Former Territory Labor powerbroker Kent Rowe has been sentenced to five years in prison for repeatedly raping a child over a six year period.

The sentence, handed down by Chief Justice Michael Grant in the Supreme Court Wednesday morning, will be suspended after two and a half years.

Rowe was convicted in September of six counts of sexual intercourse without consent for historical sex offences against a female relative when she was a child.

Justice Grant said Rowe had repeatedly lied about the offences and had attempted to make the victim “feel shame” about the abuse to prevent her from disclosing it to anyone and had shown no remorse or responsibility for his crimes.

Rowe had also acted in a “calculated” way to “neutralise the risk of her making a complaint to police”, Justice Grant observed.

“You agreed to go to sexual therapy, not because of genuine commitment but because you thought it would mollify the victim and stop her from taking the matter any further,” Justice Grant said.

“You, by lies, intended to cast yourself as the victim … and the victim as the villain. It is to your great discredit and should be a matter of great shame to you although I suspect it isn’t.”

He added that Rowe’s actions had caused considerable psychological harm to the victim over many years, left a “profound and longstanding impact” on her and affected her ability to “enjoy life … without the shadow and stigma of child sexual abuse”.

Justice Grant said in sentencing remarks that Rowe had anally raped the victim when she was around seven years old in one incident.

“A person cannot consent to sexual intercourse if they are incapable of understanding the sexual nature of the act,” he said. “The victim was about seven years of age and she had no understanding of the sexual nature of the act. Those circumstances constitute a clear lack of consent.

“The victim described your conduct during the course of this incident as sodomising her in the sense of penetrating her anus with your penis.”

In another incident years later, Rowe penetrated the girl’s vagina on three occasions with his fingers. In another incident, he had molested her while she slept.

“I have no doubt at the time that you knew what you were doing was grossly wrong,” Justice Grant said. “The act was deeply wrong, was predatory and reprehensible conduct.”

The court had heard the victim had confronted Rowe about the abuse in 2015, when she was an adult, around the same time she had told others about the sexual assaults.

“You told her that you thought about this as something they shared,” Justice Grant said. “That statement was … no doubt a calculated attempt to make the victim feel complicit in your conduct in order to discourage the disclosure of the matter.”

While the victim had told friends and family about the sexual assault she did not got to police until 2021, days after the NT Independent revealed Rowe as one of the key players in Labor’s cocaine sex scandal, Justice Grant said.

“You were identified as the political staffer in question,” Justice Grant told Rowe. “It was those reports, which ultimately led the victim to make a formal complaint to police.”

Rowe’s victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had told the court in a victim impact statement last month that she had been made to feel like “an accomplice to my own sexual assaults” after confronting Rowe about the abuse in recent years and that the ongoing sexual abuse over many years left her “scared to fall asleep at night”.

“There isn’t any sentence that will give back what was taken from me or rewrite my past,” she told the court at the time.

Justice Grant said on Wednesday that Rowe had demonstrated a “lack of remorse and a refusal to accept full responsibility”, which was made more troubling because of the impact on the victim.

He said other allegations against Rowe about unrelated “inappropriate sexual behaviour”, including by a mysterious woman known to him in 2016, had fallen short of criminal conduct and that he had “an unhealthy preoccupation with penile anal sexual intercourse”.

In sentencing Rowe, Justice Grant said he had taken into consideration that he had no prior record, had “rehabilitated yourself” to a certain level but not completely, and did not pose any “greater risk of reoffending in this particular fashion”.

He also pointed to a number of “references which speak to the very positive personal qualities you have demonstrated”.

Rowe was given a five-year sentence backdated to September 5, which will be suspended after two and a half years, making Rowe eligible for release in March 2025.

Besides running Territory Labor for the better part of a decade and acting as secretary for five years, Mr Rowe also ran the 2016 and 2020 successful election campaigns before being promoted to former chief minister Michael Gunner’s inner sanctum of top advisers. He resigned early last year for his involvement in the Labor cocaine sex scandal and lying about an extra-marital affair with a local sex worker.

Outside court, Rowe’s lawyer Jon Tippett said his client may consider appealing the sentence.