EDITORIAL: The Northern Territory is well and truly stuffed – the surprising thing is that it took six long years of the Gunner government to get us to this point.
The kind of arrogance, corruption, greed, selfishness and complete and utter incompetence it takes to break an entire jurisdiction is rare and needs to come from so many working together seamlessly to let a jurisdiction down so historically. We’re only surprised it took this long for the place to come crumbling down around us given the people in charge.
To be fair, the problems had been building for longer than that, and the cracks exposed previously, but the way this current Labor Government, now led by Natasha Fyles, has managed to screw things up by doing nothing outside of protecting their own jobs is truly remarkable.
It’s like we’re one of those broken cities in a bad superhero movie, overrun by gangs of thugs who carry out nightly crime and violent attacks on innocent people with impunity and a corrupt government that has taken us there, where anything goes and law and order has long ago been abandoned because all the good cops have left and those who haven’t are either corrupt or just don’t care anymore. Unfortunately, there is no hero coming to save us in this frontier Gotham City and the good cops we have here are under-resourced and abandoned by their leadership.
There’s always been an uneasy feeling, even for those behind the curtain, that the NT’s entire social system is built on nothing more than loose sand, held together by spit and some good fortune, that nothing is firm and the foundations susceptible to cracks. Those cracks are now visible to the naked eye everywhere, as it all comes crumbling down.
This government has let us all down and the Territory may never recover from where we currently are.
On Friday afternoon alone, the news bulletin on ABC Radio was enough to depress anyone ahead of a beautiful Dry Season weekend:
The NT Police force was in “complete crisis”, we heard, with 80 per cent of officers surveyed saying they have no confidence in Police Commissioner Jamie Chalker and the government having no plan to address the serious issues raised despite calls from the Opposition for a public inquiry; the ICAC had launched an investigation into more than 300 government-owned or leased public buildings to determine if they’re safe for occupancy – including schools and hospitals; the corrections and judicial systems were in tatters as Holtze prison overcrowding caused dysfunction and chaos, with severe staff shortages and detainees locked up in isolation not allowed to see their lawyers, which may breach international laws.
And just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, we’re confronted by the news on Monday morning that Fire and Rescue Services can’t properly staff fire stations, so decided to close one for the day in the middle of the bush fire season and while a fire ban is in place; the Greater Darwin region’s teachers are taking strike action this week because their EBA negotiations have been going nowhere, which the Chief Minister claimed was only a political stunt to embarrass Labor ahead of a by-election; and that same leader still inexplicably backing the police commissioner and taking us all on another trip through her circular maze of logic to explore the “complexity of the complexities” of making proper decisions in the public interest.
And again there’s this underlying crime issue, which the government recently revealed at Estimates they have no current plan for addressing.
Add to that a few other less-than-auspicious happenings over the last few weeks and it appears there is no way out: The Chief Minister is now openly covering up corruption after failing to provide the ICAC with documents related to a senior public officer allegedly altering a Cabinet document to deceive the government; her hand-picked candidate for the Fannie Bay by-election appears to have failed to disclose his relationship with an alleged aircraft company that he helped secure $10 million of public funds for and then used taxpayer money to travel internationally to secure funding and supplier agreements for; the Fire Service’s ageing vehicles are so past their prime that a fire in a multi-story complex in the city last month would not have been attended to because there were no trucks to fight it at the main fire station.
The safety risks to the public are deeply disturbing.
And let’s not forget the Police Commissioner, aka, Fire Services CEO, is currently under investigation by the ICAC over allegations of political interference in the decision to charge Constable Zach Rolfe with murder despite no case being made, but sees fit to stay in the office while the rank-and-file are baying for blood.
Nothing big here. It’s just the Police Commissioner under investigation for alleged corruption while 80 per cent of his own staff want him to resign because he’s as incompetent as his political masters and yet nobody in a position to clean that mess up says a word of value.
Did we mention that there’s also a little issue of out-of-control crime where some residents are afraid to leave their homes for fear of getting robbed and assaulted in public, while others are afraid to sleep in their homes for fear they will be broken into and sexually assaulted and robbed, and that the latest and best solution from the government is to hire a few security guards to do patrols?
Is there anyone out there?
And then there’s the financial mismanagement that has seen the net debt grow from $1.6 billion when Labor was elected in 2016 that is currently forecast to break $9 billion this year. We don’t even have anything to show for that spending aside from a bloated public service and a shade-less shade structure. The issue almost doesn’t seem fair to add in here if only because nobody has been talking about that little problem for the last few weeks.
But let’s not forget the Auditor General found this government lied to all of us about the true state of the books just ahead of the 2020 election and nobody was held accountable.
The economy meanwhile continues to rank as the lowest performing in the country with little glimmer of any change on the horizon.
The government can no longer protect its citizens
Essentially, the government can no longer protect its citizens and not just from crime, but fires, mismanagement of public funds and apparently its own public buildings. This is untenable. The government cannot continue to govern in good faith when they fail to provide the basic functions for Territorians that is their sole job.
The worst part of all this might be that it is not political. We strongly doubt that any of this has to do directly with the Australian Labor Party’s policies or general philosophy.
This is the concerted work of a massive group of incompetent people who just happened to have found each other through a red-shirt cult and for reasons that are still not entirely clear, elected to lead the land and solve our problems, perhaps by people who benefit financially from them remaining in power.
This is what happens when you abandon any principles and focus on maintaining your job at the expense of working for the best interests of the community. It’s appalling and has brought us to this low point in the Territory’s history.
We are now in a worse place than we were six years ago when we thought we were in a pretty bad place. This is why this Gunner/Fyles Government will go down as the worst in the NT’s history, even worse than the Giles CLP Government for the simple reason that they screwed us all, while the Giles CLP clowns only screwed themselves (and sometimes videoed it to share).
But this is what happens when unqualified people are put in leadership positions, fail to lead and then hand over the reigns to senior public servants who are also unqualified for their roles and just as selfish and greedy.
Is it really any wonder Michael Gunner fled Parliament so suddenly? And why the head public servant resigned shortly after he stepped down as chief minister? They could sense it was all about to come down.
We have to remain confident however, that their dealings will be fully exposed soon and appropriate action taken, because somebody needs to be accountable for this mess.
But the more pressing issue right now is how do we get the Northern Territory back on track?
The answer will have to come from the community itself because that tribe who sit in our Parliament to govern have shown they do not have the faintest idea.
The cracks in the facade of civility that the NT has been trying to project for decades has finally been fully exposed. Action is required and who knows where that will come from or when.
We’re not going to tell you how to vote in a single by-election. Hell, we no longer believe voting can actually fix anything. That will take much more than any politician can offer at this point. However, we’re open to ideas and need to have the conversation about how we really start to fix the NT for the good of its people.
Even a change in government won’t fix this. Senior public servants are on contracts for the primary purpose of performance based administration. It seems it is now a way of boosting incomes for mates. The current government creates commissioner positions with a team of support staff to do work that should be done by department staff. None of this produces a positive impact on our economy which seems to be based on public service wages without the economy to support the wages. Technically we are trading while insolvent! A business in this position would be under administration long before it got this baf. We need an inquiry to review all executive positions and determine what they actually achieve. There is a government team created to chase down businesses to build our economy. Most of the time we fund start ups for projects that fail.