“We expect the usual offender apologists to criticise our efforts”. So said the Northern Territory’s chief minister, Lia Finocchiaro, in an Instagram post this week announcing her Country Liberal party government’s newest changes to the NT’s youth justice laws since coming to power in August.

The most notorious among the CLP’s third set of amendments to youth justice laws in under a year is the reintroduction of spit hoods, now to be called “anti-spit guards”, into youth detention centres including Don Dale. Spit hoods became emblematic of what a royal commission found in August 2016 was a system in which children were verbally and physically abused and humiliated contrary to international law in prison-like youth detention centres that were unfit for accommodating children, let alone rehabilitating them.

Among the critics of the reintroduction of “anti-spit guards” have been Mindy Sotiri, executive director of the Justice Reform Initiative; Karly Warner, the chair of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services; and the NT’s own children’s commissioner, Shahleena Musk.

Are these leaders........

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