You’d think a good army bloke like Mal Brough would do his map reading before an attack. You’d also think he would get some sort of screening done on the civilian overseers he is installing around the country.

Not so.

It’s now clear that the act of parliament that set out the “prescribed communities” will have to be changed. Word has it that an overlay has been done on one of the Top End’s largest Aboriginal communities, to find that about 90% of the community has been left out. So Brough has managed to “prescribe” a whole bunch of bush, seawater, and a nearby mining tenement.

It seems the mapping has been done by a bunch from Brisbane, and created from satellite imagery. The mapping done over three decades by Northern Territory cartographers has been completely bypassed in favour of Queenslanders. Ooops!

That’s well done, but not as good as Gove airport, which he has taken over by law, along with a bunch of other more humble airstrips in the scrub. Gove, on which the local multinational miner has spent millions in upgrades, is also a front line regional airstrip, catering for international jet traffic as well as military and customs use. What the minister for family and community services has to do with this must be a puzzle for Brendan Nelson.

Quite apart from the general weirdness of the Business Manager from Yuendumu telling Territory cops what to do with truants, there’s another story going around that a business manager was signed off to work at another community, without inquiring too closely as to his previous experience at the same community.

Apparently he left owing the place some thousands of dollars. Perhaps he will re-fund it from the inflated salary these overseers are getting from the feds.