At the height of Australia’s most bizarre political crisis, when the Northern Territory chief minister Adam Giles was rolled by his colleagues and refused to leave, the besieged leader stood in his living room and said senior police were behind it all.
“The allegations that have been coming out about senior members of the police force actively running a coup, or a campaign, in cahoots with some alleged politicians is a significant problem,” Giles said. He thought his phone was tapped. He had thrown it in the pool.
Giles never publicly explained what – or who – he was talking about.
Over the past 40 days, the trial of the former NT police commissioner John McRoberts has heard evidence that shed new light on certain pivotal events in the months before the botched coup.
McRoberts was on Thursday found guilty of perverting the course of justice and faces a likely jail term for deflecting and frustrating a fraud case against travel agent Xana Kamitsis.
Two events, more than any other, fuelled the political drama in late 2014 and early 2015. The first was the arrest of Kamitsis. The second was the discovery that McRoberts was her secret lover.
Delicate timing
One morning in November 2014, police raided the office of Latitude Travel, a quiet suburban shopfront next to a Chinese takeaway. The arrest of Kamitsis was quick, calculated and humiliating, splashed all ever the news. And it took place without the commissioner’s knowledge.
In the months prior, the NT supreme court heard, McRoberts had repeatedly interfered with a fraud investigation. Kamitsis was the test case, one of 27 travel agents suspected of rorting a government pensioner concession travel scheme, by invoicing the health department for expensive flight costs then buying cheaper fares and pocketing the difference – to the tune of about $5m.
When McRoberts learned Kamitsis was a target, he admitted he knew her, but not the extent of the relationship. The court heard that, when told she would likely go to jail, McRoberts responded: “If she has to be charged, she has to be charged.”
And then he went about protecting her.
There were a number of extraordinary aspects to McRoberts’s involvement in the case. One was that he became involved in a hands-on way in the first place. Another was that he told Giles and other senior figures there was not enough evidence to lay charges, instead pushing for a civil resolution, which would allow the agents to repay the money without the need for lengthy court cases.
The strategy upset members of the fraud squad, who had taken their brief of evidence to a prosecutor for advice, and been told the case was solid. McRoberts also blocked the execution of a search warrant that had been approved by a judge.
Delays bred frustration. The case was whispered about in out-of-the-way Darwin cafes, where politicians, lawyers and cops in the small-town city were unlikely to overhear the gossip. “Have you heard of Xana Kamitsis?” one source asked. All anyone knew was she was a socialite and the chair of community watch group CrimeStoppers. They figured that must be why progress on the case had been slow.
When Kamitsis was raided, television crews were waiting for the money shot, the prominent party host in handcuffs. The police media unit later supplied unblurred photographs of the arrest to the NT News.
When the raid began, McRoberts was on a plane. Mark Payne, one of three rotating deputy commissioners, gave the authorisation while his boss was in the air and out of contact.
A member of the Country Liberal party emailed Giles to complain about the over-the-top treatment of Kamitsis, and Giles passed the complaint on to McRoberts, who responded that the arrest had been “a very poor decision”.
“I have expressed my anger to Mark Payne who is overseeing the police side of the multiagency task force,” McRoberts wrote back to the chief minister, in an email revealed at the trial. “I’m meeting with a number of individuals first thing tomorrow to decide what action will be taken.”
Come Monday, though, it was McRoberts under pressure.
Text messages
Four days after Kamitsis was arrested, Payne was shown thousands of text messages between the travel agent and McRoberts, dating back several years, which indicated they had a clandestine sexual relationship.
“The whole reason I fell in love with you was because my heart skipped a beat when I saw you,” said one from Kamitsis.
Payne showed Reece Kershaw, the acting second-in-charge. They then confronted McRoberts, who was still fuming about the raid.
“Body-language wise he did rock back and say words to the effect of: it’s not true, that’s not true,” Kershaw told the court. “He went a little bit pale.”
As two months passed, it seemed like McRoberts might manage to wriggle free of any consequences of his association with Kamitsis.
Payne had to take emergency personal leave for a fortnight to care for his sick wife, and when he returned he found himself on the outer, his office shifted from the sixth-floor nerve centre of Darwin police headquarters to the fourth.
Senior members of the government, still unaware of the sexual relationship and upset at the treatment of Kamitsis, were offered Payne as a scapegoat. McRoberts told them, falsely, that Payne had taken stress leave because he couldn’t cope with the criticism.
Police politics
It took two months before a whistleblower came forward and gave details of the McRoberts-Kamitsis tryst to the then police minister, Peter Chandler. The timing of the disclosure was critical. It merged the police leadership crisis with an unfolding political power struggle.
The same day, Giles had signed a letter leaving Chandler, the deputy leader, as acting chief minister. Giles was hours away from stepping on to a plane for two weeks’ holiday when he was told about the unfolding situation.
A spokesman for Chandler said at the time he had confronted McRoberts with evidence from a criminal investigation.
“His reaction was to resign.”
It’s believed by some that the whistleblower’s approach to Chandler was deliberately timed to sideline Giles. The politics of the police and the politics of the cabinet room were linked, and Giles was considered close to the commissioner, who often was willing to toe the political line.
Three out of eight cabinet members – Peter Styles, John Elferink and Willem Westra van Holthe – were former Northern Territory cops, each bringing into politics friendships and alliances made during careers on the beat.
Those alliances were laid bare in mid-2014 when it came time to renew McRoberts’s contract and decide on a new deputy commissioner. The new deputy would be front-runner for the top job four years down the track.
Some ministers, most notably Elferink, Westra van Holthe and Robyn Lambley, pushed hard for Payne to become deputy commissioner. Giles had long-term ambitions for Jamie Chalker, who had been in charge in Alice Springs, but who was a step further down the chain of command.
Between them, Giles and McRoberts designed a system to keep everyone happy, to an extent, one that would also have the effect of consolidating the commissioner’s power. Payne, Chalker and Kershaw were given the job of deputy on a rotating basis.
A dark and stormy night
Giles returned from his holiday in late January to a political storm. McRoberts had been removed. And the chief minister quickly discovered his own position was being eroded.
From his point of view, at that time, Giles could see plenty of shadows.
The timing of the disclosure to Chandler played on his mind. Why had the whistleblower waited two months to come forward, and only done so to Chandler, the day Giles had gone on leave? Why had the police also waited until McRoberts was on a plane to launch the Kamitsis raid?
He had been told about Payne’s involvement in the Kamitsis raid. And he recalled how three of the key coup plotters had been pushing for Payne to become deputy commissioner.
At 1am on 3 February two former police officers walked into Parliament House under the cover of darkness and announced they were now in charge of the Northern Territory government.
Westra van Holthe told reporters he was the “chief minister apparent” with Elferink as his deputy. Giles, in a fit of paranoia and believing his phone had been tapped, threw it from his 12th floor balcony and into the pool below.
Giles managed, somehow, to cling to power. A hastily scheduled swearing-in ceremony for the new team was called at the eleventh hour when Giles simply refused to go. No one knew what to do.
His government lasted another 18 months before being turfed out in a brutal election loss after a series of scandals, including a corruption scandal involving a Kamitsis and a ministerial staffer. She spent 11 months in jail for fraud and official corruption. McRoberts now also faces a likely lengthy jail term.
