Greater Darwin area commuters are being advised to seek other transport options because of a 24-hour bus drivers strike on Monday, October 20, after stalled enterprise bargaining negotiations between the Transport Workers Union and private bus operator CDC.
EXCLUSIVE: Darwin Waterfront Corporation chief executive Alastair Shields has been using at least two valuable parking spaces on the top level of the Kitchener Drive multi-storey carpark as his own personal garage to keep two Mercedeses – including the red one that featured in a recent Four Corners episode – which the former chair of the corporation says he had no knowledge of, raising questions about undisclosed gifts and whether fringe benefit tax has been paid for Mr Shields’s free parking fancy.
Auditors have warned the Darwin Basketball Association is at risk of going under for the third year in a row, this time due to a more than $600,000 cash shortfall for the year, with the association blaming Basketball NT for its situation but claiming it is confident in its solvency partly based on the $9,000 it pulled in from a weekly bingo night at the Casuarina Club, a figure the auditors have also called into question.
Test results from early 2024 show barriers underneath the military fuel tanks at East Arm to prevent leaks were ineffective, the Environment Centre NT has said, which was confirmed by the Department of Lands, Planning and Environment in a letter sent three weeks after Environment Minister Joshua Burgoyne approved the tanks for use and they began to be filled with jet fuel.
A 24-hour strike has been scheduled by NT bus drivers for Monday, October 20, following stalled negotiations over a new enterprise agreement between the Transport Workers’ Union and private bus operator CDC.
The Federal Infrastructure Minister has responded to her Territory counterpart’s ultimatum on the proposed Alice Springs Aboriginal art gallery, which she suggested may have been political posturing by the CLP to blame the Commonwealth for its desire to bin the project outright, describing Bill Yan’s demand that the feds approve variations by yesterday as “a pretty weird way of trying to work with the Commonwealth”.
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.
The Darwin ship lift project, initiated by the Giles CLP government in 2015, has seen the cost to complete the project increase to an estimated $820 million now, with the real possibility it could be over $1 billion by the time it’s completed, while a leading economist has raised financial management concerns.
Two Northern Territory Government departments have refused to explain the contradictions contained in an internal government report into a breach of fracking legislation by Empire Energy – now called Beetaloo Energy Australia – which involved one department sending a letter to “encourage behaviour change” after considering prosecution of the matter, while the other considered the company had done nothing wrong but still took action “to ensure it does not happen again”.
CDC bus drivers across the Territory have started wearing campaign-branded hi-visibility vests as part of the Transport Workers’ Union’s escalating work action against the bus operator’s contract offer, which they say falls below industry standards.
Tamboran Resources announced that its Beetaloo Joint Venture (BJV) has reached a Final Investment Decision (FID) for the Shenandoah South pilot project and that it has acquired Falcon Oil and Gas, while the NT Government announced that taxpayers will underwrite $75 million of a $180 million loan for a new compression facility to bring Beetaloo gas to market.
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.
