John Elferink, the Northern Territory’s controversial attorney general, leader of government business and minister for six portfolios, has announced he will not contest the next election.
A former police officer who entered politics in 1997, Elferink has often been the central figure in the Territory government’s recent run of embarrassing scandals, incidents and failures.
In his speech to parliament announcing his decision, Elferink said he had become “increasingly reflective” on his life and that of his family, and had decided to move on after he had “dallied in one place too long”. He had made the decision to retire the previous night, he said.
“Nothing in this announcement should be seen to reflect on the chief minister, or you as my colleagues, or the policy direction of the Northern Territory,” he told parliament.
“We have every right to be proud of our manifold achievements and the direction that we have set for the Territory. Events in recent times have had utterly no bearing on this decision.”
But a parliamentary colleague labelled Elferink’s announcement a stunt, and suggested to Guardian Australia he was seeking to distract attention from the fiasco, less than 24 hours earlier, when he sought to have the Speaker, Kezia Purick, dumped.
The attempted ousting failed when at least one government member switched their vote between a public show of hands in parliament that ditched Purick and a 3am secret ballot that reinstated her. Elferink had also been a key player in February’s failed midnight coup against chief minister Adam Giles.
The attempt to remove Purick from the Speaker’s chair came just days after Elferink made headlines for describing domestic violence as a man “touching up” his partner.
The incident reignited accusations that Elferink has downplayed the NT’s dire domestic violence problem. In September, Elferink was forced to give up his White Ribbon ambassadorship after he became frustrated with a female opposition MP during a debate and said he was “really tempted to give her a slap”.
Elferink has also presided over a number of incidents, accusations and mistakes within his portfolios of justice and corrections.
The “touching up” comments came while the minister was in Nhulunbuy, where a convicted rapist and axe murderer escaped after he had been given the right – against Corrections protocol – to attend a work camp. That incident ended the career of beleaguered corrections commissioner Ken Middlebrook. In less than 18 months, 36 prisoners had absconded from adult and juvenile prisons overseen by his department.
Last month Elferink was accused of staging a stunt at the ceremonial concrete pour of a long-promised hospital at Palmerston, federally funded to the tune of $110m. Media filmed the pour of what was expected to be a stairwell base, only to discover a few days later the hole had been filled in and covered over. Contractors referred questions to Elferink, who said the contractors had filled it in for safety reasons.
Guardian Australia understands a number of government MPs were frustrated at the incident, which had further strained their relationship with constituents.
Speaking to ABC radio on Friday morning, Elferink said passing legislation “which has protected workers in the workspace, the paperless arrest laws which have made our streets safer, any number of those sorts of judicial reforms, the whole of the corrections reform process, including ‘sentenced to a job’” were all achievements of which he was proud.
“I’d like to see Daniel’s Law get up and I understand there are a number of resistors to Daniel’s Law, but the fact is I will always prefer the rights of parents over the rights of paedophiles and the rights of lawyers,” he said of his plans before retirement.
Daniel’s Law is a proposed public online sex offender’s register, named after the murdered son of Denise and Bruce Morcombe. Elferink has been accused of ignoring evidence about the law’s likely effectiveness and refusing to consult experts or stakeholders.
Asked about government “bunglings”, Elferink referred to the previous day’s announcement by the NT treasurer of a forecast surplus after a “$5.5bn debt hanging over our heads” from the previous Labor government.
“It’s all very good to focus on a handful of negative things when the structural fundamental economics of this jurisdiction have been rescued from the abyss,” Elferink said.
“If you want to call that a bungling, then I don’t know what we have to do to prove our worth.”
On Wednesday Labor announced it would introduce a motion of no confidence in the next sittings in early December.
Elferink said he did not think it would succeed, but should Territorians go to an early election, voters would have the choice of “a Labor government taking us straight back into a mire of debt and deficit or alternatively a government which has been building up the Territory”.
