The Northern Territory’s heavily conflicted and “useless” regulatory authority that oversees Australia’s $50 billion online gambling industry was exposed on ABC’s Four Corners program Monday night, which featured NT Racing and Wagering Commission chair Alastair Shields fleeing media questions in an old Mercedes that initially wouldn’t start during a hasty getaway.
Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro has failed to front the public following the release of the damning Justice Alan Blow review into NT Police senior employment practices, issuing a statement to claim she will accept the report’s six recommendations, but making no mention of why she failed to set it up as a proper inquiry, which the NT Police Association said fell “well short of what was expected”.
Education Minister Jo Hersey has become the first CLP minister to admit using the taxpayer-funded white car chauffeur service for a personal trip, raising the prospect of other potential misuse by ministers, but claims she received advice from a body that has nothing to do with the car service that her personal trip to Casuarina was “within the guidelines”, even if “it doesn’t probably float with the public”.
The Justice Alan Blow inquiry into senior police appointments under former police commissioner Michael Murphy has found the promotion and appointment processes “have many shortcomings” that need to be addressed immediately, while also exposing a war within the senior ranks of the NT Police over unresolved allegations of favouritism, bias and “undeclared or unmanaged conflicts of interest” that is continuing to affect the police’s culture and morale.
Lands and Planning Minister Josh Burgoyne has flatly rejected Larrakia people’s concerns that a proposed 11-storey hotel in the parking lot of the Darwin Convention Centre at the Waterfront precinct will impact an adjacent registered sacred site, with his comments later criticised by Larrakia owners as ill-informed and unqualified.
The Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Logistics under former senior bureaucrat Andrew Kirkman spent $2 million on a deeply flawed and painfully slow internal investigation into the rorting of millions of taxpayer dollars through the Indigenous Employment Provisional Sum scheme by dozens of Territory contractors, that led to the recovery of only $900,000, new internal government documents show.
The Finocchiaro CLP Government’s move to amend the Sacred Sites Act to ultimately push through a hotel project at the Darwin Waterfront precinct against traditional owners’ wishes may spark a direct conflict with the Federal Government, as the Federal Minister for Indigenous Australians has vowed to take the matter to Canberra.
Acting Chief Minister Gerard Maley has changed his story about when he first became aware Attorney-General Marie-Clare Boothby was related to a hit-and-run driver who received no jail time for killing an Aboriginal man, raising further questions about why the CLP Government was not upfront with the public about the issue, while also raising a possible breach of the ministerial code of conduct.
The Finocchiaro CLP Government’s real reason for amending the Sacred Sites Act earlier this year has become clearer, after it moved to alter the existing Authority Certificate for the Darwin Waterfront precinct to ensure a proposed high-rise hotel project can move ahead, despite repeated objections from traditional owners.
Acting Chief Minister Gerard Maley defended Attorney-General Marie-Clare Boothby’s failure to publicly disclose she is related to a hit-and-run driver who killed an Indigenous man last year before publicly commenting on the case, saying she is “doing a great job” as “the number one law person up here”, adding he only learned about the connection “three or four weeks ago”, despite the lawyer representing Jake Danby working at his brother’s law firm.
Attorney-General Marie-Clare Boothby has refused to stand down for failing to publicly disclose that the hit-and-run driver who killed an Aboriginal man and injured another and who avoided jail last week was related to her before publicly commenting on the case, stating she told Lia Finocchiaro about the matter last year – but won’t say how – while the Chief Minister has now gone on holidays and is unavailable for comment.
UPDATED: The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions has appealed the sentence handed out to 24-year-old Jake Danby for hit-and-run causing death, following public uproar over the lenient sentence this week which spared him jail time, despite Danby bragging in text messages about hitting two Aboriginal men, killing one of them, who he called an “oxygen thief” while saying he would not go to jail.
