A guest post by Marion Scrymgour, Member for Lingiari.

This post was originally published in the Sunday Territorian on 24 August 2025 and is re-published here with permission.

Something is going wrong in the Northern Territory when the government of the day promotes a planned substantial increase in prison numbers as a winning strategy and the [NT] Attorney-General Marie-Claire Boothby proclaims: “There is no alternative: those who break the law will be arrested.”

I am writing this as someone with strong views on alcohol, crime and domestic violence, and I get it that the criminal justice system has an important job to do to keep us all safe.

Jails are essential social infrastructure.

Murderers, rapists and armed robbers belong there.

But many other people convicted of a crime do not.

The measure of a successful society and a successful government is perhaps the extent to which prison numbers remain steady and close to static for the cohort who comprise the worst of the worst, while other offenders are comprehensively managed on the outside, and supervised intensively, including through the creative use of technology.

The goal there is rehabilitation.

Contrary to the assertion of the Attorney-General, no police force in the world—and especially not in a jurisdiction as vast and challenging as the Territory—can operate on the basis that every single law-breaker will be arrested.

Discretion is key.

Neither police nor the Attorney-General have the authority to determine who is or is not a law-breaker.

That is a matter for the courts.

Many people charged with a offence end up being found not guilty.

It is people who police believe have committed serious offences who must be arrested.

Others can be processed by way of summons or notice to appear.

It has become clear we have two escalating problems.

The first is the pervasive and intractable crime levels that have continued since the change of government last August.

The second is the deterioration over the same timeframe in the relationship between government and its agencies, including police, and Aboriginal Territorians.

Neither of these problems is assisted by the Trumpian public relations strategy of the Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro and her team, talking provocatively about their – in many instances – illusory tough-on-crime measures and eliciting a knee-jerk concerned response from those who they seek to characterise as woke and out of touch. And then pointing to that response as signalling proof of CLP virtue and of how they have delivered for their base.

The Territory’s viability and survival depends on massive infusions of Commonwealth money. The NT receives far more than what would otherwise be its pro-rata share of federal funding because the calculation formula is weighted to take into account Indigenous disadvantage.

In other words, taxpayers from other parts of Australia are subsidising the operations of the NT government on what has up to now been a trust and good faith basis – that the NT government will do the right thing by its Aboriginal citizens in addressing longstanding disadvantage identified in the Closing the Gap targets.

Roads, housing, health, the implementation of the Coroner’s recommendations from her domestic violence homicide inquest reports, and addressing the impact of alcohol all loom large.

So do policing and addressing issues from the Kumanjayi Walker inquest report.

We all want things to improve on the law and order front.

But not only is that not happening, the NT’s social cohesion is being put at risk by the politically calculated blanket incarceration of Aboriginal people coming into the criminal justice system, rather than their triaging to identify and take out of circulation those individuals who pose a real threat to community safety.

Marion Scrymgour is the MP for the Federal electorate of Lingiari