ANALYSIS: Chief Minister Natasha Fyles’s taxpayer-funded US trip has all the hallmarks of a classic political travel scandal on the madcap level of the previous CLP government’s bizarro trips, despite what the state media organ NT News and Katie Woolf say.

As the journalist who broke all of those CLP travel scandals, I can say with no hyperbole that Fyles’s estimated $93,000 trip is right up there with some of those classics and we haven’t even seen all the details yet. (The FOI application is ready to be filed upon arrival, by the way).

What is clear from what we know and her office’s reactions over the last two weeks, is that it was designed as a junket from the beginning with little effort or concern put into its planning or the optics, until the public found out.

It’s been a bureaucratic screwball comedy since then, with the Chief Minister’s office issuing bizarre press release after bizarre press release in a futile attempt to justify the trip after the plane had already taken off.

Even in his darkest days in 2015, Adam Giles wasn’t stupid enough to plot a massively expensive overseas US voyage less than a year out from an election with no meetings scheduled, no plan of what to do once he arrived there and then changing the scope of the mission and the destinations on the fly.

But Fyles has been Chief Minister for 16 months and clearly wanted the Big Trip that all chief ministers go on, and she wasn’t going to let reality and common sense get in the way.

Her media allies have been helpful in defending the trip, but the public is seeing through the smokescreen, even as Katie Woolf and Matt Cunningham want to focus on Lauren Moss’s equally ridiculous $60,000 trip to New York earlier this year for a UN conference on water issues to deflect from Fyles’s absurdity.

If Fyles met with Under Secretary of the Navy Erik Raven and US Assistant Secretary of Defence Ely Ratner – as her office claimed after the fact and while the public was seething with rage – it surely was not planned when they left and conjures up an image of a meeting so poorly executed that it probably happened at a truck stop Burger King off the I-495, with Fyles rambling incoherently to US agents about the NT’s commitment to renewable energy, tourism, critical minerals, emergency responses and its undying loyalty to the US Marine Corp.

It’s a likely scenario that after days of her office annoying US Defence officials, former Labor PM and current Ambassador to the US Kevin Rudd called in a few favours and requested the meeting to placate her and make her feel big and important.

It’s like a scene out of the Coen Brothers’ film Burn After Reading. Here’s Natasha Fyles in the heart of Washington, the newest mover and shaker in the Beltway, with nobody to meet with and no way to justify her trip.

She’ll probably save the “real story” of how she triumphed in Washington for her memoir about all those high-level meetings and the long-lasting impact they will have on the future of the Northern Territory.

After all, Nicole Manison told us all yesterday that this trip was likely to “generate billions of dollars into the Northern Territory economy”.

Billions?! How do they do it?

Among the most troubling issues with this trip that has blown into a full-blown scandal is the friendly media’s approach to deflecting on behalf of Fyles.

The ABC to its credit, despite being late to the party, actually asked the most basic question that the NT News must have forgot to ask: How much is this costing taxpayers?

But Katie Woolf has been the one left with pushing it daily, despite her best efforts, as the public voice their grievances to her via text every day this ridiculous scandal has gone on, with more information dripping out daily.

So why has Katie defended the trip?

A clue appeared on Fyles’s official, taxpayer-funded social media page over the weekend, in the form of a picture of the Chief Minister as close to the White House as she was able to get, outside the fence on the north lawns.

“Not quite your usual morning run!” the Facebook post stated, in the tone of a true tourist with the White House in the background.

“I’m wearing my Run With Dad shirt. I’ve always been a supporter of the event and although I missed it in Darwin, I made sure I did a run in Washington DC.

“Congratulations to Katie Woolf Media and the committee on raising over $20,000 this year, to look after the blokes in our lives by raising awareness for mental health and prostate cancer.”

This is the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory using her taxpayer-funded social media account, operated by public servants/political advisers paid for by taxpayers, to promote Katie Woolf’s personal business interests.

Even if someone reasons that’s okay because it’s a charity event, it’s still inappropriate to have the Chief Minister using government resources to curry favour with media personalities and their “causes”.

It appeared like some sort of ill-conceived thank-you to Woolf for continually telling the public all last week that the trip was “necessary” and that she has “no issue” with it, despite the ignorant masses complaining about the costs.

I would have been horrified if Adam Giles had taken a clear junket to the US and posted a special pic of him enjoying himself for everyone to see and thanking me for not publicly criticising his junket while attacking his colleagues’ trips.

Again, it’s a tough one to gauge on the level of inappropriateness because of the sheer stupidity on all sides. One humorous idiosyncrasy of Woolf that listeners would have noticed over the years is her Ron Burgundy-esque ability to read whatever is in front of her without processing it.

That happened again on Monday when a cheeky texter got his message past the gatekeeper, asking something along the lines of “Why is it that when a CLP minister goes overseas it’s called a junket but when a Labor minister goes it’s called a crucial trip”?

“I know, right?” Katie said with an awkward laugh, before processing that the text she just read aloud was a stinging critique of her approach to reporting on Fyles’s US trip.

This is what we have for media here in the NT these days and Labor successfully created that over the last seven years. If you’re not with them – or at least willing to temper your criticism – you’ll soon be without a job.

Media coverage of this trip a glimpse of what’s to come

Fyles’s office has been reactionary since the US trip started being reported by sceptical media, after their carefully crafted soft announcement blew up in their face.

It was given “exclusively” to the NT News late last month to report because they knew their reporters would not question it. Not only did they run the press release nearly verbatim, they called the trip “vital” and included a bunch of nonsense about the US Marine build-up here announced more than 10 years ago to make it appear that was somehow connected to Fyles’s trip.

When that didn’t work, the Chief’s office issued a public release on a Sunday – three days after giving the trip to the state media organ – about a Trump-supporting congressman who was in town to approve of “what’s going on here” or something equally inane, in a release that had no news value whatsoever, except that her office thought it would make the public think she has strong ties to “key US decision makers”. There was nobody off limits if it meant Fyles could be given the social licence to fly to the US, even if there were Trump supporters to cosy up to who blamed the January 6 riots on Capital Hill security not being prepared. Her office even went so far as using the horrific deaths of three US Marines last month on the Tiwi Islands as another justification of the trip.

Then mid-last week, Fyles’s highly-paid operatives finally announced the two people she met with halfway through the trip, as well as announcing for the first time that the trip would now include high-level discussions with unnamed parties in Los Angeles and San Diego involving tourism and industrial renewable energy projects.

What makes all of this possibly worse than the CLP’s junkets is the fact that this government is currently under investigation by the ICAC for allegedly misusing public funds to fly around the Territory at the last election for party political purposes.

And not one of the current Labor MLAs or leadership has accepted responsibility for that or rebuked it ahead of next year’s election.

Don’t expect the NT News or Mix 104.9 to report on that scandal when the full details finally come out either.

Christopher Walsh is the editor of the NT Independent and formerly held roles as senior political reporter at the NT News and investigations producer at ABC Darwin. He is also co-author of ‘Crocs in the Cabinet: An Instruction Manual on How Not to Run a Government’, named by Nicole Manison as one of Territory Labor’s most favourite books of all time.