Journalist urges federal government to intervene in NT 'social catastrophe'

A veteran ABC journalist has delivered a searing analysis of Northern Territory politics in a new book that chronicles how government policies have worsened life outcomes for Aboriginal people in the NT.

In his new book The Northern Territory: A Litany of Failure, Murray McLaughlin — who worked as an ABC TV current affairs journalist and later as an adviser to the Northern Land Council (NLC) — argues the federal government has been mostly passively complicit in the welfare of the Territory's Aboriginal citizens declining over five decades.

As well as a critique of failure, the book serves as an appeal to the federal government to intervene in a territory McLaughlin describes as a "beguiling and bewitching place, a unique wonderland".

"While Canberra's reluctance to dictate prevails, one certainty remains: the Territory will never right itself.

"A mendicant jurisdiction beholden to the Commonwealth is allowed to bring embarrassment and shame upon the whole country with policy agendas that disproportionately impact on Aboriginal people while it lavishes benefits on the non-Aboriginal population."

He says the Albanese government "has done little to avert the social catastrophe unravelling before its eyes".

"As Canberra pours billions of dollars into the Territory to shore up northern defence systems and the petrochemical industry prepares to prosper from the bountiful gas fields to be fracked in the immense Beetaloo Basin south-east of Darwin, housing, health and education markers continue to deteriorate for the Territory's Aboriginal population, especially those living in remote communities."

In the book's foreword, former Labor senator Patrick Dodson, for whom McLaughlin worked as an adviser, reinforces its central message: That the NT's self-government in place since 1978 has been "a failed experiment" which has hastened "a collapse of social order".

But Mr Dodson writes that he and McLaughlin share hope that the Commonwealth will use "a rare political window … to show leadership and imagination in rebuilding the Territory and redirecting its troubled course".

Much of the book's conversational, accessible political history of the Territory is told from McLaughlin's firsthand reporting experience, and then from the sidelines of fights between the NLC and NT governments on policies affecting the rights of Aboriginal people.

He takes readers on an evocative journey through the Territory, analysing the policy blows Country Liberal Party (CLP) and Labor governments have delivered to Aboriginal people, focusing particularly on how successive CLP governments, aided at times by Canberra Coalition administrations, have tried to erode federal NT Aboriginal land rights laws.

He writes the Territory's first CLP chief minister Paul Everingham's 1978 administration opposed Aboriginal land rights and "ruthlessly" challenged almost every land claim.

This continued through to the 2013 CLP Adam Giles administration, McLaughlin writes, as they tried to persuade the Commonwealth to hand control of the land rights law to them.

McLaughlin documents how "Aboriginal incarceration rates have grown exponentially", starting with 1995 CLP chief minister Shane Stone's administration introducing mandatory sentencing for a range of offences.

"The law, predictably, had a disproportionate impact on Aboriginal people, and its impact had been cynically calculated," he writes.

The book also chronicles a series of Labor government policies during the early 2000s that harmed Aboriginal interests, including the 2001 Clare Martin administration's approval for Xstrata to dig through a sacred site to expand its McArthur River Mine in 2006.

McLaughlin labels this as "a conspicuous example of how governments have brutally brushed aside Aboriginal interests when development proposals take priority".

He writes how the following 2007 Paul Henderson Labor administration wound back bilingual education in Aboriginal community schools, concentrated government funding into larger Indigenous communities and amalgamated 53 remote local government councils into eight "super shires".

"Worse, the resultant changes coincided with the Howard government's Intervention, with communities never recovering from that double calamity," he writes.

McLaughlin analyses how both a "flawed" ABC Lateline story about an alleged paedophile ring in Central Australia and Clare Martin's "failure to respond with boldness and urgency to the Little Children Are Sacred report" resulted in the NT National Emergency Response — the Intervention.

Seventy-three communities were identified as primary sites for intervention and the army and police were brought in from other jurisdictions.

"The scope of the Intervention was extraordinary and its impact on Aboriginal people cataclysmic," he writes.

"Although Aboriginal men were offended because the Intervention had branded them child molesters and, as traditional owners, they felt threatened about the Commonwealth's compulsory leasing of community lands, the most troubling policy … was compulsory income management, facilitated by the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975.

"Federal Labor, not wanting to be wedged, embraced the Intervention."

The 2013 Adam Giles government's treatment of youth prisoners, including the use of tear gas, mechanical restraints, spit hoods and indefinite detention isolation, that was exposed by the ABC is scrutinised in the book.

"The brutalisation of children and their bastardisation in detention were painfully illustrated by the treatment of a 14-year-old Aboriginal boy, whose explosive behaviour on 21 August 2014 precipitated the tear-gassing of him and other detainees," McLaughlin writes.

McLaughlin analyses how the 2016 administration of Labor's Michael Gunner — summed up as "an uninspiring and shallow chief minister who promised plenty but delivered little" — "slithered and dithered" over recommendations of the royal commission into youth justice abuse.

He writes that Mr Gunner toughened bail laws "in the full knowledge that incarceration rates, especially of Aboriginal people, would blow out beyond already record-breaking numbers, and his commitment to a treaty began to fade".

McLaughlin also accuses the Gunner government of attacking Aboriginal land rights by passing laws making it easier for pastoralists to develop cattle stations for other uses without native title holders having to be consulted or compensated.

"Gunner's government would soon resort to drawing from the same well of prejudice against Aboriginal land claims as had nourished the Country Liberal Party," he writes.

The veteran journalist follows the NT right up to the current CLP government, documenting how Indigenous incarceration continued to dramatically increase with tightened bail laws following the 2023 murder of a bottle shop worker, Declan Laverty.

"By August 2025, the government was boasting that more than 3,300 people had been refused bail, a 44 per cent increase over the same period in 2024," the books reads.

McLaughlin's chronicle finishes with current Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro's appointment of former NT Cattlemen's Association President David Connolly earlier this year, and her determined defence of that after racist social media posts he had previously made were exposed.

"Obduracy and disdain for proper process marked Finocchiaro's announcement," he writes.

"Albanese's refusal … to reject the Territory government's egregious recommendation of a man with a record of racist commentary to be the Territory's Administrator … spoke of a deliberate avoidance of responsibility."

McLaughlin told the ABC he hoped the federal government was starting to understand that the Territory's Aboriginal people were facing a crisis so severe that it must now intervene.

"The Commonwealth has got to recognise that it's got responsibilities here," he said.

"It's going to take something like a Marshall Plan to just catch up.

"Something has to happen — these remote communities are on their knees.

"[Independent NT politician] Yingiya Guyula said it when he resigned, that Aboriginal culture is being destroyed in front of our eyes.