On Monday last – in the midst of an unprecedented leadership crisis in the NT police force and with corrections and the justice system descending into chaos – the NT Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro was a guest of Katie Woolf’s on her morning show on Darwin commercial radio MIX104.9FM.

Katie Woolf is regarded by some as a bit of a soft touch so Finocchiaro might have thought herself on safe ground.

Soft touch, safe ground or not, Katie Woolf is nobody’s fool and certainly has the wood on the current crop of live-to-air radio presenters across town at the ABC, which continues its slow descent from mediocrity through mundanity to irrelevance.

In what was largely a soft-ball interview, Woolf led Finocchiaro through a number of issues arising from the NT ICAC’s Operation Apollo, that prompted the crisis in the NT police force and involved an investigation into a recruitment process involving Commissioner Michael Murphy.

Woolf asked Finocchiaro whether she would order a review into police recruitment generally, an issue that had been pressed by the powerful NT Police Association.

“… that will all come out in the wash, Katie”

On Monday Finocchiaro’s responses were non-committal – “that will all come out in the wash, Katie” – but by the end of the week she had ordered Commissioner Murphy to take leave, appointed his deputy to “act up” in his role and ordered a broad-brush inquiry – led by retired Tasmanian judge Alan Blow – into recruitment issues during Murphy’s brief tenure as Commissioner.

Finocchiaro – who in government has kept the Police portfolio she held while in opposition – was elected on the back of a ferocious law-and-order campaign and has prosecuted that policy with persistent vigour in government.

Notwithstanding her nine years in the NT parliament – including five as CLP leader – and six months as leader of the CLP government, outside of set-piece interviews Finocchiaro is often unconvincing, and is prone to stumble through responses more word salad than coherent. That isn’t helped by a voice that can veer from squeaky to shrill and back again.

Thus it was last Monday when, at the end of a paragraph of waffling blather Finocchiaro made a statement as singular as a child abandoned on the steps of an orphanage.

“We are achieving good things Katie, there’s five hundred more people in prison than there were six months ago, and that’s a good thing.”

I highlighted that sentence in the transcript in red – rather than my usual yellow – and when I came back to it, it stood out, not for irrelevance but for the unashamed glibness with which the last five words ” … and that’s a good thing” were uttered. I checked the tape. Then checked it again. My transcript was correct.

I’m not a Christian or a believer in any faith but I respect and appreciate the spitituality of others. These words prompted me to think of the questions that believers of monotheistic faiths ask when challenged or in need of spiritual guidance.

“What would Jesus or Muhammad do?“

“What would Jesus or Muhammad do?” ‘What guidance would the Bible, the Quran or the Talmud provide?”

For an agnostic like me the question is just as straightforward, “What would be the right, just and proper thing to do?“

I’m sure that neither entity nor any of those good books would consider it appropriate to gloat over and take perverse credit for and pleasure in locking up 500 and more of your fellow citizens and to boast about it on public radio. That a politician could take perverse pride in committing their constituents into the NT’s broken prison system beggars belief.

“Thats a good thing”?

Not now, not ever.

Those words came back to me early this morning when I was awoken by the crashing of thunder and the shotgun pellets of monsoon rain above my head.

My phone told me that a new “Musical Dispatch from The Front” had arrived from my old comrade, a 50-year resident of Yuendumu, Frank Baarda.

Frank’s musical missives are often obscure and obtuse, occasionally hilarious and always insightful, if not for his linguistic fluidity then for his musical variety.

The warp in Frank’s latest missive included the Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption; the inestimable beauty of centralian sunsets; the ABC’s national treasures Roy and HG; and two musical masterpieces – our own AC/DC’s magnificent opus to freedom Jailbreak and ¡Oye! Te hablo desde la prisión by Joe Arroyo.

The weft pulling these disparate threads together was the thoroughly depressing news contained in the Australian Bureau of Statistics update on National and state information about adult prisoners and community-based corrections that backed up Finocchiaro’s miserable claim of credit for the NT’s booming prison population.

Frank’s Dispatch noted an ABC News report of new ABS data that “…shows the NT’s prison population rose from 2,236 to 2,401 in the 2024 December quarter — a 7 per cent increase. The NT corrections department has confirmed the prison population has risen by another 300 inmates since then, to reach 2,704 people in custody on Thursday.”

Finocchiaro was right – from September 2024 to mid-March 2025 the NT prison population grew by 20.9% – or 504 inmates.

The ABC’s report also contained this grim statistic: ” … the Northern Territory [is] Australia’s most imprisoned jurisdiction, with an incarceration rate three times greater than next-placed Western Australia … If the NT was a nation, its prison rate would trail only El Salvador.”

… If the NT was a nation, its prison rate would trail only El Salvador.”

And, while the dramatic spike in incarceration from the CLP’s return to power in September 2024 is alarming, no less so – as the graph illustrates – was the steady rise from 2021 when the Australian Labor Party was in power in the NT.

A pox then on both political houses.

A January 2025 article in the Law Society Journal questions why Australia spends billions on building new prisons when they don’t make us any safer.

The graph below is consistent with the ABS data but further illustrates that the NT has outpaced other Australian jurisdictions in a shameful race to the bottom of the carceral barrel.

As of 1 January 2024 a crushing 1.03% of the NT’s adult population was in prison – orders of magnitude higher than any other Australian jurisdiction.

The ‘new’ prison at Holtze in Darwin’s rural area and its counterpart in Alice Springs are both full-and-fit-to-burst and across the NT prisoners are being held in police watch-houses and cells.

In what can only be described as a Kafkaesque turn of events, even the “old” Berrimah Prison has been revived once again.

… in a Kafkaesque turn of events, the “old” Berrimah jail has been revived once again.

Condemned as a wholly unfit-for-purpose facility just a few years ago and re-badged by Labor as the Don Dale youth detention centre – and didn’t that work out well? – the notorious and decrepit Berrimah Prison has yet again been revived as “the new adult prison in Berrimah to accommodate more than 310 prisoners.”

Meanwhile hapless Corrections Minister Gerard Maley and his department are busy shuffling the deckchairs – make that prisoners’ beds – between watch-houses, cells, over-crowded prisons and 100-bed demountable prisons-within-prisons.

And, in what might foreshadow a move to eventually privatising the NT prison system in part or whole, an “initial cohort” of about 20 staff from private security firm G4S officers will be deployed to Darwin to provide ancillary services.

It is little wonder that this chaos is having serious knock-on effects elsewhere in the justice system.

As ABC News reported yesterday, “Northern Territory lawyers say they are being repeatedly knocked back from visiting their clients inside prison, causing backlogs in the courts and denying defendants their right to legal representation.”

How’s that “500 more people in prison” business going Chief Minister?

Still reckon its a “a good thing“?

* Photo of NT Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro and Corrections Minister Gerard Maley: ABC News/The Northern Myth

Got a comment?
Let me know in the comment box below – cheers, Bob Gosford