ANALYSIS: The stupidity, arrogance and outright greed displayed by Chief Minister Natasha Fyles was truly breathtaking this week – the latest example of this government showing they’re more concerned about their personal interests than the people of the Northern Territory.

The most astonishing aspect of the entire shares scandal is that Fyles inflicted it on herself by not being upfront with Territorians, sealing her political destiny by her own actions.

A former CLP minister once remarked about all the scandals that previous government suffered: “Sometimes you’ve been cut deeply by an issue and you don’t realise you’re bleeding until you’re 20-klicks down the track”.

Fyles, who now has a lot in common with that scandal-plagued CLP government, knows the uneasy feeling that comes with losing all credibility.

She breached the NT ministerial code of conduct by not divesting her shares in gas giant Woodside Energy – a company involved in the Middle Arm industrial precinct – which she was obligated to do upon becoming aware of them. Instead, when it was raised this week, she played out her party’s template for dealing with scandal: delay, deny, cover-up and accept no responsibility, which ultimately blew up in her face.

The NT Independent broke the story on Monday morning, causing reverberations across the country, with the gossip rounds in Federal Parliament that morning dominated by the story being passed around between shocked political operatives.

How could the NT’s Chief Minister be so stupid as to hold shares in a gas company and not divest them when she was using taxpayer money to travel around the country spruiking the Middle Arm project?

The simplest and most reasonable thing she could have done was divest herself of the Woodside shares as soon as she obtained them in a merger with BHP in June 2022 to avoid any potential conflict. Instead, she kept them, noted a secret number of them on her Register of Members’ Interests and thought that was enough to manage the inherent conflict of interest.

In the best political radio interview in recent memory, ABC Radio’s Jo Laverty held Fyles to account and refused to accept her regular nonsensical comments that avoided the simple and direct question: How does she manage the conflict while sitting at the Cabinet table making decisions about Middle Arm and the Territory’s gas industry?

Fyles was defiant but could not provide a simple answer. She also refused to divest the shares and never once claimed she did not have a conflict of interest.

Delaying and denying all in one shot.

Then the cover-up started on Wednesday morning when Fyles concocted the story about “grandma” gifting her shares in mining company BHP when she was seven-years-old that later turned into the Woodside shares. This was to tug at the heart strings of Territorians. How could the shares be bad if granny gave them to her instead of a new Barbie on Christmas morning 1985? Territorians weren’t buying it or the smug elitist attitude.

She then made the worst gaffe of the entire scandal by claiming she was keeping the shares in hopes they “might grow for the kids”, adding, “let’s see where those 169 shares go one day”.

The sheer arrogance of that mixed with stupidity was mind-melting. She had just said she wanted to make more money off the shares as Chief Minister, while knowingly having a conflict.

When the cover-up didn’t work, the next day she finally announced she had “taken steps to” divest the shares, but was only doing it “to end this distraction”.

She refused again to accept responsibility and failed to mention in her statement that the real reason she was divesting her shares was that independent MLA Mark Turner had sent her and the rest of Cabinet letters the night before outlining her breach of the NT ministerial code of conduct and the rules which called for an emergency meeting of Cabinet to discuss the issue.

He also sent a letter to the ICAC.

The stupid thing about it all again was how she self-inflicted this, as the Centre for Public Integrity’s director told ABC Radio this week, while trying to hold back a chuckle at Fyles’ serious lack of judgment.

“This was an avoidable conflict,” Geoffrey Watson said on Tuesday. “The Chief Minister should have divested herself from assets which could come within either her management or portfolio. It’s just silly; that’s the sort of thing that you should do.”

Fyles’ credibility lost forever, new low for Territory Labor

In politics, once you lose your credibility, there’s no getting it back. It’s the only currency a politician has and once you’re not taken seriously anymore, it’s the end of your political career.

Fyles can no longer promote the Middle Arm industrial project, which she made the focal point of her leadership and the solution to the NT’s struggling economy.

Every time she mentions it, the entire country will remember that she appeared to be personally benefiting from it.

The one certainty is that her political career is over, whether she accepts it now or not.

Fyles has disgraced the Office of the Chief Minister since she took on the role just 18 months ago.

The constant lies, the refusal to accept responsibility, and now the arrogance and severe lack of judgment on this puts her on the same level of the previous Giles CLP government – another group of people who put their interests above Territorians’.

To keep her in the role is the latest new low for Territory Labor, a group remember, who wrote reference letters for a child molester last year.

Removing her is the right thing to do for the government (both politically and ethically) and the Northern Territory, but it’s not in any of the Labor pollies’ immediate political interests, although it should be.

Nicole Manison, Chanston Paech and Joel Bowden don’t want to lead this heavily-damaged trainwreck into almost certain electoral defeat at next August’s Territory election, especially after losing a chief minister in an ethics scandal just nine months out.

Accepting the fact that Fyles stuffed up and failed to act with integrity, while clearly breaching the ministerial code of conduct, would require installing a new leader to “restore integrity” to this Labor government and we’ve all heard that before.

Nobody in caucus can provide the necessary integrity because they’re all still implicated in the ongoing ICAC investigation into the theft of taxpayer money to fund their 2020 election campaign, that not one of them has condemned.

So, they’ll keep the limping and bleeding Chief Minister in the role and let her lead their sorry arses into the next election, all tarred by the same brush. Which again should cost all of them their jobs for disrespecting Territorians and our democratic institutions.

How will they handle Fyles’ inevitable referral to the parliamentary disciplinary committee later this month for also breaching the Disclosures of Interest Act by not reporting her BHP shares while a minister between 2016 and 2020, and possibly earlier?

You know things are bad for Fyles and Labor when the state media turns on them.

In its little-publicised editorial on Thursday (buried in the back of the paper with no pointers and not published online), the NT News took aim at their great leader, suggesting that Fyles’ shares scandal “demonstrates such a fundamental lack of judgment that Ms Fyles’ credibility as Chief Minister must be seriously questioned”.

“The fact that even as late as Wednesday morning she was continuing to refuse to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation and commit to finally doing the right thing by selling her shares may be the last straw,” they wrote.

“Many Territorians would be forgiven for believing they can now no longer have any confidence in their Chief Minister and asking whether it is time Ms Fyles seriously considered whether she is the best person to lead Labor into the next election”.

The problem is they have nobody else.

Christopher Walsh is the editor of the NT Independent and formerly held roles as senior political reporter at the NT News and investigations producer at ABC Darwin. He is also co-author of ‘Crocs in the Cabinet: An Instruction Manual on How Not to Run a Government’, named by Nicole Manison as one of Territory Labor’s most favourite books of all time.