Not ‘backyard contractors’: Corrections Minister defends staffing plan
Private contractors coming into Territory prisons under new legislation won’t be from the ‘backyard’, says the NT government, but not all are convinced. Find out why.
Northern Territory
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Proposed legislation to allow the employment of private contractors in Corrections is not “privatising prisons” the deputy chief minister Gerard Maley says, but not all are convinced.
Mr Maley, who is also the Corrections Minister, defended the proposed Correctional Services Legislative Amendment Bill 2025 at a press conference in the Alice Springs Correctional Centre on Friday.
The new bill will allow Corrections Commissioner Matthew Varley to appoint subcontracted corrections personnel – a move which has drawn the ire of the United Workers Union.
Mr Maley said corrections officers had put in a 168,000 hours of overtime in 2024, costing the government $11 million.
“That is not a model that we can sustain right across the Northern Territory,” he said.
“What we’re going to do is go out there and explore with contractors what they can provide, because at the moment, we don’t really know what the cost is going to be, because we need to work out what the scope is going to be.”
Mr Maley gave no indication on how much money the government was willing to spend on the proposed contractors, and said there was no specific contractor in mind.
The contractors will be chosen via a tender process, he said, and they won’t be “some small little contractor” or a “backyard contractor”.
“We’re not about privatising prisons, we’re about increasing the workforce. We know that the prison numbers have gone up substantially over the last five months and the workforce hasn’t kicked up,” he said.
He said there are currently more than 30 additional corrections officers in training.
Mr Maley said the contractors wont have “carte blanche power”, instead being limited “to the duty that the commissioner sees fit”.
Mr Maley was in the Alice Springs prison to see the new O block, set to increase the prisons capacity with an additional 96 beds.
The additional 96 beds were originally meant to be completed by mid-2024, Mr Varley told this masthead in January last year.
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