23 February 2020
Michael Gunner might well be sitting pretty at the moment. In August 2016, he led the Labor Party to a big election win in the Northern Territory, though it was less likely an endorsement of them by voters than a big rejection of the Country Liberal Party. With a general election due later this year, hardly anybody would be predicting any significant change.
Labor won eighteen out of twenty-five seats in the 2016 election, while the CLP was reduced to just two seats. Rarely do you a see result as embarrassing as this.
But there was something perhaps embarrassing about this result, especially for the CLP. The remaining five seats in the election went to Independents. As such, there were more crossbench MPs than CLP MPs. Despite this, the CLP still ended up being designated as “the Opposition” – this would’ve been weird.
More embarrassingly, only two of the five crossbench MPs were Independents, at least in a true sense. They were Independents when first elected. The other three were former CLP MPs.
Indeed one of the former CLP figures was Terry Mills. It was Mills who led the CLP to its most recent election triumph, in 2012. This was its first win in more than a decade, before which it’d been in office ever since the Northern Territory became self-governing during the late 1970s. But after less than a year in power, Mills was dumped in a leadership coup, and he later quit Parliament. However, in 2016, he stood as an Independent for his old seat of Blain, in the Palmerston area, and he won back the seat.
Despite the long-awaited triumph of 2012, the CLP Government became utterly shambolic. The sudden dumping of Mills as Chief Minister, in favour of Adam Giles, was one of numerous sagas surrounding the CLP. There was even a coup against Giles, which somehow didn’t result in Giles being removed from the top job. When the 2016 election came, it was as if Territorians were itching to have the CLP removed from power, and its reduction to just two seats, including the defeat of Giles in his own seat, probably reflected this.
The other two former CLP figures on the crossbench, Robyn Lambley and Kezia Purick, left the CLP during its shambolic period in office. They both ran in their seats as Independents, and they held them.
Lambley holds the seat of Araluen, in the Alice Springs area. Purick, who is also the parliamentary Speaker, holds the seat of Goyder, in an area to the south-east of the Territory’s capital, Darwin.
I can only wonder if the mere presence of Mills and Lambley and Purick serves to remind Territorian voters of the bad days of the CLP’s last term in office.
From a base of just two seats, it’s highly likely that the CLP will regain a number of seats lost in 2016. Usually, when parties suffer huge election losses, they make up decent ground at the next elections. That said, a CLP win this seems virtually impossible to achieve – let alone to imagine.
But while Gunner will almost inevitably win the election and therefore remain Chief Minister at the end of this year, he’s not exactly without troubles. Beyond simply having whatever problems he’d have expected to face since taking power in 2016, two of his MPs are now on the crossbench. He’s now got sixteen seats, and if he loses four of them at the election, he’ll lose his majority.
Admittedly, while Labor holds a decent majority, the crossbench doesn’t exactly have influence. But with two Labor MPs now on the already-large crossbench, it’d still be worth watching what happens there.
Being larger than the Opposition team is what makes for something of a funny crossbench in the Top End, to which the Northern Territory, and mainly Darwin, is colloquially referred at times. Having a number of people formerly from the major parties would also make the crossbench interesting.
The next election might see some crossbenchers defeated, but some might well survive. While Labor might encounter new trouble over the next few months, even if it loses its majority, there’s next to no chance of the CLP going from two seats to thirteen for an outright win. Barring something absolutely unforeseen, Labor looks all but assured of holding power in the Top End, whether it requires crossbench support or not to achieve this.