Cunningham: NT Labor found common sense was not so common to find

Everything Eva Lawler did to right the ship, only served as a reminder of how badly it had veered off course in the first place – the post-mortem for Labor will be long and brutal, writes Matt Cunningham.

Country Liberal Party leader Lia Finocchiaro is sworn in as the 14th Chief Minister of the Northern Territory at a ceremony at Government House, with Gerard Maley. Picture: Pema Tamang Pakhrin

The harder heads inside the Labor Party knew by the end of last year the game was up.

“It’s all over. It’s not a matter of whether the CLP wins, it’s how much they win by,” one said the day after early voting started.

Hopes of an Eva Lawler-led revival had been dashed.

But the rot had set in much earlier.

A Redbridge Poll taken last November had Labor’s primary vote at just 19 per cent.

Then-Chief Minister Natasha Fyles tried to brush those numbers off, but they proved devastatingly accurate.

Lawler, who took over as Chief Minister after Fyles was embroiled in a shares scandal last December, tried desperately to reset the government’s agenda.

She took a much firmer line on law and order and laid out the red carpet for the resources industry.

But everything Lawler did to right the ship, only served as a reminder of how badly it had veered off course in the first place.

Lawler essentially ran an election campaign against her own government.

Her insistence that she was all about “common sense” pointed to the obvious lack of that trait in decisions that preceded her.

23-08-2024 - Former NT Chief Minister Eva Lawler at Zuccoli Primary School on election eve. Picture: Liam Mendes

And her genuine claim she was not about “ideology” only served as a reminder of how much this curse had plagued her colleagues in the years before.

The post-mortem for Labor will be long and brutal.

But its executive summary will almost certainly say this was a government that fiddled while all around it was on fire.

While crime spiralled out of control and the economy barely limped out of first gear, the government obsessed with a brand of identity politics a world away from the growing concerns of its constituents.

As school attendance rates in remote communities fell to appalling lows, the education department, with the minister’s backing, spent two years developing a glossy document advising teachers they should no longer call the boys and girls in their classrooms boys and girls.

While our courts became a quagmire and the ICAC an embarrassing joke, the government and its Attorney-General busied themselves banning jokes of a different kind, passing radical anti-discrimination laws that made it illegal to insult or humiliate someone on the basis of a long list of personal attributes.

In an Australian first, these new laws also removed a clause that allowed religious groups to discriminate against a person based on their religious beliefs, a change that effectively meant a Christian or Muslim school would still have to hire someone, even if they were a card-carrying atheist.

Hundreds of mild-mannered people of faith were suddenly protesting like drunken uni students on the steps of St Mary’s Cathedral.

Country Liberal Party leader Lia Finocchiaro is sworn in as the 14th Chief Minister of the Northern Territory at a ceremony at Government House, with Gerard Maley. Picture: Pema Tamang Pakhrin

If the Labor MLAs who have just been wiped out in Darwin’s northern suburbs are still wondering what happened, it might pay them to take a cruise down Vanderlin Drive on Sunday morning.

They will find the churches lining that road filled with thousands of Territorians praying their house won’t be broken into again this week, and wondering why they have been treated like the criminals.

As rising rates of youth crime had people barricading themselves in their own homes, the government saw fit to raise the age of criminal responsibility.

The impact of this policy is insignificant.

Even when the age of criminal responsibility is 10, it is only under the most exceptional circumstance that a 10 or 11 year old will be placed in detention.

But the fact the government made this change a priority sent a message to voters they were not on the side of the people having their homes broken into, but on the side of the those doing the breaking in.

All of these decisions, however, pale into insignificance compared to the debacle that followed the lapsing of the Stronger Futures legislation that had banned alcohol in Aboriginal town camps.

For seven months the government sat back and did nothing as the grog-fuelled carnage caused untold harm, mostly to Aboriginal women, particularly in Alice Springs.

Federal politicians of all political stripes, health experts, police, doctors, nurses and more begged the government to step in.

But it did nothing, insisting the alcohol bans that had kept women and children safer for more than a decade were a “race-based policy” they would have no part in.

The fact Prime Minister Anthony Albanese eventually had to step in proved this was a government that had no idea how to govern.

The damage for Labor is catastrophic.

The sensible centre the party had worked so hard to win over in the Martin/Henderson years has been handed back to the CLP on a platter.

As it considers how to plot the long path back to relevance, it might pay Labor to consider the slogan its members once liked to parrot.

“Every Territorian deserves to feel safe.”

They don’t. And for a long time they felt like this government didn’t care.