ANALYSIS: Chief Minister Natasha Fyles’s taxpayer-funded US trip has all the hallmarks of a classic political travel scandal on the madcap level of the previous CLP government’s bizarro trips, despite what the state media organ NT News and Katie Woolf say.
Record-low voter turnout, cuts to funding and now a major bungling of developing new electorate boundaries should lead to a “big shake-up” of the NT Electoral Commission, an independent MLA says, who is calling for an independent inquiry into the agency.
Chief Minister Natasha Fyles’s office has released an extraordinary statement identifying who she has met with while in the US, following intense public outrage over the $93,000 taxpayer-funded trip, also revealing she will now spend time in Los Angeles and San Diego.
Chief Minister Natasha Fyles’s trip to Washington has come under scrutiny by the Opposition who called the $90,000 price tag “ridiculous”, while the local state media outlet finally released a rough breakdown of costings for what they reported was a “vital” trip.
Labor Speaker Mark Monaghan told Estimates he “certainly didn’t” seek advice from the independent statutory body that sets politicians’ entitlements when he secretly permitted two Labor MLAs to charge taxpayers for their interstate holidays, through what the Opposition called a “rort of the system for their personal gain”.
EXCLUSIVE: Member for Daly Dheran Young charged taxpayers thousands of dollars for a roadtrip back to his hometown in NSW for Christmas, just days after a secret ruling by Labor gave politicians the ability to use their government fuel cards interstate for personal travel.
EXCLUSIVE: Labor MLA Manuel Brown lied about rendering first aid to a woman he killed with his car in 2009, the victim’s family says, while demanding to know why the Chief Minister defended the man who took their mother’s life “as an excellent representative of the community” before she knew the facts of the horrific crash.
EXCLUSIVE: Territory Labor’s candidate for the upcoming Arafura by-election was charged in 2009 and later convicted in relation to killing a woman in Katherine with his car, the NT Independent can reveal.
The Fyles Government largely ignored its own interagency Domestic Violence taskforce’s recommendations on a raft of measures aimed at improving outcomes for victims of domestic violence, including funding only 11 per cent of the required expenditure for necessary programs, internal government documents show.
A CLP politician has accused a Labor backbencher of killing her friend and then changing his name to avoid scrutiny of his shady past. FULL STORY HERE
The Fyles Government’s “knife crime reduction strategy” will not include any specific law changes, instead relying on de-escalation training for retail and hospitality workers and other measures, which the Opposition said amounted to “choosing cuddles over consequences”.
EXCLUSIVE: Previously redacted government documents related to the ongoing corruption probe into the NT Labor Government’s alleged misuse of public funds during the 2020 election have finally been released by the Office of the Chief Minister, exposing a Labor politician’s name who was onboard taxpayer-funded campaign flights that the government fought to keep secret for nearly two years.
