EDITORIAL: Territorians have a right to be angry at its government in the aftermath of the senseless killing of bottle shop worker Declan Laverty.

The Fyles Labor Government makes the laws of the land and in this instance it has let the community down by failing to take adequate measures to address the growing crime problem it has fostered unabated for years through its own flawed policies and public illusions of “action”.

Forget all this political nonsense about “generational change”, the “complexity of the complexities”, etc, etc – we have now seen that none of it is working and all it has led to is this government failing the people who elected it and violent crime stats going through the roof.

The politics needs to be taken out of the crime and community safety debate.

The only thing potentially more disgraceful this week than the horrific stabbing death of Mr Laverty is how the political parties handled it in Parliament.

At every opportunity, the Opposition CLP threw questions at Labor about what they were going to immediately do to make the community safe, because it was easy to blame them.

And in every non-answer Chief Minister Natasha Fyles provided, she was sure to add an attack on the end, referencing the CLP losing a no-consequence by-election last weekend that nobody outside of Arafura gives a shit about.

Congrats on your 15 per cent swing Tash, hope it comforts you while the entire Northern Territory is afraid their children and loved ones will not come home from work.

Labor’s arrogance was on display all week, including when the Attorney General found it all so funny he started laughing while cracking up his colleagues in Parliament during the serious motion of no confidence in the government for failing to keep Territorians safe, personally guaranteeing Labor would win the next election, while a young man’s body had just been sent to the morgue.

That was the most disgraceful episode we have ever seen in NT Parliament.

The bigger problem here is that it is in Labor’s and the Opposition’s interests to continue to engage in political point scoring like we saw this week and dividing the community over an issue neither has the solution for. And no, the CLP drafting its preferred bail laws on its own is not co-operation.

But there are solutions, there just needs to be the leadership and will to carry them out.

We believe wholeheartedly that the parties have corrupted our democracy irrevocably and that we may never recover without a parliament full of independents that can properly represent their constituents’ interests.

But if we have to live with the parties for now, then they can damn well start doing what we want and they can stick their petty politics and self-serving interests up their arses and get on with the job of fixing this place.

The government can solve this issue relatively easily but that means work, including a proper public discourse involving all interested and affected stakeholders so that we can, once and for all, come up with a comprehensive, effective and public plan for fixing this critical problem that is suffocating the Territory with fear.

This does not involve listening to Labor and the CLP come up with their best “tough-on-crime” political pledges for the next election to further divide us. We’ve heard it all before and the crime statistics show us the situation is worse than ever, which they delivered through ongoing political cycles.

The solution means having a full community discussion, a type of “Crime and Community Safety Summit” led by a suitably qualified independent chair, where people are listened to, including community groups, individuals, police, NGOs, government agencies, federal government agencies, and experts who can show results in other places, etc, and a plan of attack developed to make the community safe again, agreed to by both major political parties.

Nothing else has worked to this point and it won’t until everyone assesses the problem with clear eyes without playing to populist politics. All of this should also be done in the open where the public can assess the ideas put forward and clearly understand why a certain approach is being taken.

Both parties must then commit to enacting the final Action Plan and following it regardless of which party is elected at the next election.

This is in the best interests of the people of the Northern Territory and would take the politics out of the issue, leaving that for other problems facing the Territory, which we have no shortage of.

The solutions for the crime problem are in fact already out there, amongst all those ignored reports and reviews that governments have refused to act on, buried in back-office filing cabinets for political expedience, both in the Territory and federally. And those solutions can also be found in communities across the NT and the country where successes do occur.

Of course, they won’t do this, the party-political machine has run too long in the NT and has failed all of us. But we need to demand the politics is taken out of the issue if there is any hope of making the Territory safe again.

Labor never had a plan for crime crisis or anything else for that matter

Despite clearly having no plan to tackle the crime crisis (see last year’s Estimates hearings where Labor admitted it), this Labor Government has allowed the NT Police to fall into such a crisis that 80 per cent of officers don’t want the commissioner in the role, yet he remains, while experienced and respected officers have either left or are plotting their exits. The Opposition can’t even bring themselves to criticise the commissioner’s poor performance that has crippled the effective functioning of the police. In case they are all unaware – a dysfunctional police force with unstable leadership contributes to a crime crisis.

Other NT Government agencies that have important roles to play have also been knee-capped either by incompetence or fear of actually doing their jobs and making unpopular decisions that might somehow reflect poorly for their political masters.

The courts, too, have failed all of us by seemingly refusing to send people who commit serious crimes to jail, preferring to permit their freedom if they promise to “be respectful” and “not embarrass” themselves while on bail (a judge actually said this while granting bail recently). The community does not accept that a person who committed a violent crime against an innocent citizen with a weapon should be bailed.

We also have to be cognisant of potential knee-jerk reactions in establishing a new plan, such as the government pledging to arm any idiot who wants it with capsicum spray and teaching them kung-fu, which we can already foresee will lead to problems.

And we need to remember that our jails are bursting at the seams as a symptom of successive governments’ failures to holistically address the crime problem.

But it is not in the parties’ interests to find an actual long-lasting and effective solution to the NT’s crime problem. They’d rather use the issue as a weapon to divide us and keep themselves in power while the community is torn apart.

That’s what we’ve seen this week in the wake of Mr Laverty’s completely avoidable and senseless death.

We must demand more from our elected leaders.

How many more people need to lose their lives because the political parties want to bicker and score political points and manipulate the public into thinking one party has the solution when everything shows us they don’t?

What becomes of a government that can no longer protect its citizens?