A legal service designed to protect Aboriginal people who are taken into police custody in the Northern Territory will run out of funding in three months.
The custody notification service, run by the Northern Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (Naaja), was established in 2019 and received three years’ funding from the federal government, on the understanding that the NT government would take over paying for the service from 2022 onward.
But no funding agreement has been signed. Stephen Karpeles, who manages the service at Naaja, said that a failure to provide long-term funding arrangements, particularly in the wake of the high-profile acquittal of an NT police officer over the fatal shooting of an Aboriginal man, would “say fairly clearly that black lives don’t matter”.
“The whole point of the service is to recognise the importance of protecting Aboriginal people when they’re in police custody,” he said. “To remove the funding for the service at a time when Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory are already very apprehensive about their relationship with police would send completely the wrong message.”
The custody notification service is a 24/7 telephone line that police are required to ring if they take an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person into custody. It conducts a welfare check and provides legal advice. This is particularly necessary in the NT, says Karpeles, because it is the only Australian jurisdiction where police are not required to expressly tell people in custody they have a right to see a lawyer.
A spokesperson for the federal minister for Indigenous affairs, Ken Wyatt, said his government was “considering its position on the future funding of Custody Notification Services, which will be communicated to providers and key stakeholders in due course”.
They reiterated that the initial funding offer was for three years.
A spokesperson for the Northern Territory attorney general, Selena Uibo, said the Territory “continues to lobby the federal government for funding for this program”.
In 2016 the Australian government offered to fund the first three years of Custody Notification Services in each state and territory without an existing service. This offer was conditional on jurisdictions mandating police use of the CNS in legislation and a commitment by jurisdictions to take on full funding responsibility after the first three years. The Northern Territory and Western Australia governments agreed to the offer.
In the NT, the CNS has assisted more than 16,000 people in the past three years, including children as young as 10.
It has six full-time staff. Naaja said it needed to hire more staff to meet demand, but hiring skilled staff on a three-month contract was difficult.
Karpeles said changes to the bail act, introduced last May, had seen a tripling of the number of children under 12 who were taken into custody, and a doubling of children aged 12 to 18.
Those changes were introduced following a series of news reports about an alleged youth crime wave.
The huge jump in children being detained made the service even more important, said Karpeles.
“Our service has been in operation for three years and we’re required to be notified every time a youth is arrested – an Aboriginal youth, that is,” he said. “We were not seeing this increase that was being spoken about in our data. It just simply wasn’t there. But now that the bail laws have been amended we have seen a huge increase – a doubling across youths and a tripling of youths under 12.”
The Northern Territory has the highest rates of Indigenous incarceration in the country, and it’s geographically complicated. People are often arrested and removed from their home community, or told to attend court in a regional centre when they don’t have access to transport. It’s also a multilingual community, and there’s no legal requirement for police to provide access to a translator.
Through the CNS, Naaja is able to ensure the person under arrest understands their rights and also what is expected of them in terms of future court dates and bail conditions.
“We are speaking to people for whom English is a fourth or fifth language all the time – probably every second or third person we speak to,” Karpeles said.
Placing a legislative requirement on police to contact the local Aboriginal legal service whenever a First Nations person was taken into custody was a recommendation of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody in 1991. It was introduced in NSW in 2000 and in 2016 the federal government promised three years of federal funding to other jurisdictions which introduced the scheme.
Western Australia and the NT signed up in 2018, and began operation in 2019. Victoria signed up shortly after, and last year the federal government confirmed it had signed a $3.1m deal to establish a custody notification service in South Australia. Queensland and Tasmania declined to adopt the program, saying they have other welfare mechanisms in place.
The Aboriginal legal service in Western Australia said its funding was also due to expire in June, and it had not received any information about funding being extended.
“It is the State Government’s expectation that the Commonwealth will announce ongoing Federal Government funding for the Custody Notification Service, with an announcement due in April,” WA attorney general, John Quigley, said.
