By Denis Bright
Top End: Can Incompatibles Interact?
Where savanna shores meet fragile Top End lands, a populist style of Country Liberal Party arrived with a landslide hand.
Corporate deals bloom where mangroves retreat, while sensational headlines lull audiences to sleep.
The hungry arms of urban developers bite, ignoring secret whispers of ceremonial rites.
The military radar spins where cockatoos once flew, a different future, stark and strangely new.
Because the delicate balance is being undone, corporate power plays beneath the savanna sun.
My interest in the Northern Territory (NT) Budget on 13 May 2025 was pleasantly distracted by this outstanding documentary from the adjacent Kimberley District in WA. Aunty ABC reminded viewers about the need for caring and sustainable development in these exotic landscapes in the first of a three-part series. The documentary was outstanding enough to attract the attention of Ima Caldwell of The Guardian (13 May 2025).
The importance of the media in influencing democratic processes was well-covered by Robyn Smith of Charles Darwin University in his doctoral thesis in 2011 which is available online: Arcadian populism: the Country Liberal Party and self-government in the Northern Territory (CLP). With an annual allocation of $1.2 billion, the ABC network offers a leadership role in reporting from Darwin. This expenditure is supported by Commonwealth expenditures across the arts and media portfolios in every federal budget. Alas, the expenditure growth is not sufficient to keep pace with the demands on reporting networks across the NT.
These policy challenges are largely overlooked by the NT’s mainstream media. Local audiences prefer sensational new coverage like crocodile attacks and youth crime. However, there is a keen interest in Australia from the office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) in Washington with its grasp on global economic diplomacy and the possibilities of using tariffs as a weapon for negotiation with resource rich countries like Australia. Readers can register with Gemini Google Bard (GGB) at no cost and receive an assessment of the work of the USTR and how it might be operating in Australia. For the best results, it is vital to request an essay response with detailed references. These can be examined critically for each reference by the robots at GGB or checked out at leading libraries. This will take time as the robots take less than thirty seconds to respond to a complex request which can be copied and transferred to a word file for use in future research. Of course, these are just hypotheses but in the absence of detail, the offer is better than nothing.
The USTR keeps President Trump informed on economic diplomacy in partnership with other intel units as US domestic and strategic policies combine to impact on local productions in the Australian film industry.
Film Territory (FNT) was generously funded by local and federal Labor Governments. I requested feedback from FNT on just how it fared in the recent NT budget. I will add details in a postscript if I obtain a reply.
Change.org show FNT had lobbied to protect its funding with this media release in April 2025:
The Northern Territory screen industry has experienced an incredible 386% growth over the past six years, contributing over $48 million to the local economy since 2018. This rapid expansion highlights the industry’s vital role in job creation, tourism, and cultural storytelling. However, despite this success, Screen Territory’s actual budget remains alarmingly low – around $500,000 – with additional one-off funding bringing the total to just $2.4 million. This is far from sufficient to sustain and grow an industry that has proven its worth both economically and culturally.
Screen Territory is the lifeblood of local artists and filmmakers, an industry that I am personally involved with. Its financial support allows us to create, innovate, and share stories that are unique to our culture and experiences. However, potential funding cuts threaten to dismantle the very support system that has fuelled this incredible growth.
We must stop any decreases in funding and raise the base budget to a minimum of $3 million – ideally $5 million – to ensure sustainability and continued success.
To put this in perspective, Australia’s creative sector contributed $112.8 billion to the national GDP in 2019/2020, with film and video production accounting for $4.1 billion (ABS, 2020). The screen industry is a proven economic driver, and investing in it boosts the economy, fosters local employment, and preserves our rich storytelling traditions.
The 2025-26 NT Budget offered mixed outcomes for Territorians in allocations for day-to-day priorities within a once more sustainable caring mixed economy. Here are the winners and losers of the Country Liberal Party government’s first budget.
Readers can scroll down through each of the major portfolios on the active news site to cover the specifics or peruse the NT’s Budget Papers through a google search (ABC News 14 May 2025).
With all its economic and social problems, the Top End is no place for those future prissy balanced neoliberal budgets which are rhetorical pipe dreams of the CLP. More than 70 percent of the revenue base of the NT is allocated through federal government grants and the sharing of GST revenue. NT Treasurer the Hon. Bill Yan offers little thanks to the Commonwealth for its generous support and sees this as an opportunity to attack the Labor movement for its generosity or to acknowledge some of the achievements of the previous NT Government (NT Budget Papers 13 May 2025):
Fiscal outlook
Madam Speaker, we inherited deep deficits and mounting debt from Labor.
The Territory’s net debt position sits at $10.55 billion and is projected to rise to $13.97 billion by 2028-29. The deficit in the non-financial public sector in 2025-26 will be $1.31 billion, down from $1.65 billion in 2024-25.
As a result of our responsible budget measures and reprioritisation, the fiscal deficit is projected to reduce to $531 million in 2028-29. The net operating balance for the general government sector is projected to be $265 million in deficit in 2025-26, down from $707 million in 2024-25, and is projected to be in surplus from 2027-28.
Total revenue for the non-financial public sector is expected to increase to $10.04 billion in 2025-26 and rise to $10.55 billion by the end of the forward estimates.
Commonwealth revenue is projected to be $7.14 billion in 2025-26. Over 70% of the Territory’s revenue comes from the Commonwealth.
That’s not by accident. It reflects the sheer scale of the historical backlog – across infrastructure, across services and across the board – left to us from the Commonwealth since self-government.
While this Commonwealth funding is vital, it is largely to maintain the status quo. What we need from the Commonwealth is nation-building projects, taxation reform and changes to support increased migration.
Eight years of underinvestment, trickery and over-promising by Labor has left the Territory even more dependent on Commonwealth support just to get essential services and long-overdue projects back on track.
Even the Murdoch-owned NT News dared to offer critical coverage of the lack of direction in the NT Budget. This time, there was a high degree of unison with the ABC News coverage. Even the news perceptions are similar. Let’s hope that the recent national election result is producing a pragmatic change in the need to work with Labor locally and nationally. Perhaps representatives of the CLP could now broaden their ideological fixations and work at greater consensus building in appreciation for all that financial support from Canberra. Perhaps relaxing over an Iview of the Kimberley Documentary from an adjacent Labor state might help.
Critical Headlines on the NT Budget: NT News 14 May 2025
Denis Bright (pictured) is a financial member of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA). Denis is committed to consensus-building in these difficult times. Your feedback from readers advances the cause of citizens’ journalism. Full names are not required when making comments. However, a valid email must be submitted if you decide to hit the Replies Button.
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