The last time Territorians booted a government into oblivion, the Greens didn’t even field a candidate in the Darwin electorate of Fannie Bay. Anyone brave enough to predict the leftwing party would win the seat – as is now expected, eight years on – would have been laughed out of the laksa queues at the local Parap markets.
Perhaps 2016 was a simpler time. The Mills-Giles Northern Territory government was destroyed by its own infighting and constant scandal. Labor won 19 of 25 seats by promising not much – simply to not be like the last mob.
Labor then transitioned through three chief ministers after 2022, finding itself similarly scandalised. So the simplest reading of Saturday’s NT election result is that Labor breached its core promises to voters on stability and integrity and got a hiding that was coming.
But there are other lessons from the 2024 election that will ring true in the rest of the country, particularly in Queensland and Victoria but also federally where conservative oppositions are running the same “crime crisis” playbook as the Northern Territory Country Liberal party.
In each of these jurisdictions, Labor governments have been sucked deeper into crime debates that are – in some cases – sensationalised by media and politicians.
The Victorian opposition has latched on to the issue, prompting the government’s backdown on raising the age of criminal responsibility In Queensland, the Liberal National party wants to introduce “adult crime, adult time” after dragging the government further and further to the right on youth justice.
The Northern Territory’s new CLP government, led by Lia Finnochiaro, says its first priority will be to lower the age of criminal responsibility and toughen bail laws.
NT Labor backtracked on its 2016 election promise to raze the Don Dale youth detention centre and keep kids out of prison, then pivoted to an unashamedly “hardline” approach. Its 2024 campaign promised “tough love” and promoted the government’s decision to implement a snap curfew in Alice Springs.
The same comparisons could equally be made on environmental policies. Labor went to the 2016 NT election promising a fracking moratorium. It is now under pressure from environmentalists over water conservation, gas subsidies and the controversial Middle Arm development, which has links to new fossil fuel developments including fracking in the Beetaloo basin.
In the end, the 2024 NT campaign was a monumental disaster that will cost Labor more than government. Heartland seats targeted by pro-development and “tough on crime” messages have been lost to the CLP on massive swings – more than 20% in four Darwin and Palmerston seats, including the chief minister Eva Lawler’s electorate.
And three more previously safe Labor seats – all in Darwin’s leafy middle suburbs – are under threat from Greens or left-leaning independents who have argued for evidence-based crime approaches and pro-environment policies.
In Johnston the Labor MP and former AFL player Joel Bowden – seen by many as a future leader – won the electorate by 16% in 2020. He was beaten into third place on Saturday and will probably lose his seat to the independent Justine Davis, a justice worker who has campaigned for measures that address the drivers of crime, not “kneejerk reactions driven by the election cycle”.
In Fannie Bay, the old electorate of the former chief minister Michael Gunner, the Greens appear poised to win their first seat in the NT parliament. Labor’s primary vote tanked and it ran third.
Nightcliff has long been Labor’s safest seat. Natasha Fyles, who served as chief minister for 18 months, won almost 80% of the two-party vote in 2016.
Fyles is now in for an anxious wait. Left-leaning candidates have won 40% of the vote in Nightcliff and the preference count will be complicated – either the Greens or the independent First Nations activist Mililma May could still win in the wash-up.
The thrashing is a warning to Labor governments across the country that the only way to campaign to a broad coalition of voters – especially on emotive and divisive issues like crime and justice – is to show people tangible success.
Labor’s crime policies in the NT and elsewhere have often been contrary to the advice of experts about what works. They have seemed designed to solve political problems, not real-world ones.
That tactic might work to neutralise a political issue in the short term, but eventually governments have to improve things or own their failures. The clear outcome from the Territory is that, after eight years, voters of all colours did not feel their communities were safer or more prosperous.
The Queensland election will be held in two months and that state’s crime debate has been remarkably similar to the NT. Polls point to a large swing against the Miles government amid heightened concern about youth crime. The LNP hopes to make big inroads in north Queensland. In Brisbane the Greens are eying at least six seats.
LNP insiders expect the party to lean further into its crime campaign in Queensland after the landslide NT result.
And, they say, expect Peter Dutton’s federal opposition to do the same.
