When the next incident of water contamination surfaces, it is important that there are clear public standards for testing, reporting, and remediation with direct lines of legal accountability to residents. Such legislated standards are necessary to reduce the likelihood of such incidences and to protect drinking water for all residents of the NT.
Lawyers will be excited and busy this week. Government lawyers will be reading the decision closely and working out how to proceed. Often where States or Territories have granted tenure for specific projects (such as a mine) there is a contractual agreement between the State or Territory and the project proponent that passes compensation liabilities through to the proponent, so there will also be some company lawyers busy assessing potential liabilities. Lawyers who represent indigenous groups will be carefully considering where to go next.
The recently-developed Darwin suburb of Muirhead is the model of an obesogenic suburb. It is designed around the car. There is little or no provision of public transport. Streets are meandering and there’s nowhere to go. There are no retail, commercial or social facilities or amenity. There’s no milk bar, there’s not even a pub!
Darwin has always been a haven for desperados, chancers, carpet baggers and those trying to run away from the dark shadows of a previous life. I'll admit to being one of the latter when I turned up in mid-1984. From the long-lens-view of the populated south-east of the country, Darwin was an attractive bolt-hole, not least because it was about as far away as you could get from your southern ghosts. Not that there was any lack of opportunity for new troubles in the Top End.
Literary journals are an important component of Australia's literary culture and can help to foster a range of Indigenous, non-indigenous and multicultural voices. However, the Northern Territory has no such platform, and its lack is a significant shortfall in the artistic lives of Territorians.
“The government comes, has a look and goes back to their air-conditioned office”: Miriam Charlie. Residents in the four town camps - Mara, Yanyula, Garawa 1, and Garawa 2 - face overcrowding, insecure tenancy, water contamination, and failing health hardware. The recently released Town Camps Review classifies 34 per cent of Borroloola houses in “very poor” condition, and another 25 per cent in “poor” condition.
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.
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.