Well, here we are in Clown Town again where the Lawler Government has now drawn up a list of who were the good Nazis and who were the bad Nazis.

It’s another week to wallow in the misdeeds, malfeasance and asinine behaviour of our elected leaders and explore that sweet corruption-incompetence nexus that makes us all feel at home in the Great Territory Lifestyle.

TELL us what you have seen happening in Clown Town at news@ntindependent.com.au

Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda

For those who are not in the Lawler Labor Government, Clown Town will have to translate that sub-headline. It says: Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

It seems to be a new department added by Chief Minister Eva Lawler this week, headed up by the new Minister for the Determination of Good Nazis and Bad Nazis Brent Potter. Those two are our Clowns of the Week for the second week running for their world’s best practice in Nazi-propagandising arse-clownery.

Since last Wednesday, when the NT Independent revealed Potsy’s anti-Semitic posts, that also included racist, homophobic and misogynistic material over a six-year period to 2019, between them, he and Lawler have offered new explanations and excuses for why it has been okay, aka lies, almost every day.

Lawler’s office even sent secret background to journalists saying Nazi General Erwin Rommel, who Potsy quoted in a Facebook post, was not actually a Nazi. Obviously just HItler’s misunderstood long-serving vehemently non-Nazi servant of the head of the Nazi party.

Do you think they would let Rommel be a member of NT Labor?

Then her office lied to the NT Independent saying the denial part was because of a “typo”.

Clown Town will let the readers decide for themselves if a typo was responsible for some “accidental” denial that Rommel was a Nazi.

“For background, attached is one of the posts where Walsh claims Potter is support [sic] Nazi’s [sic], when really he re-shares a famous war quotes [sic] from a non-nazi [sic] German while serving in the Army,” the email from Ms Lawler’s office said.

Sure, there are plenty of typos but none that could possibly alter the meaning: as a reader observed, something along the lines of, “yeah a typo stopped Mein Kampf being a romance novel”.

Using public resources to do Nazi propaganda is scary enough, but it is also scary to think about the lack of intelligence of Lawler’s brains trust that they thought the typo excuse was something that was in the realm of plausibility. She even said it out loud at the press conference.

It hurts the brain to think about how stupid it is. It is the explanation at the level of a three-year-old. A three-year-old wearing a blue shit and R.M Williams boots.

It also hurts the brain to think they all still have their jobs paid for by the taxpayer.

Clown Town is surprised they did not say Rommel was in fact a Hindu and that explained the swastika.

We look forward to the NT News publishing its 120 Best Nazis list based on “backgrounding” from the Minister for the Determination of Good Nazis and Bad Nazis.

Take me to your leader

If aliens came to the Territory now, abducted you and said, “take me to you leader”, what would you say? “What’s a leader?”

While standing in front of federal ministers at a press conference this week in what was supposed to be a positive $840 million financing announcement, Lawler suffered the humiliation of being asked why her office was secretly briefing journalists that a Nazi general, and one of Hitler’s most trusted men, was not a Nazi, why she was blocking the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption from accessing Cabinet documents, and what she thought about the CFMEU pulling its support from Territory Labor for this year’s general election.

Union NT secretary Michael Ravbar told ABC Lawler was the worst political leader he had encountered.

She defended not releasing Cabinet documents that could expose corruption due to convention. If you want to use the convention argument in the NT, the only way now to get cigarettes or alcohol is to ram raid a tobacconist or a bottle-o. But as an opinion piece the NT Independent published yesterday argued, there is a vital convention that ministers resign or are sacked when their behaviour contravenes established standards of morality or ethics.

Lawler has let the Potsy scandal bubble along for about 10 days now, while her defences of him grow increasingly illogical and nonsensical, which follows her lack of action against Deputy Chief Minister Chanston Paech over his shares scandal and Potsy’s own shares scandal.

Right now, she is dragging her whole party down with her and Potsy.

Surely the title Chief Minister in front of her name is just a typo.

Potsy’s special little flower journey

After all the rubbish he has spouted in the week leading up to it, no one wanted to hear Potsy’s self-propagating ‘mein emotionale entdeckungsreise’ (my emotional journey) speech to parliament where he said he unreservedly took responsibility for his actions, which is not at all true because he has not resigned.

He can say the word ‘responsibility’, he just doesn’t understand its meaning.

Potsy said he did not blame any other group or person for what he did, despite having pretty much having told the media last week his bigoted attitude was one that was required to survive in the Australian Army when he was there.

They haven’t all been happy days for Potsy.

The speech was a carefully constructed obfuscation, where he hit on the right notes and raised the right groups to portray the artificial construction of the new and better, sharing, caring, non-bigoted 2024 version of Potsy; matured and grown; working in aged care taught him the importance of building strong relationships based on empathy and compassion; marrying a single mother also led to personal growth; working on the fifth floor with inspiring women, being Nicole Manison and Natasha Fyles; exposure to a diverse culture; all of it led to him taking on a more empathetic, compassionate and broad view of the world

In his speech he also said, “in these circumstances the best I can do is admit to a mistake and move forward”. He didn’t really admit a mistake when first asked about it by the NT Independent, he only did that after the rest of the media came knocking.

He also said that throughout his life he had continually attempted to improve himself and the world around him, despite having said in the paragraph above that it was only in the last few years that he had been exposed to a diverse culture that challenged his single-minded and bigoted views. So had he been continually trying to improve himself and the world around him through his single-minded and bigoted views?

He went on to refer to his Facebook posts as being shared in jest, ignorance or stupidity “many years ago”.

