Community First

One-size-fits-all solutions are the hallmark of bureaucratic arrogance. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way national policies are dumped on the Northern Territory without regard for its culture, demography, geography, or security realities. The top-down approach, crafted by city-bound elites in Canberra or Melbourne, treats the NT not as a unique jurisdiction, but as an afterthought, something to be managed, not understood.

Policies designed for inner-city Melbourne or Brisbane simply do not translate to Katherine or Wadeye. What works in a dense, urban environment with infrastructure, stable families, and functional economies will collapse when applied blindly to communities dealing with generational trauma, logistical isolation, and fragmented governance. Yet, that’s exactly what continues to happen.

Central planners view policy through spreadsheets. The locals live with the consequences. When crime rises, when services fail, when incentives backfire, it's not the architects of these policies who suffer. It's the community. Canberra keeps funding "programs"; the Territory keeps getting the same outcomes. You’d think that after the third or fourth failure, someone might ask whether the policies were the problem. But that would require humility, a rare commodity in bureaucracies. One could even question their humanity.

Real change starts by flipping the model. Local problems demand local authority. The people on the ground, police, elders, teachers, business owners, know more in five minutes of lived experience than a consultant knows in five years of reports. Empowering communities means more than token listening sessions. It means giving them the power to say “no” to bad policy and “yes” to tailored, local solutions.

Consider crime. National justice frameworks have become obsessed with rehabilitation over responsibility. Yet in the NT, where violent crime and repeat offending are not abstractions but daily realities, that obsession has become deadly. A bail policy that works in Canberra becomes a death sentence in Darwin and Tennant Creek. But still, the ideology trickles down, unchecked, unchallenged, and unfit for purpose. Its lunacy.

Education is no different. The NT needs curricula that address its own socio-economic and cultural challenges, not imported content that ignores literacy gaps and local language diversity. Teachers in remote schools don’t need more digital whiteboards, they need working toilets, safe classrooms, and permission to discipline without fear of reprisal from bureaucrats who’ve never set foot north of Alice Springs.

And the economy? The NT is burdened with red tape written for capital-rich southern cities. Small businesses trying to hire, build, or trade are crushed by rules designed for corporate compliance departments. If you want entrepreneurship in the Territory, you need to treat it like a frontier, not a franchise.

National governments should provide guardrails, not handcuffs. The role of Canberra should be to support, not to strangle. Let the NT govern its own priorities, set its own spending, and trial its own responses. If a policy works, replicate it. If it fails, scrap it. But stop pretending that uniformity is fairness. It’s not. Uniformity is how the distant rich crush the nearby poor while claiming to help them. As for funding, its time to turn off the tap, necessity is the mother of innovation, continually funding bad idea’s is extremely destructive.

Community first isn’t a slogan. It’s a demand for control, local, contextual, and earned through results, not intentions. From the author.

The opinions and statements are those of Sam Wilks and do not necessarily represent whom Sam Consults or contracts to. Sam Wilks is a skilled and experienced Security Consultant with almost 3 decades of expertise in the fields of Real estate, Security, and the hospitality/gaming industry. His knowledge and practical experience have made him a valuable asset to many organizations looking to enhance their security measures and provide a safe and secure environment for their clients and staff.