EDITORIAL: The CLP Government’s decision to ignore serious instances of improper conduct at the taxpayer-funded Darwin Waterfront Corporation when faced with documented evidence has sent a message to the entire NT Public Service: Go ahead and do your worst, this CLP Government will cover it up, along with the misuse of public resources.

It also shows why our latest government-in-crisis cannot perform its basic function of keeping the public safe and maintaining the public’s trust in its institutions.

Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro had the opportunity this week to show every Territorian that her government was serious about being tough on crime – even corporate crime – and that this was in fact her “Year of Action” to improve the Territory.

Instead, she had her puppet, Attorney-General Marie-Clare Boothby, perform a pantomime when she fronted media on Tuesday, with the Chief Minister hiding behind her, claiming there was nothing “untoward” going on at the Waterfront, which she knew because the Waterfront board, including CEO Alastair Shields, had worked with the Department of Chief Minister & Cabinet – run by Lia’s hand-picked head public servant Luccio Cercarelli – to provide the Minister with a briefing that claimed everyone was good and had done nothing wrong.

Lia refused to comment on the matter, avoiding even a single question about what she knew about her husband’s massive $300,000 contract that was not independently assessed under public service governance rules before being awarded, or the estimated $400,000 he made in ‘higher duties allowance’ over six years for made-up jobs in other agencies that was all paid through the Waterfront Corporation.

The “briefing” our illustrious Attorney-General relied on for her “assumption” that everyone should be exonerated was completed before the revelations of the Chief Minister’s husband’s involvement.

The truly disturbing issue here is what this means moving forward for not only Boothby and Lia, whose political careers were put on life-support from Tuesday, but the Territory overall.

The Chief Minister and the Attorney-General are now on the public record stating they will not refer suspected misconduct in the public service, backed up with evidence, to be independently investigated. No government in the NT’s history has been so bold and we’ve had some bad ones. (The Lawler Labor government attempted similar with their ministers’ misconduct last year and we all know what happened to them.) This may also breach the ministerial code of conduct and the duty to refer suspected misconduct to the ICAC, although we all know the pointlessness of that referral.

The consequences of the CLP’s decision will reverberate long past the next election, regardless of whether the party moves on Lia’s leadership in the meantime.

The Northern Territory is now a full-blown Kleptocracy, authorised by the CLP, to permit those in positions of power to benefit off the rest of us while the Territory burns and its citizens are left to fend for themselves, as we’ve seen this week.

In her “Year of Action” speech back in February, the Chief Minister said she would be providing “action, certainty and security” to get the Territory moving again in 2025.

“We cannot afford uncertainty and confusion for potential investors at a time when private sector spending in the Territory is lagging,” she said.

The only certainty she provided with the decision to cover-up suspected corruption at the highest levels of the public service is that the Northern Territory is open for corrupt business dealings.

Not exactly what respectable nation-wide private investors want to hear about a jurisdiction when making investment decisions.

We said last week that the lawlessness on our streets was a symptom of the lawlessness in our public service. Unfortunately this week, we saw that in action when a teen facing serious violent charges was bailed and allegedly stabbed a man to death in his own shop for doing his job.

Successive governments have failed to holistically fix the problems we face here, including in our broken judicial system. Mostly because of “advice” from those public servant fat cats bilking it for all it’s worth who stand in the way of reform and the necessary change because they might cease benefiting from its dysfunction.

Our elected officials have been far too happy to smile in public and allow it to happen while receiving their own fat paycheques.

The Waterfront debacle is also very much a Labor scandal, but it’s clear that whatever might be uncovered during the course of a public inquiry scares Lia more than anyone.

As an unnamed Waterfront “spokesperson” told the ABC this week, everything was “approved by the minister[s]”.

Indeed, it all was. Which makes the maladministration much more significant and all the more serious. Most of it was done under Labor ministers, with a few assists from the previous and current CLP Government.

The internal government memos we reported show that ministers rubber-stamped just about every request for increased salaries or newly created jobs for mates without proper oversight – even up to last April, when Andrew Kirkman failed to manage a conflict of interest he had in lobbying the then-chief minister to increase his mate and fellow board member Alastair Shields’ salary. It was approved the next day, with seemingly no consideration given outside of taking Kirkman’s word for it, as he was the acting head public servant at the time.

Perhaps most chillingly, this whole fiasco depicts how those senior public servants manipulated one government’s elected ministers into blindly bowing to their demands and how easily they’re doing it right now with current ministers.

The issues at the Waterfront are not “historical” in any sense of the word; Boothby approved a new contract for Shields that she refuses to explain earlier this year or late last year, and appointed her own ‘friendlies’ on the Waterfront board, including Katie Woolf’s husband Patrick Bellot. There’s also the little matter of how Kirkman’s wife Susan was hired for an unadvertised job six months after her husband secured a pay rise for Shields at her own outrageously high salary, while the CLP was in power, and amid unanswered questions about where she was destined to be employed permanently.

This is the kind of stain that doesn’t come out in the wash, electoral or otherwise.

Every single member in this current Finocchiaro CLP Government is tainted by this scandal now and their refusal to do the right thing for the people of the Northern Territory will follow them.

The Finocchiaro CLP Government is doing exactly what the last Labor government did and the public is catching on. This is not a new bad government just starting off, it’s the systemic continuation of decades of bad governments controlled by bloated, unelected and out-of-touch senior executives who financially benefit off our suffering and can easily manipulate our elected representatives by way of their own greed and ignorance.

As the former director of comms in the previous CLP government once famously remarked over a few drinks: “Stop going so hard on us, we don’t know what we’re doing”.

This current government is so inept, they betray that secret every time they open their mouths.

The future of the Northern Territory depends on its elected officials leading through difficult times. The problems we face are multi-faceted and far-reaching with no easy answers. But the fix starts by cleaning up the top and working down from there. If this government is incapable of doing that, we need to find something else and we clearly don’t have another three years to wait.