adults charged with criminal offences from 21 October, while all other services specifically geared to adults, which include referrals for grants for aid for criminal law services at remote bush courts, along with the contracting of private lawyers, will be brought to an end by 1 January.

This development comes on the back of the Country Liberals landslide victory at this year’s NT election in August, which had a focus on “community safety” in terms of crime, and new NT chief minister, Lia Finocchiaro, promised to roll out a number of tough-on-crime measures and to bolster support for NT police.

The crackdown on crime in the NT and the cutting of legal aid for adults will have a disproportionate impact upon First Nations peoples, as much of the Country Liberals electioneering on community safety and crime had a focus on offences committed by Indigenous youths, and the only solution to such matters that the Territorian political class appears to be able to contemplate is punishment.

Legal Aid NT provides free legal advice and lawyers to run cases free-of-charge for Territorians with legal problems, who can’t afford the cost of representation. Former acting director of Legal Aid NT Fiona Hussin told the ABC last week that the scaling back of services is due to insufficient funding and the legal service doesn’t consider its current budget can support its usual caseload.

Territorian legal services are warning that the cutting of legal aid to adults is going to have a devastating impact on the community, as the jurisdiction’s most vulnerable adults will be forced into situations where they must represent themselves in court, despite having a dearth of legal knowledge, and critics have described this as effectively creating “a direct pipeline into prisons”.

Grave concerns

This week, the heads of the Law Society Northern Territory, the NT Bar Association and the Criminal Lawyers Association of the NT wrote to the new NT attorney general Marie-Clare Boothby, warning the incumbent that the “already underfunded and overburdened” NT criminal justice system is not going to “withstand this latest blow”.

“The impact of the proposed changes… will have a profound, immediate and wide-ranging impact,” states the letter, which was cited by the ABC. “Cases without a lawyer will take longer to get listed for plea, hearing, committal, trial or appeal, while unrepresented defendants try to navigate their way through the justice system.”

The legal associations further warned of specific aspects of the system that will be exacerbated by the lack of adequate representation for marginalised adult Territorians, which will include increased time spent on remand and hence, prison overcrowding, victims seeking justice will have prolonged wait times, while the risks of damage to the system’s reputation will spike.

Part of the reason why NT Legal Aid has had to make this decision is that the main legal aid service for First Nations people in the NT, the Northern Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA), has been struggling with its caseload and staff numbers over recent times. And Boothby outlined on Wednesday that NAAJA’s chief executive has recently confirmed that the service is fully operational.

The territory of mass incarceration

The appearance of the conservative Finocchiaro government came after ongoing reports regarding a youth crime wave in Mparntwe-Alice Springs. And this has led to extreme law enforcement measures being applied, which have included multiple curfews imposed upon NT youths in regard to the centre of the city.

In taking office in August, the NT Country Liberals outlined plans to address “two decades of escalating crime”, with the administration preparing to drop the age of criminal responsibility from 12 back down to 10, enact laws for the presumption against bail for serious violent crimes, roll out wanding operations to locate knives in public, as well as a crackdown on public drinking.

Finocchiaro, however, is now overseeing the jurisdiction with the nation’s highest incarceration rate.

And this is drastically so, as the NT imprisonment rate is at 1,153 individuals per 100,000 persons, while the second highest rate nationally is WA with 303.6 per 100,000 adults. And when it comes to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the NT, the rate is a shocking 3,526 per 100,000.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in March, 88 percent of the 2,219 adult prisoners in NT correctional facilities, or 1,955 of them, were First Nations people. And as for child inmates in the NT in March, 91 percent of them, or 32 out of 35 were Indigenous youths. Indeed, the youth imprisonment rate in the NT at times sees 100 percent of the population made up of Aboriginal kids.

Nonfunctioning by design

The National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls said it’s “profoundly disappointed – but not shocked – by the announcement”, and it added that no one should be surprised about it, as legal services have long been warning about ongoing funding issues.

An abolitionist from the National Network, Tabitha Lean further explained that the “carceral system forces people”, especially marginalised people, into reliance upon “chronically underfunded and overstretched” public legal services. And she makes clear that these government funded services that can’t adequately carry out their mandates, function in this manner by design not by accident.

Boothby, the NT attorney general, told the ABC last week that “NT Legal Aid continues to receive funding from the Commonwealth and Northern Territory governments,” while federal AG Mark Dreyfus countered that the issues the free legal service in the NT is suffering through are due to a lack of territory government funding not Commonwealth.

“By denying adequate legal assistance, the state is effectively creating a direct pipeline into prisons, where marginalised people are warehoused and forgotten,” Lean underscored in a 4 October statement.

“This is the machinery of systemic violence at work where justice is withheld, and incarceration becomes the inevitable outcome for those who cannot afford to navigate an unjust legal system.”