A Senate committee has recommended that the Commonwealth work with the states and territories on national minimum standards for youth justice, in a final report released in Canberra on Friday that describes the idea of a national youth crime wave as a "false narrative".

The Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee, chaired by South Australian Liberal senator Leah Blyth, made four recommendations after nine public hearings and 128 submissions. Besides the minimum standards, it wants a cross-portfolio National Child and Community Safety Taskforce, a government education campaign using actual crime data, and a further Senate inquiry into what drives youth incarceration.

The price of the current system runs through the report. Citing the Productivity Commission, it says detaining one young person cost an average of $3,625 a day in 2024-25, a figure that excludes the Northern Territory. Supervising a young person in the community cost $424 a day. The committee put the annual cost of detaining a single child at an estimated $1 million.

The report is blunt about who is being held and why. On an average day in 2024-25, 4,147 young people aged 10 and over were under youth justice supervision, about one in five of them in detention, according to Australian Institute of Health and Welfare figures cited by the committee. Eighty per cent were unsentenced. First Nations young people made up 60 per cent of those in detention in the June quarter of 2025, and 78 per cent of them had not been sentenced.

The committee wants the education campaign to "counter sensational media coverage on youth crime and the false narrative that the country is in the grip of a youth crime wave". The crime data point the same way. The Australian Bureau of Statistics counted 44,583 offenders aged 10 to 17 proceeded against by police in 2024-25, 5 per cent fewer than the year before.

The four recommendations come from the Chair's report. Labor senators wrote that they do not dispute its evidence, but three sets of additional comments pull in different directions.

Labor senators on the committee, including deputy chair Jana Stewart, added eight recommendations and argued the Chair's report "does not identify any specific recommendations targeted at addressing the needs of First Nations children". They also wrote that "youth justice is a state and territory responsibility".

Greens senator David Shoebridge and Liberal senator Andrew McLachlan went further than the majority, jointly recommending that the Commonwealth use the external affairs power to set a minimum age of criminal responsibility of 14 across every jurisdiction by the end of 2027. The age is 10 in most jurisdictions, 12 in Victoria and 14 in the ACT. They also noted that in the Northern Territory, "no government department or official fronted the committee at all".

“The Commonwealth cannot keep funding failure and abuse in the name of state and territory autonomy," Shoebridge told AAP. Independent senator Lidia Thorpe, a participating member, filed her own comments with eight recommendations.”

A spokesperson for Attorney-General Michelle Rowland told the ABC that while the states and territories run their own justice and detention systems, "all levels of government need to do more to reduce the number of young people in detention".

The government is not bound by the report and has not formally responded. Any move on national standards or a common age of criminal responsibility would need either agreement from every state and territory or Commonwealth legislation.