Three decades of recommendations. Still counting the dead.

April 1991. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody — three years of investigation, 99 individual inquests, eleven volumes of findings — handed down its final report. It made 339 recommendations.[1] The then-prime minister called it a blueprint. Every state and territory government accepted almost all of them.

Thirty-five years later, the Australian Institute of Criminology's most recent annual figures record 33 Indigenous deaths in custody in the 2024–25 reporting period — the highest single-year figure since the AIC began publishing the data.[2]

That is the headline statistic. It is not, on its own, an explanation. But it is the context in which any conversation about police, prisons and accountability in Australia — and particularly in the Northern Territory — must now take place.

What the Commission found

The 1991 report did not conclude that the 99 Aboriginal people whose deaths it investigated had been killed by police or corrections officers. Its finding was subtler and, in some ways, more damning: that the deaths were the product of a criminal justice system that over-incarcerated Aboriginal people at every stage — from first contact with police, through remand, through sentencing — and then failed to care for them when they were inside.[1]

The 339 recommendations reflected that diagnosis. Some were operational: cell design, medical screening, custody notification. Many were structural: diversion programs, alternatives to custody, better resourcing for Aboriginal legal services, genuine self-determination. The Commission's position was that you could not fix deaths in custody without reducing who ended up in custody in the first place.

The 78% problem

For most of the past decade, governments have pointed to a 2018 Deloitte review, commissioned by the Commonwealth, which reported that 78 per cent of the 339 recommendations had been "fully or mostly implemented".[3]

It is a convenient number. It is also contested.

Researchers at the ANU's Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) argued the Deloitte methodology substantially overstated progress — counting recommendations as implemented where the relevant policy had been announced but not resourced, or where an equivalent program existed on paper but was not operating in practice.[4] Other legal academics and advocacy groups have drawn similar conclusions.

The recommendations were not aspirational. They were the floor. A generation later, we are still below it.

There is no single authoritative register of what has and has not been implemented. That absence — 35 years on, after two royal commissions and hundreds of coronial findings — is itself one of the accountability failures this publication was founded to document.

The Northern Territory, specifically

The NT is a small jurisdiction. It is also the Australian jurisdiction in which these questions land hardest.

Corrections data shows the Territory now imprisons its residents at a rate no other Australian jurisdiction approaches. More than one per cent of Territorians are in custody on any given day — a figure that has risen sharply over the past year following a change of government and a "community safety" legislative agenda.[5] Approximately 90 per cent of people held in NT detention facilities are Aboriginal, in a Territory where Aboriginal Territorians make up roughly 30 per cent of the population.[5]

The AIC's most recent data records the NT as having the second-highest non-Indigenous prison death rate in the country (0.61 per 100 non-Indigenous prisoners), after the ACT.[2] Indigenous death rates are reported separately.

The second Royal Commission

In 2017 a separate Royal Commission — into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory, established after ABC Four Corners broadcast footage of children being tear-gassed and mechanically restrained at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre — handed down its own final report. 147 findings. 227 recommendations. 198 of them for the NT Government alone.[6]

Nine years on, Don Dale remains operational as a youth detention facility.[7] A replacement facility has been the subject of repeated announcements. The minimum age of criminal responsibility in the NT was raised to 12 (the Commission recommended a higher threshold), and there are reports that element of reform may be partially rolled back under current legislation.[7]

Where oversight sits

Accountability in the NT is distributed across several bodies — each with a narrow remit, and none with the powers and resourcing that advocates have long argued are needed.

The NT Ombudsman handles administrative complaints, including complaints about police. In its 2022–23 annual report, the Office recorded 2,155 approaches across all jurisdictions, with outcomes described in categories including "partially substantiated", "unsubstantiated" and "incapable of being determined".[8]

The Independent Commissioner Against Corruption (ICAC NT) has jurisdiction over serious and systemic corrupt conduct, but not over routine policing decisions. The NT Coroner investigates individual deaths, including deaths in custody, and makes recommendations — but has no power to compel their implementation. The NT Information Commissioner oversees the NT's freedom-of-information regime, which journalists and legal academics have long criticised as narrower and slower than its state counterparts.

The NT Custody Notification Service, run by the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) since 2019, is the one piece of RCIADIC-recommendation infrastructure that operates as designed: whenever an Aboriginal person is taken into police custody, NAAJA is notified and legal assistance is offered.[9]

What accountability would look like

This publication will not pretend to have a complete list. But from the primary sources — the Royal Commissions, the coronial inquests, the AIC data, and the work of Aboriginal legal services and community organisations — a set of consistent recurring recommendations emerges:

A public, authoritative register of which RCIADIC and coronial recommendations have been implemented, and by whom. An oversight body with genuine investigative powers over policing, independent of the police force. A freedom-of-information regime that does not treat "operational" as a blanket exemption. A minimum age of criminal responsibility of 14. Full implementation of the NT Royal Commission's 198 recommendations, with public reporting against each one.

None of these are new. All were recommended, in substance, by one or both Royal Commissions.

The 35-year anniversary of RCIADIC is not a moment for commemoration. It is a deadline that has already passed.

1. Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, Final Report, April 1991. Available via the National Archives of Australia. naa.gov.au
2. Australian Institute of Criminology, Statistical Report 57: Deaths in custody in Australia 2024–25, December 2025. aic.gov.au/publications/sr/sr57
3. Deloitte Access Economics for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Review of the implementation of the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, 2018. See also the National Indigenous Australians Agency resource centre. niaa.gov.au
4. Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR), ANU, commentary on the Deloitte review. See "30 years on: Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody recommendations remain unimplemented", CAEPR, 2021. anu.edu.au
5. NT corrections and demographic data as summarised in the AIC report cited above. Population estimates from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
6. Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory, Final Report, November 2017. royalcommission.gov.au/child-detention
7. Indigenous Justice Clearinghouse, Report Overview — Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory. indigenousjustice.gov.au
8. NT Ombudsman, Annual Report 2022–23. ombudsman.nt.gov.au
9. North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA), About NAAJA. naaja.org.au