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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Canberra bashing has always been the default setting for NT governments, except of course when governments coincided. There has traditionally been minimal recognition of the high percentage of commonwealth funding to the NT. Sadly NT governments of both persuasions have allowed themselves to be conned by the fossil fuel industries into supporting fracking (a bullshit claim of a need for more gas) and have been dudded over resource sales due to Federal control of such issues. One area of potential increased income might be from gambling with the NT hosting a plethora of online gambling interests because of a long established low-tax approach.
The NT govt is certainly the land of Luddites. Whilst the fed govt was LNP, the NT had the stuffing squeezed out of it, and it in turn squeezed the stuffing out of its people, particularly the blacks (applauded of course by the fed LNP). For years it was fundamentally ignored by fed govts of all persuasions, with their white anglo post-colonial stupidities. Their failure to string anything together to connect it but camels and a telegraph wire was indicative of their complete failure to recognize it as a gateway to and from the burgeoning East Asia.
With nearly 60% of the population being post-colonial officials and freebooters (Australian, English, Irish, Scottish), in mostly govt hubs, it didn’t warrant defense. With the rest being Indigenous (30%) and Asian (10%), the services for them were less than basic (other than colonialist police and brutal bastilles)
The vast majority Euro-Australians haven’t been to the NT, or the Kimberley, or the Gulf or Cape – for that matter most haven’t been north of latitudes 25º-20ºS, except maybe for a brief and uncomfortable Somerset Maugham-like stint in Cairns. So they have no idea of its vastness, beauty and environmental riches.
Not till the latter days of the mineral resources boom was there a glimmer of attention from the Oz govt. With a few airstrips here and there – proper ones in Darwin Katherine and Alice, with the yanks came Tindal+ and better Alice for Pine Gap. Now there’s extraction industries lurking everywhere trying to cash in on vast energy resources.
No real change of attitude on the Indigenous and Asians, nor services for them, just a goggle-eyed interest in the lucre to be extracted from underground. And mangled BS about the potential for attack from the ‘Reds’.
After years of ignorance from the fed LNP, and a ‘Voice’ etc disaster for Labor, divisive revisionism has seen the CLP slither back into NT governing administration. They are now up to their gills in a feckless neoliberal rampage, where natural beauty, environmental wonderments and fresh water means nothing unless it can be covered with their hotels, piers, wharfs, mines, drill sites, dams and industrial plants.
Our recent visit to the beautiful Northern Territory confirmed earlier reports of more money being spent in Knightbridge than elsewhere, most government jobs being desk jockeys in airconditioned Darwin offices and far too little funding getting out to the voters, especially the Aboriginal communities.
Bosses claim that staff turnover retention of about two (2) years is the cause of the government staffing problems. However, refusing to staff outlying communities, or resource those communities with effective health, education, security services and (what Internet services??) is an uncaring deliberate government policy; practical racism on a Territory wide scale not seen elsewhere except other state Aboriginal communities like Toumelah N NSW.
Labor’s NT Opposition Leader Selena Uibo has spoken out in her Address in Reply Speech on 15 May 2025 as reported by ABC News in Darwin : https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/darwin-breakfast/budget-reply/105296178
Thanks for those comments on the importance of the NT’s gas industry. It receives only four mentions in Budget Paper One. ABC News Darwin elaborates on these references:
The NT government is hoping critical minerals and gas exports from the Beetaloo Basin will help grow the economy in coming years.
The budget includes:
$181.3 million for regional roads supporting the gas industry
$1.1 million for the development of the Beetaloo Basin
$6.4 million to support the new Territory Coordinator role, whose job is to cut regulatory red tape to accelerate economic projects
Santos’ $5.6 billion offshore Barossa gas project will not contribute any royalties or taxes directly to the NT, but it will support some local jobs while it exports LNG from Darwin.
Thanks for a great article Denis on NT politics and economy.
Safari tours of the Top End are largely unaffordable. Our family enjoys those free trips with an appropriate beverage on You Tube on docos with the right mood music. Prices for a Kimberley Cruise from Darwin to WA over ten nights commence at $13,400 this winter season. A bridge deck balcony suite costs $30,900 per passenger. There will not be any homeless people on these cruises.
As in Queensland, there is an appalling rate of homelessness under the LNP Government here and with CLP in the NT. ABC News Darwin covered these issues: Authorities are keeping the homeless on the move in Darwin away from tourist areas and good time night spots:
“”Many homes in NT remote communities are severely overcrowded, forcing some residents to move to urban centres, while there are more than 6,000 people on the social housing waitlist.
This NT budget reduces funding for housing within the Department of Housing, Local Government and Community Development by $100 million. There has also been a $200 million decrease in housing infrastructure spending compared to 2024-25.
The housing infrastructure spend includes:
$615 million for housing in remote communities
$150 million mostly for remote homelands and affordable housing projects
Almost $50 million for infrastructure to support the development of Holtze, a proposed outer Darwin suburb
$11 million for land development and community facilities in the Alice Springs suburb of Kilgariff”
Cul de sacs in Howard Springs Darwin will not do much for the NT’s poor and homeless although land prices are below those of Brisbane and Sydney. Howard Springs is 28 kms out of town and is served by a three dollar bus with a frequency of one hour for much of the day. Tourists might get a glimpse of the Berrimah Correctional Centre on the way:
Courtesy of the NT Government:
The Berrimah Correctional Centre holds prisoners from all security levels. It also holds offenders on remand waiting for their sentences. To visit a prisoner, you must book at least 24 hours ahead as bookings are limited. If you’re visiting a prisoner who is your friend or family, you can visit them on a Saturday or Sunday. A professional visit can be done any day between 9am and 5pm, in person or by teleconference. This includes legal representatives, social workers and psychologists.
Work has been underway on the Holtze Housing Development Area since planning commenced in the early 2020s. The CLP is implementing this borrowed agenda from the previous government.. Documents are available from the NT Planning Commission site. More Top End character was needed in this development with marketing in the hands of Darwin’s largest real estate agency at Howard Springs.
Thanks for the responses from readers.
Conservative populism is a real force in Australian politics at all levels. Perhaps the AI Resources of the Australian Government could assist ABC News with a fact-checking site to monitor outrageous claims on economic and social issues being made by the LNP, CLP and other far-right networks.
Was the CLP landslide in the NT engineered by the Wedge Politics offered through Topham Guerin (TG) at the national level? From the Saturday Paper by jason Koutsoukis: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2024/12/07/exclusive-dutton-hires-morrisons-disinformation-team.
Australians should know which advertisers are managing political campaigns at all levels (https://www.9news.com.au/national/liberal-party-launches-australias-first-entirely-ai-political-ad/f17cbea7-4e69-4fba-a8e8-346dc9fd699a).
Ordinary Territorians don’t want fracking because it not only poses real threats to our democracy, but it risks draining and contaminating precious water, harms people’s health, and releases massive amounts of greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere.