The Finocchiaro Government has axed a $19 million police station that was to be built at Peppimenarti because it claimed the residents did not want it and will instead build one in Maningrida, but the head of the local Aboriginal corporation said the residents were not consulted and simply objected to the proposed site of the complex in the middle of ceremonial grounds and wanted to use some of the money to build new houses so people did not have to continue living in tents.
The government announced today it will build a new police complex in Maningrida, which would expand the number of police there from 10 to 14, but it will not say how much it will cost, while the NT Budget website showed there was $35.7 million allocated for the complex.
The NT Government, of either party persuasion, is unable to think outside the same tiny bureaucratic square. That Peppimenarti has become a contemporary issue is gloriously ironical considering this was once a community in which the NT Judiciary and police were never required to visit.
Harry Wilson imposed an iron rule, and damage to the community or injury to a resident seldom occurred, and if it did, such an offence was never repeated. Himself a teetotaler, alcohol was banned. On many occasions Harry explained his psychology and techniques to me and government of the pre-self-government era had more sense than to interfere with a system that worked.
The Chief Minister has disdained to even acquaint herself with a 12,000-year-old legal system that achieves effortlessly what her own judicial farce manifestly cannot. So, instead, she imposes the alien western urban model that is never seen or felt when and where it is needed, and which creates a regulatory vacuum in the community which precipitates pervasive lawlessness and, due to its failure, budget-destroying costs on the besieged mainstream community taxpayer.
Expecting sudden success by repeating the same failed solution over and over, is a well-recognised syndrome. Perhaps its time to admit that in the NT we live in two different worlds and just maybe after 235 years of one-size-fits-all it is time for a rethink. Meanwhile, the fool who decided to site a police station on ceremony grounds should be exiled from the NT altogether. That is the most destructive act of bureaucratic folly in living memory.
This is a perfect example of why Participatory Budgeting needs to be implemented.
But that will need a Change of Government and we don’t mean from CLP to ALP. That’s not a Change; that’s just more of the same.
Change For Better Party are the only ones offering this kind of fundamental difference is how to govern.
See a quick summary of one of the most successful implementations of it around the globe:
https://www.local.gov.uk/case-studies/case-study-porto-alegre-brazil