Cunningham: NT Labor’s transparency on Don Dale conditions as clear as concrete
The NT Government has confirmed its considering moving female adult prisoners to Don Dale when the youth detainees move out – prompting criticism. So is the old Berrimah prison a cockroach-infested hellhole, or an upgraded correctional facility still capable of humanely detaining inmates?
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In 2016, Four Corners reporter Caro Meldrum-Hanna wrote to Northern Territory Corrections Minister John Elferink requesting access to the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre and other correctional facilities. “Based on our research, the Northern Territory is proactively trying to make things better,” she wrote.
“From Sentenced to a Job, in-prison education programs, reducing offending rates, restraining the growth of prisoners, to barbecues being planned in Don Dale to teach juveniles about cooking. Minister Elferink, this is a significant legacy. It is also your legacy.”
Elferink obliged, however the program that went to air a few weeks later seemed to gloss over the “significant legacy” part, preferring instead to portray the minister in a far less positive light than had been promised in the gushing letter.
Given this history you might have forgiven the former CLP administration for never allowing the cameras in again. But a couple of weeks after that program went to our, we were given permission to film at the “new” Don Dale Detention Centre – the old Berrimah prison where youth detainees were transferred in 2015.
This is the same facility former Corrections Commissioner Ken Middlebrook told a coronial inquest in 2011 was fit only for a bulldozer.
(It would require a book, rather than a column, to adequately portray how appallingly Middlebrook has been treated by NT governments. Let’s just say Corrections is in a far worse state now than when he was in charge.)
In 2017, the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children took the cameras on a tour of the old and new detention centres.
In November 2017 that Commission recommended Don Dale be closed within three months. It’s still open.
In 2018, under the Gunner Labor Government, our cameras were again allowed in to see the improvements made to the facility while work started on a new detention centre.
When detainees set the centre on fire in November of the same year, the cameras were again allowed in to see the damage.
This week, Chief Minister Eva Lawler confirmed the government was considering moving female adult prisoners to the centre when the youth detainees move out later this year. (Attorney General Chansey Paech yesterday revealed Don Dale would in fact be used as a training facility for male prisoners.)
This prompted criticism from advocates who say the facility is no place for women or children, or indeed, any human.
So, is the old Berrimah prison a cockroach-infested hellhole, or an upgraded correctional facility still capable of humanely detaining inmates?
It would seem there’s a simple way to answer this question.
“The media should be allowed in there tomorrow. If the community are properly informed about how their society works there’s no good reason why the community shouldn’t be shown, through the media, whether it’s Sky, ABC, NT News, you should be allowed to go around that place and see what it’s like,” Darwin barrister John Lawrence SC said this week.
But when we put that request to the Department of Territory Families, Housing and Communities, we received an answer we hadn’t heard before.
First, a senior executive from the department, Brooke Wilson, called to say media were no longer allowed access to Don Dale. She said this decision had been made after consultation with detainees who did not want to be portrayed like animals in a zoo. (What does this say about how they are treated?)
She also said the Minister for Territory Families, Ngaree Ah Kit, had determined that when the youth detainees were moved out, the media would still not be allowed access.
No reason was given for this decision and there was no clarification from the Minister’s office.
In a subsequent written statement, the department said: “We provide a range of programs for young people across the centre, from education to treatment services, health and wellbeing and cultural activities. Tours of an operational facility disrupt these programs and would require unreasonable changes to the normal routine for young people.”
The decision is instructive on a couple of levels.
First, it shows this Labor Government is still plagued by the cancer that has infected it from day one, where it allows government departments to call the shots, and fails to intervene, even when common sense would indicate those decisions are being made in the best interests of the highly-paid department executives, rather than the punters who pay their wages.
Second, it again shows Labor’s 2016 commitment to be open and transparent was about as genuine as Caro Meldrum-Hanna’s letter to John Elferink.
And finally, it leaves any reasonably-minded person to wonder: What have they got to hide?
Originally published as Cunningham: NT Labor’s transparency on Don Dale conditions as clear as concrete
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