St John Ambulance NT last week told paramedics it was ceasing two emergency procedures, roughly a year after a damning independent review into its medical treatments called for the procedures to be ended until a medical director was employed, with the report also finding multiple failures and poor decisions resulted in harm to patients and significant risk to staff.
The Kalymnian Brotherhood says it intends to defy a Health Department order to destroy two tonnes of octopus which it deemed “unsuitable for consumption”, saying the claims were the result of “sabotage” against them by an unknown third party, and that there is nothing wrong with its stock of eight-armed marine mollusks, as the Glenti Festival kicks off this weekend.
The Prime Minister’s Office has no record of correspondence with Darwin Council about why Anthony Albanese allegedly cancelled a trip to attend the council’s ‘VIP’ unveiling ceremony of the controversial Cyclone Tracy memorial sculpture late last year, a Freedom of Information response indicates, despite Lord Mayor Kon Vatskalis having claimed he cancelled the event because the Prime Minister could not make it.
A St John Ambulance NT executive was allowed to drive one of the charity’s emergency response vehicles on holiday to Adelaide, with the organisation claiming he paid his own fuel interstate, but the move has annoyed some who say St John has a shortage of response vehicles and follows an audit of its spending last year.
The Finocchiaro Government has rejected a presumption in favour of NT public servants working from home, as well as the removal of a cap on the amount of days they can spend working from home, the Community and Public Sector Union has said, while Public Service Minister Jo Hersey said the government would not reduce the existing flexible work arrangements, but would not say what its work from home policy was.
Environment Minister Joshua Burgoyne said he has not been provided a legal briefing that recommended prosecution against Empire Energy and has not asked to see it, while his department has since decided the company did nothing wrong in relation to one of the alleged offences, but will not provide any details of what it is the company was involved in.
A Holtze prison corrections officer who lost an eye after having a crutch thrown at him was working alone at the time he was attacked by a prisoner who had not been properly classified for his threat risk, part of a wider problem of overcrowding and understaffing, prison insiders have said, but the Corrections Department insists prisoners are being properly classified.
The applicants of a Federal Court action seeking details of a secret deal Darwin Council signed with a developer to build a 21-storey civic centre-private office tower say they have dropped the original case because a court date would be too late to stop construction, but said they are still looking at a claim to stop millions of dollars in car park levies being spent on the building and instead returned to developers and property owners who have paid the fees.
A man has been charged with murder over the death of another man in Palmerston in March, NT Police said.
NT public servants will have a redeployment option taken from them and the Commissioner for Public Employment will be able to make determinations about their employment outside of the current enterprise agreement under a proposal put forward amid ongoing negotiations, the Community and Public Sector Union says, adding it could result in job cuts.
A Freedom of Information application seeking a departmental brief provided to former environment minister Kate Worden last year that recommended prosecution of Empire Energy was rejected on legal privilege grounds, a government letter shows, while the department appears to have attempted to cover up one of the three alleged offences referred to in the document.
The Health Department’s chief executive says the department will “really carefully” manage the deal it intends to sign with a company to run the closed hyperbaric chamber unit at Royal Darwin Hospital, after it was revealed that company’s sole director is the wife of the director of a company that previously held the same contract and went into administration, with its contract terminated by the NT Government.
