The Finocchiaro CLP Government’s real reason for amending the Sacred Sites Act earlier this year has become clearer, after it moved to alter the existing Authority Certificate for the Darwin Waterfront precinct to ensure a proposed high-rise hotel project can move ahead, despite repeated objections from traditional owners.
An internal government report into a fracking legislation breach by Empire Energy – now called Beetaloo Energy Australia – shows that while the NT Government first recommended prosecuting the company because a fine was considered an insufficient deterrent, it later decided to send a letter to “encourage behaviour change” instead.
The Northern Territory is set to lose out on nearly $6 billion in GST revenue over the next four years, according to a new report from The Australia Institute, that argued that amount of money could pay for the NT Art Gallery in just over a month.
More than 62 per cent of the Northern Territory’s public servants who voted on the new Enterprise Agreement have rejected the NT Government’s latest pay offer, with the union representing the workers calling on the government to get back to the bargaining table as soon as possible.
Acting Chief Minister Gerard Maley defended Attorney-General Marie-Clare Boothby’s failure to publicly disclose she is related to a hit-and-run driver who killed an Indigenous man last year before publicly commenting on the case, saying she is “doing a great job” as “the number one law person up here”, adding he only learned about the connection “three or four weeks ago”, despite the lawyer representing Jake Danby working at his brother’s law firm.
Police officers ended an estimated 40-second pursuit of a suspicious ute in Darwin city last week for “safety reasons” four to five seconds before it ran through a red light and hit a taxi, injuring passengers in the car, NT Police said.
Disgraced former NT police commissioner Michael Murphy has been appointed deputy chief executive of the Royal Flying Doctor Service SA/NT, with the organisation praising his “principled leadership” and “strong commitment to public trust”, despite a corruption watchdog report earlier this year finding he was “incompetent” and “negligent” and created a substantial detriment to the public interest by hiring a mate as assistant commissioner.
Attorney-General Marie-Clare Boothby has refused to stand down for failing to publicly disclose that the hit-and-run driver who killed an Aboriginal man and injured another and who avoided jail last week was related to her before publicly commenting on the case, stating she told Lia Finocchiaro about the matter last year – but won’t say how – while the Chief Minister has now gone on holidays and is unavailable for comment.
The government corporation that markets and organises the Territory’s major events will be rolled into the broader Tourism NT body, to “market tourism and events with greater impact”, but the Tourism Minister could not say how many jobs will be cut or how much money the Finocchiaro CLP Government expects to save through the merger.
A 16-year-old boy has been arrested after allegedly spraying two nightclub bouncers with OC spray in Darwin’s CBD overnight, NT Police said, which has happened within the first month of a Finocchiaro Government trial on its sale to the public.
The NT Environment Protection Authority has renewed the Darwin Liquified Natural Gas plant’s licence for another five years with new conditions, but appears to be permitting Santos to decide how much a leaking storage tank can continue to leak, a decision the Environment Centre NT said was providing a license to pollute while showing the regulator would not enforce consequences for “super emitters”.
UPDATED: The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions has appealed the sentence handed out to 24-year-old Jake Danby for hit-and-run causing death, following public uproar over the lenient sentence this week which spared him jail time, despite Danby bragging in text messages about hitting two Aboriginal men, killing one of them, who he called an “oxygen thief” while saying he would not go to jail.
