The angel on Jim Jefferies' left shoulderon June 13, 2025 at 3:30 pm
The tail wagging the dog. Again.
‘Mr Kirkman lobbied for his mate and Darwin Waterfront Corporation (DWC) chief executive Alastair Shields to receive a pay rise while he was acting head public servant last year and a member of the same DWC board.
Six months later, Mr Kirkman’s wife Susan was hired by that same DWC for a temporary position on a huge pay packet estimated to be in excess of $200,000 a year.
Mr Kirkman’s sister and previous head public servant Jodie Ryan has also had temporary highly paid positions at that same DWC.’
~Sam Burke, Husband of current Chief Minister LiaR Finocchiaro and son of Denis Burke previous CLP Chief Minister, also has a highly paid and dubious contract on that DWC Board, while all 3 men Kirkman, Shields and Burke are all paid members of a 5 person Board Australasia Railways (AARC).
‘“What I am saying is he has not resigned and he is still being paid,” Mr Maley told the committee. “At what level, you would have to talk to the Chief Minister’s department.”’
~2 things are possible here with this statement. Both of them are ridiculous for Ministers but sadly the accepted norm for the NT:
1. Maley is lying and he does know but is refusing to say.
2. Maley actually doesn’t know, which would be an incredible state of affairs. Has the information been hidden from him? Has he deliberately not asked for it?
Somebody is lying to the public. We believe all of them are: Shirkman, Maley, every one of them. They’re taking the piss out of all of us while our tax dollars pay them handsomely.
The reason we’re even having this discussion is because, again, faced with problem and expensive staff at the upper levels of Government, with Andrew Shirkman being the latest poster child for the TICKS, the CLP have simply looked the other way and allowed them to continue in their positions, free of any consequences for threatening staff, causing easily over a million dollars in expenditure in trying to keep those threats from the public as much as possible in this specific case.
This current crop of MLAs have walked into a shambles that’s for sure. The Labor party were inept and rotten, in both senses of the word. Truly.
Eva Lawless wanted to hold and control the wheel of a fast moving train wreck and what did she do with it? She floored the lying/corruption accelerator pedal and went full steam ahead off a cliff, instead of a sharp pull to the left or a massive slam on the brakes to try and prevent the obvious and oncoming disaster.
She had a chance, a slim one, but she didn’t take it.
Watching all this unfold, the CLP had an opportunity to redo NT politics, reform and reframe the corruption debate, rethink how we can beat crime together as a society and recalibrate public sector waste, incompetence and mismanagement.
And what have they done about all that so far?
Made it all worse.
So, let’s think for a minute about why they have done this.
And then what we can do about that to stop it happening again.
It’s obvious to anyone that Shirkman could have easily been sacked for serious misconduct for what he did to Maria Rust.
This is not controversial to state that NTG HR has the tools to do this, if they wanted to.
Shirkman being a Dept head answers to a Minister.
Ministers answer to the Chief Minister.
So if Shirkman is still in a job, or still being paid, that is because the Chief Minister wants it to be so.
Ministers like Marie-Clare Boothby, when she has her Attorney-General hat on, love to tell people that she alone makes the decisions when she speaks her gobbledygook as head legal officer for the NT.
She may actually believe that, we’re not sure. Maybe she’s overdoing the psychedelic mushroom micro dosing, who knows what’s bouncing around in that empty head of hers at times.
That belief, is akin to telling a five year old with a kitchen set that the ‘people’ she is serving afternoon tea to in her little plastic cups, are real people having real conversations.
So, Alastair Shields From The Public is allowed to keep his ten or so Board and Committee paid positions and all the extra benefits from corporate donors he gleefully receives and announces to the media every now and then because the current Chief Minister says so.
Andrew Shirkman is allowed to do whatever it is he is doing because the current Chief Minister says so.
Now that major Depts and Agencies are falling apart under the strain of long term incompetence, cronyism, nepotism and mismanagement – the DPP having resigned this week too, who’s making the charging decisions at the moment by the way and with the Police in a hole so deep that it must be constantly dark down there – she probably doesn’t have a plan at all about what to do in part because she hasn’t been taking notes from her 8 years in opposition.
Greg Shamahan at ICAC is another one of those tail wagging the dog scenarios.
It’s also uncontroversial to say this but keeping expensive muppets like Shirkman and others is signalling to the rest of the NT public service that no matter how hard you work and no matter how good your work is, you will not succeed in this environment.
You will stay in your lane, stay at your pay grade and we will allow you all to watch in awe as we promote, pay at HDA, keep in employment, give more money and Board memberships to, and offer free long term legal assistance to bullies and bullshitters while embracing mismanagement and incompetence.
