The Northern Territory government failed to properly communicate to the public when it made big decisions such as privatising the Territory Insurance Office, the chief minister, Adam Giles, has said.
He also said party instability was behind it now that a number of MLAs were retiring or had resigned over the past term.
The NT goes to an election on 27 August and, while it is widely predicted the Country Liberal party will lose government, a string of resignations, retirements and changes to electoral boundaries has created a relatively unpredictable playing field.
Giles told local radio on Monday morning there was “no doubt” his government had not communicated the sale of TIO properly, which sparked widespread condemnation among Territorians who feared greater premiums or restrictions on insurance against weather events such as flooding and cyclones.
“We never sold the message about the problems,” he told Mix 104.9. “TIO wasn’t properly reinsured … If we got hit by a cyclone TIO couldn’t afford to pay the bill. Government wouldn’t have been able to pay the bill because it’s more than the government budget if we got hit by the cyclone.”
At the CLP campaign launch on Sunday, Giles challenged the Labor party to commit to buying TIO back if it believed it should be publicly owned. He also committed a future CLP government to not privatising other state assets such as water and electricity providers.
Giles said on Monday he believed people understood that the lease of the Darwin port to the Chinese company Landbridge was “the best infrastructure deal in the country” and praised CLP industry subsidy programs and a plan for 24,000 jobs.
The CLP jobs plan includes 7,200 in an onshore gas industry. Fracking for onshore gas has sparked heated division between the parties and led to frequent protests by environmentalists, pastoralists and Indigenous traditional owners. Labor has committed to a moratorium on fracking should it win government.
“Just because you support something like the gas industry doesn’t mean you’re not an environmentalist,” Giles said. “I’m the biggest environmentalist and conservationist around. But I support a well-regulated, a well-ruled industry of gas.”
He said environmentalists had yelled and spat at him and claimed that if Australia switched from coal-powered stations to NT-supplied gas it would “cut emissions by 50%”.
The CLP is going to the election with a markedly different team to the one it had in 2012. Neither the attorney general, John Elferink, nor the treasurer, Dave Tollner, are contesting their seats, and a number of MLAs left the party amid infighting and scandals. Giles said the “personnel changes” meant a more stable government should the party win another term.
“We’ve had a couple of personnel changes,” he said. “Some of the people that weren’t able to work in a team, like Kezia [Purick] and Robyn [Lambley], they’ve gone. Alison Anderson, I mean, talk about a fire. They’re gone, and since they’ve been gone the instability has sort of been taken off. There’s been a few issues but they were the three who caused the instability.”
Giles said there had been a “change in dynamic” and that many first-term governments “found it very difficult in finding their feet, settling in and moving from opposition to government”.
“We’ve got a fresh team with a greater balance of people from different backgrounds, a better balance of men and women, of Indigenous and non-Indigenous, so I I think we’re more reflective of the community.”
He also responded to revelations the former corrections commissioner Ken Middlebrook, who has borne the brunt of much of the blame for juvenile justice failings, had been appointed to the parole board after he resigned over the escape of a convicted rapist and murderer from a work camp.
Middlebrook was appointed as a “community member” of the board but has since said he would not participate until after the royal commission into child protection and juvenile detention.
Giles said he had raised the matter with Elferink but there was nothing he could do about it while the government was in caretaker mode. “To be frank, I don’t think he should have been on there and it’s certainly something to look at after the election.”
He praised former the Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, who appeared at the CLP launch and used part of his speech to accuse the ABC of using public funds to “set us all up” and create biased reporting on the Don Dale youth detention centre.
