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The Northern Territory has made widespread cuts to free legal representation, leaving children as young as 10 to represent themselves in court. By Russell Marks.
NT cuts legal aid for anyone out of custody
Children as young as 10 could be forced to represent themselves in Northern Territory courts after Legal Aid Northern Territory announced it would immediately cease free legal representation to people charged with crimes unless they are already in custody.
The announcement on Monday morning came just six months after Legal Aid NT secured a significant funding boost in the Territory’s budget. “We have acted to deliver the certainty Legal Aid NT needs to plan, recruit and support vulnerable Territorians,” Attorney-General Marie-Clare Boothby said at the time.
That extra funding is no longer sufficient, according to a letter sent to lawyers by Legal Aid director Catherine Voumard. “Legal Aid is projecting an end of financial year deficit,” she wrote, not five months into the financial year. “Legal Aid has worked hard to try to identify efficiencies. Unfortunately, it is not possible to save the significant amount required except by drastic action.”
Voumard did not supply dollar amounts or details, and Legal Aid did not respond to The Saturday Paper’s request for them before deadline.
Boothby weathered significant criticism when she appointed Voumard as a “captain’s pick” in May. Voumard had no executive management experience. Her appointment was neither recommended by an independent recruitment panel nor endorsed by Legal Aid’s commissioners. At least three board members resigned in protest, and senior criminal lawyers have since announced their resignations.
The attorney-general is now apparently annoyed, too. “We are disappointed with the timing of this service reduction, given the significant and ongoing NT government investment,” Boothby told The Saturday Paper. “I also expect all publicly funded legal assistance providers to operate a sustainable model and to take the necessary steps to ensure long-term financial stability.”
Boothby referred The Saturday Paper to Legal Aid “to explain the operational reasons and impact behind this decision”. Legal Aid did not respond to questions.
Where has the money gone? Nobody is saying. Crime and victimisation rates as reported by the Northern Territory Police Force have dropped during 2025, as have lodgements of new criminal cases in the Local Courts.
Boothby and her chief minister, Lia Finocchiaro, have claimed lower crime rates as a significant achievement, after the Country Liberal Party tightened bail laws first in October 2024 – immediately after being elected in August on a law-and-order platform – and again in May 2025.
Presumably there has been a concomitant decline in the demand for legal aid services, though Legal Aid did not respond to The Saturday Paper’s query about this.
On Tuesday, Finocchiaro explained the problem on ABC Radio: Legal Aid is representing too many Aboriginal defendants. The chief minister said that referrals from the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) – due mainly to legal conflicts – add a “huge additional burden to the legal aid system”.
“What we want is money from NAAJA to Legal Aid to pay for their customers at Legal Aid,” Finocchiaro said. Voumard alluded to this “solution” in her letter on Monday.
Nearly nine in every 10 prisoners in the Territory are Aboriginal. It follows that a large part of Legal Aid’s ordinary work is to represent Aboriginal defendants.
From late 2022, Legal Aid experienced enormous pressures caused by floods of referrals from NAAJA, as that organisation spiralled into crisis triggered, in part, by mass resignations and a former chief executive’s unlawful termination. That crisis was resolved temporarily by the reallocation of some of NAAJA’s funds to Legal Aid, and sustainably by NAAJA’s return to full staffing levels.
“Now that NAAJA is back to full operations,” Boothby told The Saturday Paper, “I have encouraged them to support Legal Aid in return, so clients are not left without representation.”
Boothby recently wrote to NAAJA’s chief executive, Ben Grimes, suggesting that the agency brief out its conflicted clients to law firms rather than refer them to Legal Aid.
“The desire to reallocate funds from NAAJA to Legal Aid NT is based on inaccurate information and limited understanding of service delivery and funding for legal services in the NT,” Grimes said in a media statement on Thursday.
Grimes is keen to avoid buying into what he sees as Finocchiaro and Boothby’s attempts to drive a wedge between NAAJA and Legal Aid. He told this paper that the notion that NAAJA’s dollars would follow Aboriginal defendants to either Legal Aid or to law firms suggests a view that Aboriginal people don’t have an equal entitlement to access Legal Aid.
“Aboriginal people do not have a lesser right to access Legal Aid NT services than non-Aboriginal people,” he said.
Neither the CLP nor Legal Aid has explained why the source of Legal Aid’s referrals – or the racial identity of its clients – should matter more than the number of clients it represents. “Our laws, changes, policies and anything we do in government apply to everybody equally,” Boothby told the Legislative Assembly in October, when explaining why she had abandoned a review into racism in government departments that had been signalled by Labor. “It is not about whether you are Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal.”