Why would someone want to do this to the whole of Government?
We believe the dysfunction is deliberate.
Keep it this bad, this badly mismanaged, so that none of the good people want to stay and then they leave – this stops us looking so bad when compared to someone who knows what they’re doing – and it dissuades any good people from applying to work here and has the same net outcome.
Keep it all shit and we can keep all the shit here, sucking the financial life out of the place while reminding the population “it’s always been this way” and “this is all normal”.
Sadly they are right. But they neglect to tell you that it’s because they want it to be this way.
We say it again: no one has a way out because none of the MLAs really want it to change.
The ALP/CLP Coalition of Chaos don’t want this to change, just check the public record if you don’t believe us.
The Independents maybe but are impotent due to lack of numbers and lack of coherent direction.
Throwing out “transparency” and “accountability” all the time without any means or direction about how you’re going to achieve that is pointless if you really want things to change; it’s great if you’re the ALP/CLP Coalition of Chaos because it shows them they have no serious competition in the political space.
Senior public servants are running the whole show. LiaR Finocchiaro is either way out of her depth, or is merely a puppet for more senior CLP/NTG voices who don’t want anything to change for their high level mates and their families. Hubby Sam Burke included.
This whole arena needs a clear out. NT Politics needs a transformation.
It is grubby:
the mudslinging, the shit everywhere, the petty point scoring, the dark and dingy wilful blindness, the damp squibs routinely chucked around when completely out of policy ideas, the disastrous state of public safety and the degradation of our public dis-service.
Do we want to transform this place or not?
If so, our only hope in our household’s opinion is to join and support the movement for Change For Better.
From the bottom up:
~Participatory Budgeting to empower local community decision making in spending their money better, ~Being All In On Justice Reinvestment, ~genuine Proportional Representation in voting, ~a free and open Freedom of Information system/process for keeping Government accountable, ~incentivised whistleblowing with the best whistleblowers given awards at an annual ceremony by the heads of depts they blew the whistle on, ~ICAC without any NT Government staff or their mates/acquaintances and Greg Shamahan’s recommendations for supporting NTG corruption to be immediately undone, ~actual consequences for mismanagement and bullying in the NT Public Service, ~extending the statute of limitations backwards so we catch all the Shirkmans of this Territory, ~external and independent investigations when obviously required, ~an Attorney General who is legally trained at the very least, ~Police fully supported in working together with communities of all colours instead of against them, ~lying Police officers sacked and prosecuted, ~all cases of nepotism punished and ended, ~all cases of cronyism punished and ended, ~all NT Boards and Committee appointments dissolved and re-assessed independently, ~future limits on how many you can be on, ~published monthly figures of all NT Government legal expenditure to assist in budgeting decisions and so we have a well informed public, ~educational best practices embraced not ignored, ~learning to be a fiscally responsible Government and to encourage public participation in that process, ~not criminalising children as much as we can, ~stopping the sale of pepper spray to the public (duh), ~having real independent Public Accounts Committee hearings not the pantomime we were forced to endure recently, ~fraud against Government properly investigated and prosecuted, ~a fully open and transparent lobbyist register with everything the public wants to know put in there.
….you get the gist we’re sure.
We want people to be proud to be here, not fighting to get on the first plane south.
And we don’t mean through puff pieces in Government compliant media spewing out stories of how great the weather or the wildness of the bush are.
We mean every aspect of life: work, health (physical and mental), opportunities, education, play, aspirational lifestyles, multiculturalism, decent housing, giving a hand up to the weak and forgotten, connections, all one big entity working in tandem to secure its own long term survival.
Not the shite sandwich we are being fed right now, again, by imposters with no idea what they’re doing, other than keeping it shite so they can suck out all the money for their mates first and f**k everyone else.
If so, our only hope in our household’s opinion is to join and support the movement for: Change For Better.
It’s run by the right people with ideas to Change The Game.
Without the right people, we have what we have now.
2015-25 DWC CEO/Board Member Andrew Shirkman would be a very dangerous person to sack as he would have access to the ‘honey pot’ stories about his DWC cronies?
The angel on Jim Jefferies' left shoulderon June 13, 2025 at 5:26 pm
For any budding politician who wants to see how to ask the right questions of incompetent, Government supported, higher level employees, in the right way, with the requisite level of disdain and anger directed towards them…..we’re thinking to the Alastair Shields From The Publics and Patrick Bellends of this world, not to mention all CLP ministers in Estimates and everywhere else.
