1. What is happening?
On Monday evening, Four Corners, one of Australia’s peak investigative journalism programs, broadcast shocking footage of young detainees at the Don Dale detention centre in the Northern Territory being mistreated by staff.
In one image, a young man, Dylan Voller, is strapped to a chair by his wrists and neck, and covered with a “spit hood”.
In another, guards repeatedly sprayed six teenagers - all of them Aboriginal - with tear gas after they allegedly began to act aggressively to Don Dale staff.
The guards can be heard on the video saying, “no let the fucker come through because when he comes through, he will be off balance. I’ll pulverise the little fucker. Oh shit, we’re recording hey [laughs]”.
In the footage, 14-year-old Aboriginal boy Jake Roper is seen trying to escape his small concrete cell before being tear gassed for up to eight minutes.
Roper had been kept in the cell with no natural light, air conditioning or running water for up to 23 hours a day. The footage shows a distressed Roper screaming at the officers, “I’ve been in the back cells for how long bruz?”
“They were kept in those cells for up to 24 hours a day,” Howard Bath, the former NT children’s commissioner, told the program.
2. How did people react?
The footage shocked the nation, and politicians acted quickly.
Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull immediately announced a royal commission to investigate the NT’s youth justice system. A royal commission is a public inquiry with wide-ranging powers, often formed to investigate widespread, ongoing impropriety in public institutions.
The NT’s Corrections Minister, John Elferink, was quickly removed from his role, but remains the territory’s attorney general and children, families, justice, disability and mental health minister.
NT chief minister Adam Giles said he was shocked by the footage, and blamed a “culture of cover up” within the NT corrections system for having not seen it earlier.
3. But people have known about this footage for a long time.
BuzzFeed News, along with many other media outlets, has reported on the tear gassing incident. In 2015, a report by former Northern Territory children’s commissioner Dr Howard Bath, found the actions undertaken by Don Dale staff to be excessive.
4. Why does this matter?
Indigenous incarceration is at crisis levels in Australia. The NT has long been criticised for its punitive approach to young Aboriginal offenders, many of them in custody for minor crimes or on remand waiting to appear before the court.
At present Aboriginal young people make up almost 96% of the juvenile detention population in the Northern Territory despite only comprising 44% of the population aged between 10 and 17.
In the past 10 years the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander imprisonment has increased by 88%, compared to the non-Indigenous imprisonment rate, which has increased by 28%.
Indigenous Australians only make up 2% of the Australian population, yet they make up more than 27% of the nation’s prison population. In the Northern Territory 90% of the prison population is Aboriginal.
In the past five years, the deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders in custody have increased due to the rising rates of imprisonment. 449 Indigenous Australians died in custody between 1980 and 2011. That’s more than one death a month.
5. This isn’t an isolated incident.
Long before he was NT chief minister, Giles bragged that he would throw young offenders in a concrete hole if he was corrections minister.
“I would love to be the corrections minister. It is not the portfolio I really aspire to but, if I was the prisons minister, I would build a big concrete hole and put all the bad criminals in there: ‘Right, you are in the hole, you are not coming out. Start learning about it’. I might break every United Nations convention on the rights of the prisoner but, ‘Get in the hole,’” he told NT parliament in 2010.
What was broadcast on Four Corners was the tip of the iceberg, experts say.
“Amnesty International has repeatedly raised concerns of abuse of children being held in youth detention centres in the Northern Territory,” Julian Cleary, Indigenous rights campaigner at Amnesty International Australia, said.
“The NT government has failed to deal with systemic issues with the treatment of children in its youth detention system,” Cleary said.
6. What's happening with the young people in the footage?
Following the Four Corners episode, Dylan Voller's lawyer released a heartbreaking letter from the young man thanking the public for its support and apologising for his actions.
He's now in an adult prison, where his lawyer says he doesn't feel safe because some of the guards there are the same ones who worked at the Don Dale centre.
Giles says he has now banned the use of restraint chairs and spit hoods, despite his own government voting to legalise them just two months ago (long after they were already in use). And he is considering moving all offenders from the Don Dale centre to a different facility.
7. What’s next?
The Australian federal government is meeting to decide the terms of reference for the royal commission this week. The Northern Territory will hold its parliamentary election on August 27, the ruling Country Liberal Party is widely expected to lose.