Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro has committed to taking no action against five senior police officers who lied to the court about their involvement in the racist TRG awards, despite evidence the joint investigation by the ICAC and NT Police executive failed to properly review the officers’ criminal conduct.
The Territory’s politicians have quietly been given an early Christmas present in the form of an $8,200 annual pay rise as of January 1 – bringing their base salaries to $175,000, plus benefits and expense accounts – while ministers will see their pay packet increase by nearly $14,000 a year.
The Centre for Public Integrity has called on former deputy chief minister Nicole Manison to resign from her new VP position with Tamboran Resources and for the CLP Finocchiaro Government to review all decisions the previous government made concerning the gas company, in what is becoming a major PR nightmare for Tamboran.
Darwin Alderman Rebecca Want de Rowe has publicly criticised the Supreme Court jury’s conviction of her paedophile husband Kent Rowe, stating on social media recently that he is “innocent” despite being found guilty in 2022 of the repeated and remorseless sexual abuse of a young female family member over many years.
A Charles Darwin University staffer who publicly criticised the CLP Government in an op-ed for acting like “dictators” who engage in “shady” politics, has been rebuked by vice-chancellor Scott Bowman from China in his own opinion piece, in which he wrote that he was impressed by everything the CLP is doing, including a proposal to give an unelected bureaucrat the ability to override environmental regulations.
Four years after finding deliberate non-compliance of campaign financial disclosure laws by the NT’s political parties and donors, the NT Electoral Commission has again ordered an audit of the major political parties, independents and other election participants to ensure they properly disclosed their donations and expenditure at the 2024 NT election.
A tender to paint CLP Minister Marie-Clare Boothby’s electorate office and “move furniture” was put out to the market at a cost of between $500,000 and $1 million, government records show, which the Minister claims she shut down over the huge price tag, but the tender was active for at least a week before being removed, the NT Independent can reveal.
Territory Labor spent more than $1 million on its 2024 election campaign, new figures released by the NT Electoral Commission show, which was more money than the party raised and $170,000 more than the CLP spent on their campaign, with Labor appearing to spend more than half a million dollars on “staff expenses” and non-print ad design costs.
The Office of the ICAC did not interrogate a single person as part of an investigation last financial year, which the Acting Commissioner claimed was due to renovations to the office’s hearing room and a new policy introduced by suspended Commissioner Michael Riches not to force people suspected of corruption to provide evidence.
The Finocchiaro CLP Government is proposing new laws to grant ministers and the unelected Territory Coordinator sweeping powers to “step in” on major projects and overrule regulatory processes by departments, ultimately making decisions to approve projects themselves, which critics have labelled “anti-democratic and anti-Territorian”.
Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro’s hiring of a liquor industry lobbyist as her chief of staff has been raised during debate in Parliament about new alcohol laws, with Greens MLA Kat McNamara suggesting the government’s plan to scrap the minimum alcohol unit price would benefit the liquor industry and not Territorians.
Any person found guilty of spitting at any worker will be subject to a mandatory three-month jail sentence, as part of the CLP’s anti-crime agenda to be debated in Parliament this week, that has been labelled a “recipe for injustice” by the Australian Human Rights Commission.
