EDITORIAL: There is no question our NT Police service is completely broken and untenable in its current state, but what is most alarming now is that nobody in a position to fix it has any interest in doing their job to provide stability and leadership for our hard-working officers, while restoring the public’s trust in this crucial institution.

The problems started long ago, with poor leaders for more than a decade, with one of those commissioners sent to jail for attempting to pervert the course of justice and others arguably needing to follow him for their own transgressions.

As we said in a previous editorial last year, the once-proud NT Police service has been left to rot from the inside out, its most senior and experienced officers’ morale shattered, and its credibility left in tatters.

The latest internal integrity issues came to a head early last year when former commissioner Michael Murphy was captured in an ICAC investigation rigging a hiring panel to appoint a mate to a senior executive role.

That eventually prompted – after much protest by Chief Minister/Police Minister Lia Finocchiaro and now Commissioner Martin Dole – the Justice Alan Blow review into senior executive hirings under Murphy.

Both Lia and Dole had to be dragged kicking and screaming into that “inquiry” and after begrudgingly ordering it, they then made sure that Justice Blow did not have the crucial powers under the Inquiries Act to properly investigate the problems inside the top brass. This is not opinion, Blow himself said so in the report.

What Blow produced was nonetheless problematic and startling – a report that found the senior management group at each other’s throats, accusing one another of everything from corruption to cover-ups to incompetence to mismanaging conflicts of interest, with professionalism thrown out the window while deep disunity festered in the senior ranks.

The problems had “affected the culture and morale” of the organisation, Blow found, with senior executives experiencing “heightened anxiety, depression, self-doubt, sleeplessness, embarrassment and stress” as a result of chronic mismanagement.

Outside of pledging to implement Blow’s recommendations, including developing a written recruitment and appointment process, properly managing conflicts of interest and declaring them, and that merit become the primary criterion for appointment, nobody has done anything about the underlying serious integrity issues exposed here.

For days last March after finally sacking Murphy, Lia refused to order an inquiry into police senior hiring practices before eventually relenting after feeling pressure to act.

She claimed she ordered the Justice Blow “inquiry” because it was the only way “that everyone can move forward”.

“What I can’t have is uncertainty in a police force who has a very big and important job to do,” she said at the time.

What Blow delivered was uncertainty – bags of it. But both her and Dole have refused to do anything to actually clean up the serious allegations of impropriety at the highest levels of the police exposed in the report.

Instead of showing leadership, last week Martin Dole used taxpayer money to hire lawyers to fight the public release of allegations made by former assistant commissioner Sachin Sharma against him and Murphy involving his demotion.

Dole appears to have wanted Sharma’s accusations suppressed until such time as he could arrange for another pot of taxpayers’ money to pay out Sharma through an undisclosed settlement that would ensure the allegations were never made public.

This is truly unbelievable in any free and democratic jurisdiction, but everyone here seems to accept that’s how the top cop in the land should behave. Not to mention the rank hypocrisy it exposes of the Commissioner, who wrote a recent opinion piece about the importance of “transparency and building trust through openness”.

Dole’s self-serving, and before the NT Independent reported it secret, “investigation” of the executive team led by an AFP senior member also lacks the credibility it needs due to the way it was established, with the NT Police’s man overseeing it a close friend of Dole’s, which Dole has denied, saying he is the one overseeing it. This might make it worse, as there is no perceived independence, which means its outcomes, which we presume will remain secret, will be forever questioned and viewed only as protection for those Dole wants to remain on the executive.

The public could have more trust of this process if a new commissioner from outside the Territory had been sworn in and wanted to clear the air, not someone who’s neck deep in it all. It’s important to note this investigation was sparked by a complaint made by the very man Murphy rigged a hiring panel to promote.

If you thought things couldn’t get any worse, or the senior management destabilised any further, we now have the case of Assistant Police Commissioner Janelle Tonkin and allegations she sat on controversial hiring panels that also lacked integrity.

Tonkin, sources have said, promoted officers with whom she had been involved in sexual relationships without disclosing conflicts of interest. This was one of the worst kept secrets in the police ranks.

It was referenced in an earlier draft of Blow’s final report and a fairly wide cross-section of police know there’s more about Tonkin’s misadventures that may or may not be made public, despite the public’s right to know how its senior officials are managing one of its largest institutions.

Martin Dole knew about the allegations involving Tonkin and clearly did nothing about it. He and police media director Mark Wilton hoped it would go away and never see the light of day.

The question remains what the Police Minister knew about the allegations and if she too needs to step down from the role.

Why was the final Blow report – with the section removed about a senior assistant commissioner allegedly mismanaging serious conflicts of interest on hiring panels – released to the public while the Chief Minister/Police Minister was on extended leave and after she had the report in her possession for more than a month?

What did Lia Finocchiaro know about the full extent of the problems in police then and why did she appoint Dole days after the damning report was publicly released without going through a proper recruitment process?

She personally backed him in with that move and needs to accept responsibility now.

The only way forward currently is a full, public judicial inquiry into the state of the NT Police that will review evidence to once and for all investigate and clean up the misconduct that has been allowed to fester in the most senior ranks.

Lia called for an inquiry into police seven times while in opposition but quietly backed away from it the day she was sworn into office. She also promised Territorians an inquiry last year when commissioning Justice Blow that she then rigged to ensure nothing was properly investigated.

We say it’s time to keep the promise she made to the public and restore confidence in its police force. This cannot continue unaddressed.