The Lawler Government will introduce legislation to legalise youth curfews across the Northern Territory, after refusing to admit last month that the “emergency situation” ordered in Alice Springs following riots in the town may have been unlawful, which an independent MLA said was only being done now to “fix their latest cock up”.
The Lawler Government has announced a big-spending budget three months out from the general election that puts the Territory on course to achieve a net debt of $11 billion by next year.
The Lawler Labor Government’s 2024 Budget is proof that Labor is bereft of any “new ideas” to address the Territory’s problems, CLP Opposition Leader Lia Finocchiaro says, while the Chief Minister threw it back at Ms Finocchiaro, demanding to know where she’s been hiding for the last month.
The Lawler Government has pledged “an almost $90 million boost” for police operations in tomorrow’s Budget, just a year after providing only a modest boost for police despite record crime rates and pleas from the public to keep the community safe amid an ongoing “crime crisis” across the Territory.
A powerful peak body for Aboriginal Territorians has publicly rebuked Police Minister Brent Potter for his comments about violence in Daly River, insisting the Minister and the Lawler Government are playing “the blame game” instead of accepting responsibility for their failure to uphold law and order across the Territory.
The Labor Government needs to come clean to Territorians over its misappropriation of taxpayer money to fund its 2020 election campaign instead of hiding behind new staff guidelines, the Opposition CLP says, while the Chief Minister says she has not been informed yet of what the ICAC’s investigation will reveal, but would not denounce party figures’ actions.
EXCLUSIVE: Labor’s misuse of public funds at the 2020 election has sparked internal reforms to ministerial staff rules, ahead of possible findings from the long-delayed ICAC investigation into the party’s conduct, that an independent MLA says continues to “stink” the longer it remains unresolved.
The Lawler Government and CDU have refused to explain how the university can provide the necessary independence to undertake monitoring of the gas industry’s fracking operations in the Beetaloo Sub-Basin, after its vice-chancellor told a Senate inquiry the university regularly accepts money and gifts from the industry, with other integrity issues at the highest levels of the university remaining unresolved.
The Lawler Government has signed a multi-year gas supply deal with Tamboran Resources to purchase gas from its future Beetaloo Basin operations to keep the lights on in the Territory, before the government has given final environmental approval for the operation to go ahead.
Attorney General Chansey Paech has announced $57 million to repurpose an old prison in Darwin and an Alice Springs rehab facility to house female inmates, contradicting his previous “jailing is failing” mantra, that will also see male prisoners detained at the old Berrimah prison as an “interim measure”.
CDU vice-chancellor Scott Bowman has refused to answer questions about his performance at last week’s Senate hearings into the proposed Middle Arm industrial precinct, including why he did not disclose that the university has recently been awarded the majority of a $2 million contract by the NT Government to monitor fracking operations in the Beetaloo Sub-basin and his apparent breaches of policy.
UPDATED: The CLP has raised three times more money in political donations than Territory Labor by the end of March, with a crypto bro leading the party’s donations take, while Middle Arm proponents and developers backed in Territory Labor with big bucks ahead of August’s general election, new disclosures filed with the electoral commission show.
