Loftus Rule: A rebuttable presumption that where an NT government decision is questioned it is more likely to be a fuck-up rather than an innocent mistake. (Syn: snafu - situation normal, all fucked up)
The cost of dealing with Australia's nuclear waste only rises. Federal Resources Minister Matt Canavan is waving big money at anyone who'll take our waste, with latest figures indicating total funding of $31 million for the project. The current shortlisted communities have received Federal Government development grants totalling $4 million. Back in 2014, the Ngapa clans proposing Muckaty Station as a nuclear waste dump would have received a total of $12 million.
Other African gang members have snuck into the health care system, working at the local hospital as nurses and also as disability and mobility support workers, at the Aboriginal aged care centre and at local Aboriginal hostels. Taxi and bus drivers, university and TAFE students, checkout chicks and guys, pizza shop owners, cleaners and receptionists at the local casino, bank tellers, senior public servants, business operators and real estate agents. The list goes on.
To ensure the adversarial system works as well as it can, the accused must have counsel at least on par with that of the Crown. Mismatches of lawyers at trial is the stuff of Deep South murder trials in the USA. There some accused, unable to afford sufficiently experienced lawyers in an environment of little or token legal aid, can be represented by law students or destitute lawyers willing to appear for all in fees of a thousand bucks to defend an alleged killer heading to the electric chair.
The mistake the politicians made (although Clare Martin was an honourable exception) was to conclude that this very long-standing “emergency” demanded that the white politicians and bureaucrats urgently devise and impose their own “expert” punitive, paternalistic policy solutions on those recalcitrant, irresponsible black fellas who wouldn’t even protect their own children from the thugs and paedophiles in their midst.
The Territory government and land councils each have significant real world authority over the same land mass, and therefore real roles in important decisions made about land use, tenure and development on half of the Territory’s land, which in turn comprises twenty percent of Australia’s land mass.
Cultural recognition & sensitivity, jobs, affordable housing (including during occupation), tourism opportunities, environmental protection, identity, community, and the much touted “liveable city”. We live in a town that is being moulded by traffic engineers instead of strategic thinkers like urban designers, demographers and economists.
For James Jeffrey, it is not about the politics, but the people, which is probably why he has managed to survive for so long in the toxic political environment at the Oz, stuffed as it is with Liberal Party operatives and conservative thinkers (forgive the oxymoron). He is genuinely (not, unlike many News Corpse writers, unintentionally) funny. Deeply funny. The kind of funny that leaves you in tears, but not always tears of laughter.
The everyday materiality of cement raises everyday questions: what about the effects of corrosion, seismic activity, moisture, design flaws and age on cement’s presumed durability? Harkness writes that concrete’s “guileful ruse is to offer us a permanent fix, once and for all”. Cement’s claim of permanence is deceptive, particularly when compared with the resource that is to be extracted.
Senator WALSH — I was aware of the fact that the Northern Territory is heavily dependent upon Commonwealth revenue [and] I have noted from time to time that nobody has a more voracious appetite for Commonwealth money than the present Northern Territory Chief Minister, although incongruously nobody is a more vocal critic of the Commonwealth taxes which raise the revenue which he so voraciously consumes. Senator Peter Walsh, Hansard, May 1983.