Watch this 5 minute questioning of USA’s Pete Hegesth before the House Armed Services Committee:
The tail wagging the dog. Again.
‘Mr Kirkman lobbied for his mate and Darwin Waterfront Corporation (DWC) chief executive Alastair Shields to receive a pay rise while he was acting head public servant last year and a member of the same DWC board.
Six months later, Mr Kirkman’s wife Susan was hired by that same DWC for a temporary position on a huge pay packet estimated to be in excess of $200,000 a year.
Mr Kirkman’s sister and previous head public servant Jodie Ryan has also had temporary highly paid positions at that same DWC.’
~Sam Burke, Husband of current Chief Minister LiaR Finocchiaro and son of Denis Burke previous CLP Chief Minister, also has a highly paid and dubious contract on that DWC Board, while all 3 men Kirkman, Shields and Burke are all paid members of a 5 person Board Australasia Railways (AARC).
‘“What I am saying is he has not resigned and he is still being paid,” Mr Maley told the committee. “At what level, you would have to talk to the Chief Minister’s department.”’
~2 things are possible here with this statement. Both of them are ridiculous for Ministers but sadly the accepted norm for the NT:
1. Maley is lying and he does know but is refusing to say.
2. Maley actually doesn’t know, which would be an incredible state of affairs. Has the information been hidden from him? Has he deliberately not asked for it?
Somebody is lying to the public. We believe all of them are: Shirkman, Maley, every one of them. They’re taking the piss out of all of us while our tax dollars pay them handsomely.
The reason we’re even having this discussion is because, again, faced with problem and expensive staff at the upper levels of Government, with Andrew Shirkman being the latest poster child for the TICKS, the CLP have simply looked the other way and allowed them to continue in their positions, free of any consequences for threatening staff, causing easily over a million dollars in expenditure in trying to keep those threats from the public as much as possible in this specific case.
This current crop of MLAs have walked into a shambles that’s for sure. The Labor party were inept and rotten, in both senses of the word. Truly.
Eva Lawless wanted to hold and control the wheel of a fast moving train wreck and what did she do with it? She floored the lying/corruption accelerator pedal and went full steam ahead off a cliff, instead of a sharp pull to the left or a massive slam on the brakes to try and prevent the obvious and oncoming disaster.
She had a chance, a slim one, but she didn’t take it.
Watching all this unfold, the CLP had an opportunity to redo NT politics, reform and reframe the corruption debate, rethink how we can beat crime together as a society and recalibrate public sector waste, incompetence and mismanagement.
And what have they done about all that so far?
Made it all worse.
So, let’s think for a minute about why they have done this.
And then what we can do about that to stop it happening again.
It’s obvious to anyone that Shirkman could have easily been sacked for serious misconduct for what he did to Maria Rust.
This is not controversial to state that NTG HR has the tools to do this, if they wanted to.
Shirkman being a Dept head answers to a Minister.
Ministers answer to the Chief Minister.
So if Shirkman is still in a job, or still being paid, that is because the Chief Minister wants it to be so.
Ministers like Marie-Clare Boothby, when she has her Attorney-General hat on, love to tell people that she alone makes the decisions when she speaks her gobbledygook as head legal officer for the NT.
She may actually believe that, we’re not sure. Maybe she’s overdoing the psychedelic mushroom micro dosing, who knows what’s bouncing around in that empty head of hers at times.
That belief, is akin to telling a five year old with a kitchen set that the ‘people’ she is serving afternoon tea to in her little plastic cups, are real people having real conversations.
So, Alastair Shields From The Public is allowed to keep his ten or so Board and Committee paid positions and all the extra benefits from corporate donors he gleefully receives and announces to the media every now and then because the current Chief Minister says so.
Andrew Shirkman is allowed to do whatever it is he is doing because the current Chief Minister says so.
Now that major Depts and Agencies are falling apart under the strain of long term incompetence, cronyism, nepotism and mismanagement – the DPP having resigned this week too, who’s making the charging decisions at the moment by the way and with the Police in a hole so deep that it must be constantly dark down there – she probably doesn’t have a plan at all about what to do in part because she hasn’t been taking notes from her 8 years in opposition.
Greg Shamahan at ICAC is another one of those tail wagging the dog scenarios.
It’s also uncontroversial to say this but keeping expensive muppets like Shirkman and others is signalling to the rest of the NT public service that no matter how hard you work and no matter how good your work is, you will not succeed in this environment.
You will stay in your lane, stay at your pay grade and we will allow you all to watch in awe as we promote, pay at HDA, keep in employment, give more money and Board memberships to, and offer free long term legal assistance to bullies and bullshitters while embracing mismanagement and incompetence.
