The Northern Territory, torture, and Australia's detention disease

Each press conference he has given has been typified by this spirit of disingenuousness. All of it is marked by one overwhelming acceptance: youth detention, with all its maximums security frills, is necessary. Besides, he retorts, there were "improvements" in youth detention; but it was "not perfect".

This begged the question as to whether a royal commission was even necessary, an overegging of an already improved pudding. "I want to make sure we have a safe community to live in, where kids aren't breaking into homes."

On Tuesday, Giles revealed another tactic suggesting that any investigation into the youth detention system is not going to have legs. Note, claimed the chief minister, the way some of the youths in the footage were actually behaving. The blaming of inmates remains the default position.

"There are kids who are trying to deliberately cause cranial issues by bashing their head against the wall." Such naughtiness (although quiet, meditative reflection is hardly the sort of thing encouraged in the NT detention system for desperate youths).

Officers themselves need "to be able to de-escalate issues when children are not in… a calm environment within themselves and at all times those kids' wellbeing is being put at the best possible place."

To add to this furore, Giles has been accompanied at stages by indigenous politician Bess Price, the Territory's Minister for Community Services, claiming that various families were happy to see their children in prison. This eye-brow raising comment was perfectly tailored to a system of necessary teaching and retribution: bad boys needed to be taught a lesson, to be made better.

Whatever it is deemed, be it a culture, a form of thinking, or an attitude, any revelation to its practitioners via the medium of a television program is bound to sting. That a royal commission has been the borne fruit in this endeavour may not mean very much. Political figures such as Giles suggest that mentalities can be immoveable. The prison alternative remains all powerful.