Alice Springs, Australia – For Ben Hall, the CEO of tour bus operator AAT Kings, business lately has been tough.
He says visitors are not booking tours to Uluru, a huge sandstone monolith that is the most famous attraction in Australia’s vast Northern Territory, in the numbers they used to.
“We’ve certainly seen the trips from Alice Springs to Uluru have been a little bit softer,” Hall, who operates a fleet of about 30 buses focusing on tours to Uluru, told Al Jazeera.
“We’ve added a couple of new short break itineraries for this year into the region…but certainly it’s been tough trading.”
Tour and car rental companies across Australia’s Red Centre, as the country’s vast outback region is often called, have reported a similar drop-off in business.
While tourism operators attribute the decline to a number of factors, most agree that part of the cause is escalating youth crime in Alice Springs, a remote town of some 40,000 people that serves as a base for visitors to outback attractions such as Uluru.
In the past two years, youth crime in the town has captured national media attention and stoked political turmoil at the both federal and state government levels, even though crimes by minors have also risen nationwide.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who leads the centre-left Labor Party, has made several visits to the town to highlight his government’s efforts to tackle the issue.
In March, and again in July, the Northern Territory government implemented curfews banning minors from the town centre at night following a series of violent attacks.
The rise in crime has drawn particular attention to Alice Springs in the media as it came after the Northern Territory government ended a 15-year alcohol ban in remote Aboriginal communities in late 2022.
In 2007, Australia’s federal government implemented a series of interventions in the Northern Territory, where about one-third of the population is Indigenous, in response to a territory government report that found evidence of widespread child sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities.
The federal interventions, which some rights groups criticised as racist and discriminatory, included a blanket ban on alcohol in remote Aboriginal communities that was extended by successive territory governments.
After the alcohol ban was lifted, a series of high-profile violent incidents in Alice Springs, including teenagers stealing vehicles and attacking police cars, made headlines across the country.
In the year ending November 2023, violent offences by youths rose to 1,182, a 50 percent rise compared to 2019-20, according to the Northern Territory’s Department of the Attorney-General and Justice.
After accounting for population change, the overall youth offender rate decreased from 2,855 to 2,819 offenders per 100,000 persons in 2022–23, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, although part of that decrease can be explained by the government’s decision in August 2023 to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 12.
Local police warned residents to avoid visiting the town centre, and the Northern Territory government reintroduced a ban on alcohol sales in January 2023.
While the uptick in crime has prompted politicians to action, some community leaders and legal experts have criticised the territory government for implementing “draconian” policies, such as curfews, that could further stigmatise Indigenous communities.
Human rights groups have also accused police of targeting Indigenous people in the territory, which has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world.
Last month, the newly elected Northern Territory government lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 10, prompting concern among community leaders that Indigenous teenagers will be locked up at even higher rates.
North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency, a not-for-profit legal service, noted that between 2018 and 2023, the number of prisoners in the territory rose 22 percent, which it claimed was a result of young Aboriginal people being targeted by law enforcement.
Jared Sharp, a legal officer for the non-profit, said in a press release that while the public perceives a rise in youth crime in the Northern Territory, “youth justice court lodgements territory-wide have fallen for three years running”.
The focus on youth crime and subsequent crackdown have been keenly felt by tourism operators, who typically see an uptick in tourism during the dry season between April and October.
In April, tourism industry figures called for “urgent” financial support from the government after the announcement of the first curfew prompted a wave of customer cancellations.
In September, Ross River Resort, a popular stop for travellers en route to Alice Springs, announced that it would close its doors to the general public from the following month.
Martin Ansell, co-director of resort operator Grollo Group, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that tourism had dropped “50 to 60 per cent” from the previous year.
Kirsten Holmgren, who runs tours of the East MacDonnell Ranges, said she has had a “very, very quiet” season.
“This year I haven’t had more than six people on a 16-seater bus, so I do have to fill in between working for other companies,” Holmgren told Al Jazeera.
While Holmgren acknowledges the issue of youth crime in Alice Springs, she believes the media have given the issue outsized attention, discouraging visitors.
“So break-ins and car thefts have definitely been on the rise. This in no way affects tourism at all. It only affects the locals,” Holmgren said.
Danial Rochford, CEO of Tourism Central Australia, said crime is not the only reason tourism has been suffering, pointing to cost-of-living pressures as well as reduced flights to Alice Springs.
Tourism in the region “has come under enormous challenge”, Rochford told Al Jazeera.
While tour companies have reported a drop-off in visitors passing through or basing themselves in Alice Springs and its surrounds, operators are more sanguine about the number of visitors to Uluru itself.
A spokesperson for Voyages Indigenous Tourism Australia, an Indigenous-owned business that runs the local Ayers Rock Resort, said the company is “in the midst of one of the busiest periods yet, celebrating domestic and international guests returning to pre-COVID levels during the peak winter season”.
Rochford said Uluru’s visitor numbers were benefitting from the addition of direct flights from Cairns, Melbourne and Brisbane by Qantas and Virgin Australia, respectively, since last year.
Hall from AAT Kings agreed that air accessibility and rising airfares to Alice Springs had created difficulties for local drive tourism operators.
“I think the big [solution to the decline] is trying to get more airlines to fly into the region. Security is probably another,” Hall said.
Before dropping sharply last year, domestic tourism in the Northern Territory experienced a small boom as Australians flocked to the region to enjoy their newfound freedom following the lifting of COVID lockdowns.
Since then, local tourism operators have found themselves increasingly in competition with the international market as Australians flock overseas in record numbers.
In 2023, the territory as a whole recorded 1.6 million visitors, a decrease of 1.3 percent from the previous year.
Despite the return of international visitors to Alice Springs since the end of the pandemic, their numbers have yet to recover to their 2019 level.
Despite the challenges, maintaining a vibrant tourism scene in the Northern Territory is essential not only to the local economy, but also to the promotion of Aboriginal culture, said Jungala Kriss, an Indigenous tourism operator in Alice Springs.
“I think historically, most people think of Aboriginal people from textbooks. They don’t learn a lot at school. They grow up not knowing Aboriginal people,” Kriss, who runs tours of the West MacDonnell Ranges that include experiences of Aboriginal art, told Al Jazeera.
“So when they actually come to a place where there’s a large population of Aboriginal people, then they start to see that [Aboriginal people] are just the same as them,” Kriss said.