Why would someone want to do this to the whole of Government?
We believe the dysfunction is deliberate.
Keep it this bad, this badly mismanaged, so that none of the good people want to stay and then they leave – this stops us looking so bad when compared to someone who knows what they’re doing – and it dissuades any good people from applying to work here and has the same net outcome.
Keep it all shit and we can keep all the shit here, sucking the financial life out of the place while reminding the population “it’s always been this way” and “this is all normal”.
Sadly they are right. But they neglect to tell you that it’s because they want it to be this way.
We say it again: no one has a way out because none of the MLAs really want it to change.
The ALP/CLP Coalition of Chaos don’t want this to change, just check the public record if you don’t believe us.
The Independents maybe but are impotent due to lack of numbers and lack of coherent direction.
Throwing out “transparency” and “accountability” all the time without any means or direction about how you’re going to achieve that is pointless if you really want things to change; it’s great if you’re the ALP/CLP Coalition of Chaos because it shows them they have no serious competition in the political space.
Senior public servants are running the whole show. LiaR Finocchiaro is either way out of her depth, or is merely a puppet for more senior CLP/NTG voices who don’t want anything to change for their high level mates and their families. Hubby Sam Burke included.
This whole arena needs a clear out. NT Politics needs a transformation.
It is grubby:
the mudslinging,
the shit everywhere,
the petty point scoring,
the dark and dingy wilful blindness,
the damp squibs routinely chucked around when completely out of policy ideas,
the disastrous state of public safety and
the degradation of our public dis-service.
Do we want to transform this place or not?
If so, our only hope in our household’s opinion is to join and support the movement for Change For Better.
From the bottom up:
~Participatory Budgeting to empower local community decision making in spending their money better,
~Being All In On Justice Reinvestment,
~genuine Proportional Representation in voting,
~a free and open Freedom of Information system/process for keeping Government accountable,
~incentivised whistleblowing with the best whistleblowers given awards at an annual ceremony by the heads of depts they blew the whistle on,
~ICAC without any NT Government staff or their mates/acquaintances and Greg Shamahan’s recommendations for supporting NTG corruption to be immediately undone,
~actual consequences for mismanagement and bullying in the NT Public Service,
~extending the statute of limitations backwards so we catch all the Shirkmans of this Territory,
~external and independent investigations when obviously required,
~an Attorney General who is legally trained at the very least, ~Police fully supported in working together with communities of all colours instead of against them,
~lying Police officers sacked and prosecuted,
~all cases of nepotism punished and ended,
~all cases of cronyism punished and ended,
~all NT Boards and Committee appointments dissolved and re-assessed independently,
~future limits on how many you can be on,
~published monthly figures of all NT Government legal expenditure to assist in budgeting decisions and so we have a well informed public,
~educational best practices embraced not ignored,
~learning to be a fiscally responsible Government and to encourage public participation in that process,
~not criminalising children as much as we can,
~stopping the sale of pepper spray to the public (duh),
~having real independent Public Accounts Committee hearings not the pantomime we were forced to endure recently,
~fraud against Government properly investigated and prosecuted,
~a fully open and transparent lobbyist register with everything the public wants to know put in there.
….you get the gist we’re sure.
We want people to be proud to be here, not fighting to get on the first plane south.
And we don’t mean through puff pieces in Government compliant media spewing out stories of how great the weather or the wildness of the bush are.
We mean every aspect of life: work, health (physical and mental), opportunities, education, play, aspirational lifestyles, multiculturalism, decent housing, giving a hand up to the weak and forgotten, connections, all one big entity working in tandem to secure its own long term survival.
Not the shite sandwich we are being fed right now, again, by imposters with no idea what they’re doing, other than keeping it shite so they can suck out all the money for their mates first and f**k everyone else.
If so, our only hope in our household’s opinion is to join and support the movement for: Change For Better.
It’s run by the right people with ideas to Change The Game.
Without the right people, we have what we have now.
2015-25 DWC CEO/Board Member Andrew Shirkman would be a very dangerous person to sack as he would have access to the ‘honey pot’ stories about his DWC cronies?
For any budding politician who wants to see how to ask the right questions of incompetent, Government supported, higher level employees, in the right way, with the requisite level of disdain and anger directed towards them…..we’re thinking to the Alastair Shields From The Publics and Patrick Bellends of this world, not to mention all CLP ministers in Estimates and everywhere else.
Watch this 5 minute questioning of USA’s Pete Hegesth before the House Armed Services Committee:
Justine Davis and all others, take notes please: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl4eCWYSGQQ