Territorians will be forgiven for thinking this Fyles Labor Government has led us to the brink of complete and utter civil collapse.

The way things are going, we’ll all be living in huts, hunting rats with sticks within the next couple of years.

If we needed any further evidence that this government is the most incompetent and self-serving in the Territory’s history, let’s look at the situation as it stands this week.

We learned the government has been politically interfering with your right to know what crimes are being committed in your community by replacing the police comms director with their own “marketing manager” in a treacherous effort to cover-up the reporting of serious crimes instead of addressing the problem.

You will have no idea if someone is stabbed on your street because the government thinks that’s hurting tourism and their own electability so your safety be damned. Instead of fixing the problem, Territory Labor has resorted to their regular MO – that it’s better to cover it up.

Then we had the government interfering in ICAC legislation to prevent themselves from being named in any upcoming corruption reports, as part of a secret review into the Act Gunner had a mate undertake, which was called out by a leading national expert this week as “quite weird by national standards”.

National standards? We have no idea what that even means round these parts anymore. But we understand the “quite weird” part; that’s putting it mildly and should be sent to Nicole Manison’s people immediately to become our new tourism slogan.

Then we saw the Speaker of Parliament Mark Monaghan jet-setting off to Pacific island nations to take part in strange pig ceremonies at taxpayer expense while trying to make it appear he was still in town eating burritos on social media. For some reason he never told anyone about the trip, even though that one is actually permitted under current entitlements, unlike the Christmas holidays he told Attorney General Chansey Paech and Deputy Speaker Dheran Young to charge taxpayers for, which has still not been resolved.

So, the government is too busy looking after themselves and utilising their full entitlements to care anymore about the crime crisis and the safety of the wider community, which they’re actively trying to cover up now rather than solve and all while the ongoing dysfunction and internal problems in the police force fester.

We still find ourselves having to remind this group of Labor tribe members that a fundamental function of a government is to keep the public safe.

If all of that isn’t bad enough, the latest Utilities Commission report this week shows that the power grid will fail within three years because – despite warnings for years – this government has invested next-to-nothing into much-needed infrastructure to keep the lights on and to also meet their own over-hyped renewable energy targets. Every year that they failed to act has led to increased costs and risks, the report found.

We still have multiple major solar projects sitting idle and unable to connect to the grid after the government failed to provide the necessary infrastructure upgrades and now we’re told to expect widespread blackouts in the near future because they have ignored the warnings for years.

This completely hopeless government racked up a $9 billion debt in seven years to hire more carpetbagging senior bureaucrats from down south instead of investing in critical infrastructure and while the problems in the police force have been ignored despite cries for help. It would be unbelievable if we haven’t seen it all happening with our own eyes.

We really could not make this stuff up.

This place appears doomed.

Our elected leaders are nowhere to be found while people continue to be stabbed in the streets and the police force remains broken, while the electricity grid is on the verge of collapse.

And don’t forget, if you want to escape before we start sharpening those rat-sticks, good luck with that. The airport runway is apparently not safe and for reasons that have still not been properly explained, the powers that be could not arrange the necessary upgrades during the pandemic because there were a couple repatriation flights a week touching down. And now they tell us the works need to be carried out at night – at night when the airport is at full capacity – again, for reasons they cannot properly explain.

Not that anyone is asking questions about this kind of stuff.

Through either outright stupidity or collusion, the establishment media in this town is complicit in all of this. We have a commercial radio presenter who gets everyone in positions of power on the air but has a problem asking the right questions, is woefully unprepared with facts and just goes along with what she’s fed.

Mix 104.9 has been told not to mention the NT Independent’s reporting and has completely ignored this publication’s crucial reports into governance of the Territory in favour of having lying ministers on their flagship talkback radio program to spread more misinformation to the public that benefits only them.

Then we have the ABC buying the absolute bullshit the government’s new crime marketing manager gives them.

The public broadcaster seems to have believed the police/government spin machine that crime in Alice Springs is at a four-year low and reported it as fact. Then, when some thinking people raised serious doubts about those stats, the cops backflipped on their claims and the ABC let it all go because, well, it was only the police caught lying to the public to keep their political masters happy and what’s wrong with that? (That original story is still up by the way and has not been updated to indicate the initial facts were wrong).

There’s also apparently still an old-fashioned newspaper in town that reports on things from time to time through the government’s distorted prism. No report from them yet on the government’s crime marketing manager being installed to cover-up the extent of crime. They have no interest in exposing this government’s massive failings and just keep taking what they’re given and running with it. No questions asked, no truth provided.

But the sweet advertising cash keeps flowing for these commercial media outlets, so all good.

This is all just in a random week in July. We haven’t even raised the concerted efforts of our elected members and greedy public servants to systematically destroy our other democratic institutions in favour of keeping themselves employed.

Who even has faith in our justice system anymore or the police force under the current executive? The only good news on that front is that somebody may finally be under investigation for perverting the course of justice in connection to the Zach Rolfe matter, but who could effectively undertake that investigation here is still up in the air.

We’d love to run a story about something positive the government has done. They’ve set the bar so low now that keeping the power on would be something to celebrate.

We’ve said this before, but really, how much more proof does anyone need after this last week: This is what happens when incompetent elected officials and conniving senior public servants put their self-interests above the good of the Territory and its people.