Matt Cunningham analysis of Territory Labor government performance
For more than seven years the Labor Government could best be described in one word; bland. But is that changing?
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Territory politics took an unusual turn on Wednesday morning.
For more than seven years the Labor Government could best be described in one word; bland. And that’s almost exactly what it promised to be.
Six months before its landslide win in the 2016 election, Labor leader Michael Gunner said he would lead an “excitedly boring” government.
Aware of the CLP chaos that had landed Labor in power with a whopping majority, Labor set out to be stable and sensible.
It worked for a while. But over the past seven years, Labor has never managed to flick the switch from boring to exciting.
As a consequence, it has little to show for almost two terms in office.
Previous administrations can point to the Inpex and Darwin LNG projects or the Alice Springs to Darwin railway as Territory-building projects.
Even the troubled Mills/Giles government can say it privatised TIO and leased the Darwin Port, as controversial as those decisions might have been.
But for the Gunner/Fyles governments there’s been no signature project it can hang its hat on. Project Sea Dragon failed, Sun Cable looks a pipedream, and the Barossa offshore gas project has been strangled by legal challenges.
Asked three times this week if she wanted to see the Barossa development go ahead, Chief Minister Natasha Fyles said many words, but none of them were ‘yes’.
“We do want to see these projects but not at the sake of our community or our environment,” she said.
Caught in the middle of a scandal that has ironically pinned her as being too close to the gas industry, the Chief Minister is now busy appeasing the left unions that put her in power and want all new fossil fuel developments banned.
Meanwhile, those on Labor’s right – armed with some alarming polling – are becoming increasingly panicked that if there’s not a sharp improvement in our economic fortunes soon, the opposition benches await in August.
Fyles’s fence-sitting on Barossa is emblematic of the government’s long-term strategy.
It’s a small-target strategy that tries to keep everyone happy.
Its purpose seems to have been to hold on to government for as long as possible, rather than to use government to better the Territory’s interests.
To use a cricket analogy, many of its cabinet ministers have resembled out-of-form batsmen, walking nervously to the wicket where they try desperately not to get out.
In the process, they forget that the primary purpose for being there is to score runs.
They’ve delivered carefully crafted lines, designed to talk a lot without really saying anything. Now, with the innings nearly over they’re starting to wonder if they have a competitive score, and they’ve sent their very own Glenn Maxwell out to bat.
Which brings us back to Wednesday morning and the press conference held by new Police Minister Brent Potter.
In less than 20 minutes, Potter accused the media of “police bashing” over its reporting of the alleged sexual assault of a seven-year-old child in Tennant Creek, labelled Blain MLA a serial ICAC referrer, questioned if the Chief Minister would be facing criticism over her adviser Gerard Richardson’s links to Tamboran Resources if those same links were with Sun Cable, argued with a Channel 9 reporter over the number of children who had been removed from the streets of Alice Springs at the weekend (he was wrong), and said he didn’t care if a child was Indigenous or non-Indigenous, if they were wandering around unsupervised late at night, he would make sure they were taken to a safe place.
While I wouldn’t agree with everything he said, it was a refreshing change from the mundane lines of the unelected spin doctors we’ve become accustomed to hearing over the past seven years.
No-one was left in any doubt about what he thought and where he stood.
The challenge for Potter will be whether he can walk the talk.
And the question for Labor is whether it will be enough to excite voters, who’ve become so bored they’ve almost stopped listening.
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Originally published as Matt Cunningham analysis of Territory Labor government performance
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