Police Commissioner Martin Dole has appointed Commander James J. O’Brien as acting deputy commissioner, leap-frogging him over four assistant commissioners and three acting assistant commissioners, in a move labelled “very odd” and a “massive slap in the face to all the staff ranked above him” by a former officer, but described as a “common occurrence” by the top cop.
Three senior NT Police officers, including two executives, were issued with serious discipline breach notices for alleged racist comments during a recent senior management meeting, with one of the accused identified as one of five officers who lied in a statutory declaration to the Kumanjayi Walker coronial inquest, sources have told the NT Independent.
A Holtze Prison inmate is being treated for a less serious form of diphtheria, the Northern Territory Centre for Disease Control has confirmed.
Basketball Australia will not comment on the findings of its national integrity unit’s investigation into questionable proposed income streams at the now-defunct Darwin Basketball Association, while former DBA chair Gary Shipway has not responded to questions, with his employer, News Corp, stating his role overseeing the financially collapsed association is unrelated to his current role as deputy editor of the NT News.
Former NT Police and Australian Federal Police commissioner Reece Kershaw has been appointed the interim chief executive officer of the troubled St John Ambulance NT organisation until the recruitment process for the role is finished, the organisation said.
The Finocchiaro Government has spent $8.1 million converting part of Holtze Prison into a standalone women’s section, but has still not disclosed the overall cost of its five-year prison master plan, as inmate numbers continue to rise to just 50 prisoners below the capacity the government said it would be able to house by 2028.
Attendance rates at Northern Territory schools in 2025 dropped by half a per cent on 2024 despite the introduction of truancy officers in November of that year. Education Minister Jo Hersey said today she was doubling down on her government’s plan to get kids to school and hold parents accountable for non-attendance, but did not directly reference the marginal decline.
An Alice Springs man who tried to complain about how the Health and Community Services Complaints Commission handled his health treatment complaint discovered the review committee meant to scrutinise the commission no longer existed, having been left dormant after Attorney-General Marie-Clare Boothby failed to appoint members, while she claimed it would be premature to do so ahead of the establishment of a proposed new integrity body.
The head of ambulance services at the troubled St John Ambulance NT, Andrew Thomas, has been appointed as the new executive director of Bushfires NT, while the ambulance contractor has said it has brought in former Australian Federal Police commissioner Reece Kershaw to help find its next chief executive officer.
Police Commissioner Martin Dole told the former head of public prosecutions that Zach Rolfe should be charged with murder over the shooting death of Kumanjayi Walker, but did not have a conflict of interest despite his childhood relationship with the victim’s family, a new ICAC report has found, which also concluded that police management’s failure to record major decisions in the case was “unfortunate” and “surprising” but did not amount to improper conduct.
Darwin Council will not say if it spent the $126,500 allocated for the annual city Christmas display, that this year involves failing lights, decorations from Christmases long, long ago, and the old Smith Street Christmas tree that appears was only lit for one night.
A team of scientists say the NT Government is being “misleading, inaccurate and potentially defamatory” by claiming their study that found a major aquifer was drying at an accelerated pace did not include enough years of data, a criticism that follows the government itself in 2022 inexplicably doubling the estimated annual re-filling rate provided for an aquifer by appearing to cut the data period in half.