NAAJA is wholly funded by Canberra, whereas Legal Aid’s funding is split between the Commonwealth and Territory governments. Grimes told The Saturday Paper that the CLP’s new expectation that NAAJA pay for the representation of all Aboriginal defendants also ignores an enormous existing funding disparity between the legal services. He says that NAAJA’s average caseload per lawyer is presently about 98, while Legal Aid’s is about half that. He is confident that NAAJA appears in just under two-thirds of all criminal cases in the courts.
“The chief minister is trying to distract,” Grimes says, “to divert attention away from the immense pressures her government has created across the entire justice system since coming to power.”
In response to questions put by The Saturday Paper, Boothby implied that this idea – that NAAJA should pay for all Aboriginal defendants – had come from within Legal Aid. She said she was only “advised last week” of Legal Aid’s intention to cut services. “One issue raised with me was the increase in referrals from NAAJA,” Boothby said. Voumard was invited to respond, and said Legal Aid was planning to release a statement on Friday.
In the May budget, the CLP allocated an additional $8.5 million to public prosecutors and $5.3 million to the Local Courts, as well as the extra funds to Legal Aid. “But there was not one additional dollar made available to NAAJA,” Grimes says. “It’s difficult to ignore the racial implications of the legal services’ disparate funding.”
While the CLP has reacted to events involving Aboriginal offenders with legislative changes and strong rhetoric, it has been criticised for its muted or underwhelming responses when Aboriginal people are victims. Finocchiaro’s response to the coroner’s finding that police racism contributed to Kumanjayi Walker’s death in custody in Yuendumu was to criticise the inquest’s length and expense.
The CLP has largely refrained from commenting on non-Aboriginal offender Jake Danby’s non-custodial sentence after he ploughed into two Aboriginal men with his car, killing one of them, while he was unlicensed, and then sent racist text messages afterwards. None of the CLP’s 17 members of parliament identifies as Aboriginal, while 30 per cent of the Territory’s population is Indigenous.
The cuts announced this week are the third set of service cuts by Legal Aid in as many years. For some time, Legal Aid’s executive had been telling the previous Labor government that funding was insufficient to cope with growing demand. Then, two months after the CLP won a landslide election in August last year with a “tough on crime” platform, Legal Aid cut services to all adult defendants, citing a budgetary catastrophe.
Following weeks of lobbying – including by lawyers who were also CLP members – Boothby provided top-up funding at the end of November and Legal Aid restored its services in full. If there was a problem with the sustainability of NAAJA referrals to Legal Aid then, Boothby did not mention it. In May she announced an increase of $5.5 million in the Territory-funded portion of Legal Aid’s annual budget.
Legal Aid’s executive explained to lawyers last year that children were unaffected by the 2024 cuts because the funding shortfall then was from the Territory’s component, whereas children’s legal representation was funded out of what was then the National Legal Assistance Partnership, ultimately by the federal government. This time around, however, children will be directly affected. The implicit demand is that Canberra needs to pay more.
“People charged with crimes and who can’t afford a lawyer are being used as leverage in an amateur game of funding brinkmanship,” one lawyer told The Saturday Paper under condition of anonymity. Given the CLP’s new expectation that NAAJA pay up, it seems unlikely at this stage that it will alleviate Legal Aid’s projected deficit.
It’s also very unlikely that the Albanese government will provide additional funding in these circumstances. It is difficult, then, to see how Legal Aid will restore services before next July.
The Territory government’s annual contribution to Legal Aid’s budget is about $10 million. Other Territory government departments are notorious for running up enormous legal bills, often briefing corporate law firms and engaging interstate senior counsel, instead of relying on the solicitor-general and the government’s own in-house legal practice.
The NT Police Force spent $5.5 million on the Kumanjayi Walker inquest alone – and much of this went to interstate counsel and their travel and accommodation costs. The Attorney-General’s Department spends just short of $10 million a year on its own legal fees. The Department of Children and Families spent $2.53 million on its own legal fees in 2024/25. The CLP has been silent on these legal expenses.
“Why can’t we just have a basically functional legal aid system like the rest of Australia gets?” asks Michael Whelan, a lawyer based in Katherine. “We continue to have interruptions to the provision of basic legal services to very under-privileged people.”
Russell Marks is employed by a law firm that accepts briefs from both Legal Aid NT and NAAJA, and from NT government departments. Any views expressed in the article are his and not necessarily the firm’s.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 22, 2025 as "NT legal aid denied to children".
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