Litchfield ratepayers will face a four per cent increase in rates and waste charges next financial year under the council’s draft 2026–27 budget, which also sets aside $8.5 million for capital works.


Litchfield ratepayers will face a four per cent increase in rates and waste charges next financial year under the council’s draft 2026–27 budget, which also sets aside $8.5 million for capital works.

Darwin ratepayers will pay 5.5 per cent more next financial year, while $23.5 million will be spent on capital works including $4.5 million for stormwater upgrades and reconstruction and $3.5 million for roads resurfacing and renewal, Darwin Council’s newly released Municipal Plan shows.

A 17-year-old boy has been arrested after allegedly punching a female restaurant worker in the face in Alice Springs before chasing and assaulting two adult male delivery drivers, NT Police said.

A 10-year-old boy is in custody for his alleged involvement in the aggravated robbery of a 72-year-old woman who was driving out of a Casuarina shopping centre carpark on Tuesday evening when several people jumped on her car, opened the door and ripped glasses off her face before allegedly stealing the victim’s purse, police said.

Tourism Minister Marie-Clare Boothby has returned from a previously unannounced “China tourism mission” to the city of Guangzhou, which she said was necessary to build relationships in person and attract more Chinese tourists to the Northern Territory.

The Department of Corporate and Digital Development will not provide an update on its seven-month-old investigation into the death of employee Shaun Joyce, whose family alleged bullying and harassment contributed to his death, which follows the department head not directly answering questions about the workplace culture during a Parliamentary public hearing into the failed $320 million Acacia IT project earlier this year.

UPDATED: The Finocchiaro CLP Government has announced a $10 million “support package” for St John Ambulance to recruit more paramedics amid a crisis situation with the ambulance provider, which comes while the government has pledged to expedite negotiations on a new five-year service contract that expired in January, while the union says the latest cash injection is not near enough to fix the problems.

The Finocchiaro CLP Government has responded to calls for safer hospitals by pledging to provide 150 health care staff at Darwin and Palmerston Hospitals with personal duress alarms and $500,000 to fix the air conditioner at RDH, but has not said if it considered supplying pepper spray to the staff as well, amid ongoing violent incidents at the hospitals.

Alice Springs Town Council says Jacana Energy only contacted it this week to discuss electricity price increases for local government from July, while the Local Government Association NT said some remote councils are considering cutting family, health and youth programs amid the planned price increase, as Darwin Council also ponders cuts to services.

A $70 million federal loan will underpin a new 14-storey CDU student accommodation building for 350 students across from the university’s city Danala campus, with land provided by the NT Government, with construction now expected to start two years after the campus opened and seven years since it was first announced.

The number of NT public servants stating they were bullied or sexually harassed at work has increased significantly since 2023 along with a consistent fear to report, while the number of physical assaults on public servants has nearly doubled in two years, according to the latest NT Government People Matter Survey, which was quietly released by the government last week.

The NT Supreme Court has dismissed an appeal by a Katherine man found guilty of groping a woman’s vagina on a red-eye Jetstar flight between Brisbane and Darwin.