Bushranger
A personal mission
Chief Minister Michael Gunner is often heard to be talking about population growth, but no one seems to be taking it quite as seriously as his own ministry. Within 18 months, Deputy Chief Minister Nicole Manison and Port Darwin MLA Paul Kirby have produced bubs, and Tourism Minister Lauren Moss revealed in the NT News this week she has one on the way. Even deputy opposition leader Lia Finnochiaro had a bub during this term of government. Maybe now it’s the people’s turn?
Starstruck
The long-suffering ratepayers of Palmerston are set to go to the polls next weekend. Perhaps things are on the mend for council, and if so, Bushranger will miss the scathing, and amusing, Facebook reviews that residents leave on the council’s page. A recent example? “Are you after a council that offers arbitrary decisions made with no community involvement? ... How about token gestures to make it look like ratepayers are important when really it’s businesses that get the best deals? Then the City of Palmerston sounds like your ideal local council!”
Happy IWD!
NT Police on Thursday extradited an alleged double rapist from Victoria, marching him through the airport, bundling him into a van and taking him down to court to face the justice system. What a way to celebrate International Women’s Day!
Slow-cooked goodness
We all know how it is. You work hard, you run late and then still have to come home and prepare dinner. Well, rumour is one ABC journalist has discovered the way out of late dinners and high power bills. Bushie has been told Tom Maddocks brings a slow cooker into the ABC offices every day and leaves it to cook away, preparing his dinner for the evening.
Meeting of the minds
A bright spark from Western Australia called the NT News this week to suggest a mooted meeting between US president Donald
Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jongun be held in Darwin. How the gentleman thought the bemused journalist might be able to facilitate such an arrangement remains unclear.
An accurate slip
Earlier this week, Territory Families Minister
Dale Wakefield was on a panel at a community crime meeting when she made an awkward slip of the tongue. She said the NTG was “tickling” the youth crime problem in Palmerston. Although quick to correct herself, frustrated community members voiced their outrage. “Too right you’re tickling the problem,” one man later said. “You’re not bloody tackling it.”
Fries with that?
The Territory Government wants to cut some of the proverbial fat from its public service. Bushie suggests they start with the bored bureaucrat who this week, on work time and a work computer, edited the Japa- nese language Wikipedia entry for Cheeseburger. Bizarrely, they added the phrase, in English, “Yummy yummy for my tummy”.
Why not just ask?
Territory Taste magazine publisher Anya Lorimer is planning a trip to Vietnam. Bushie is never one to question fun overseas travel but he does think her reasoning is a little strange. “I am going on a quest to learn what to do with the Asian vegetables I see at the markets every weekend,” she wrote in the mag. A cheaper option may have just been asking the stallholders for instructions?
WORST PERFORMANCE OF THE WEEK: Despite ongoing crime, vandalism and prostitution problems and a pre election promise by the Gunner government, Nightcliff still has no 24-hour cop shop. Fed-up locals have had enough of the delay.