Potsy is a shape shifter. In this speech, as he does on radio and in interviews, he presented casual and superficial ownership of his failings (where often he won’t even do that except when absolutely forced to), and then spends the rest of his time diminishing the significance of what he did and making excuses for why he did it.

There is an irreconcilableness to his claims of taking responsibility and his then shifty and tricky attempts to pass things off as being in jest or reflecting ignorance or stupidity, the sort of Nazis hi-jinx phase everyone goes through in their late 20s.

This speech was the chance to show that he actually knew what contrition was without all the clauses and trickiness, but most of it was spent with him describing what a great bloke he is now.

Then it emerged that one week before he made this speech, the Office of the Chief Minister had secretly backgrounded journalists that Rommel was not a Nazi and the NT Independent reporting had been wrong.

Lawler deflected the exploding Nazi bomb to Potsy who said he had ordered it. Then in a statement to the NT Independent, he said it was “an editing error”. “I in no way intended to try and hide that Rommel was a Nazi.”

So even as late as Thursday afternoon, he was still lying about what he had done. And why was he secretly briefing journalists about Nazis, and hiding behind fifth floor communications staff to do it, about his own scandal?

In his speech, he said that you judge a person by their actions, not by their words alone.

Do your actions say you have really changed Potsy? Or is the real change that you are becoming slicker and shiftier?

Potsy’s words are like an oil slick on water; the light reflects to show a rainbow of colour that can seem beautiful for a moment, then you stare at it a bit longer and realise it is just a toxic sludge of broken-down dinosaurs sitting on something life giving, poisoning anything good around it.

His speech should have been called Mein Bullshit.

Shade Structure

The story of the Gunner/Fyles/Lawler government can be summed up with the so-called shade structure.

The ABC revealed through FOI the $3.3 million structure is reducing temperatures by just 0.6 degrees but relative humidity was higher underneath it than outside it. It also reported it cost $155,000 in maintenance and repairs in the past financial year, three times more than estimated. Then we were told the vines aren’t getting watered enough for that money.

There has been a conga line of bullshitting ministers about the growth rate of these vines since about 2019, the latest by Sleepy Joel Bowden who said the vines weren’t “growing as fast as anyone would like”.

Five-and-a-half years ago, on the last day of October 2018, then-Infrastructure Minister Nicole Manison said the Rangoon creeper and orange trumpet vines would grow to full size in 12 to 18 months. The following February, then-Infrastructure Minister Eva Lawler said it was anticipated the vines would cover the structure by May 2020.

By September that year, the government said the original forecast period for the vines to reach a “reasonable level of coverage” was 18 months. Whatever that means.

Now the woman who apparently told the government what vines to grow, said they will cover the structure in “another five years or so”.

This Labor Government are political alcoholics who refuse to go into a 12-step program. They cannot ever admit step one, that they have a problem or they got something wrong. Because of this, they cannot complete step nine, which is to make amends.

Even now they refuse to admit they have a heavy lack-of-shade problem. At some point several years ago, they could have admitted they were the wrong plants and fixed the situation. Now it is probably too hard and too late for them to do anything because they have been saying for so long it is like walking into a cool room being under that thing.

Don’t tell Clown Town we are standing under a shade structure when we have to wear sunglasses and SPF 50.

The CFMEU’s Ravbar said Labor was dying on the vine in the Territory. Territory Labor are the shade structure vines.

Clown Town is waiting for the secret backgrounding email to say the word “shade” was just a typo.

CDU cyber

Charles Darwin University are in the hunt for a senior cyber security engineer after the “unpleasantness”. The person will be responsible for the “formulation and continuous refinement of the university’s security architecture and overall cyber posture”.

In mid-December, the NT Independent revealed the university took two weeks to inform students about a privacy breach of their sensitive and personal information, including mental and family health, along with passport and visa details and financial records, warning weeks after to look out for potential scams involving the release of their personal details.

The use of the term “cyber posture” is arse-clownish enough, considering CDU’s cyber posture seems to be downward-facing dog, but not telling students about the breach is really dropping-your-pants clown behaviour.

I have important friends

Lord Michael Riches of Adelaide was delighted this week to announce his forthcoming nuptials to the Baroness Casey of Blackstock. Apparently, the two met on Tinder where his bio said that in his spare time – apart from drinking piña coladas and getting caught in the rain – he loves investigating corruption, because the nature of his job does not allow him to investigate corruption in office hours.

Well, actually, the Independent Clown Against Corruption announced that the Baroness, aka Louise Casey, was coming to Darwin to talk at his Australian Public Sector Anti-Corruption Conference, aka the massive distraction from his job for someone who doesn’t even seem to understand what corruption is.

Lord Michael of Adelaide famously declared there is no “widespread corruption” in the public service, but then went on to observe he had seen “repeated instances of failures to abide by proper process, a lack of clear policies and systems, and a lack of effective management and audit processes”.

He has not yet announced whether all members of the House of Lords and the Royal family will be attend his conference, which surely will feature a gala ball where Lord Michael of Adelaide and Baroness Casey of Blackstock will dance the first dance.

While his performance in the role has not been helped by the Labor Government blocking access to Cabinet documents, it is hard to understand why Lord Michael of Adelaide is hosting this conference – planning the menu and fussing over seating arrangements and who sits next to the Baroness – instead of, oh we don’t know, releasing reports on corruption investigations?

He is not a man who can pat his head and rub his belly at the same time.

We are beginning to think the there might be a typo in his title, and it should be the ICAIC: Independent Commissioner Against Investigating Corruption.

And another thing

Clown Town was moved to lol at Matty Gambler’s comment