EDITORIAL: Back in August, amid the fallout of the over-the-top, only-in-the-NT tale involving wild allegations the local federal MP assaulted the NT Administrator at a public festival, the Police Minister and Police Commissioner dismissed calls for an independent body to oversee the investigation, calling any assertion the police would be politically motivated “insulting”.

This despite the long history of police acting politically during high profile investigations into public figures and stuffing those investigations up royally.

Both Lia Finocchiaro and Martin Dole rejected calls for independent oversight, with Dole adding that police investigate assault matters all the time and this would be no different.

Except that this is different because it involves an elected member of federal Parliament and the King’s representative, who runs this place on paper. The stakes are much higher and it takes more than arrogance to ignore that.

This week the lack of independence was splashed across the local media and News 24 when it emerged that Connolly and the police accused the federal member of breaching bail which did not occur and then bizarrely claimed a “doppelganger” must be involved, because of course, in this little half-wit psychological play we’re all in a doppelganger is entirely appropriate at this point in the story arc.

Not to be all ‘told-you-so’ – and we are certainly not revelling in this latest screw-up – but three months ago we wrote in this space that the NT Police needed to bring in independent oversight of the investigation.

There were several reasons for this, including the history of stuffing up highly political investigations. Independent oversight has been done before and there was good reason to do it on this case, to ensure at the very least, the appearance of independence given the political ramifications.

David Connolly, ‘His Honour The Honourable’, Administrator of the Northern Territory, and his wife Jo Brosnan, incorrectly fingered Luke Gosling at a coffee shop and wrongly accused him of breaching his bail conditions, which was happily pursued by the NT Police without scrutiny.

Following a court hearing this week, the NT Independent was granted access to the documents relating to police issuing Gosling with a “formal caution” over those allegations. The prosecution at first objected to the release of documents but later relented and allowed all media access after News 24 were granted the file days earlier, with the court stipulating nothing could be reproduced.

According to those documents, police alleged Gosling showed up at the Boatshed café at Cullen Bay on a Tuesday morning in September, to drink a coffee with a “female acquaintance”.

Connolly and Brosnan were at the same café sipping coffee with some unsavoury-looking blokes, photos show, when they thought they had caught the Member for Solomon walking around the outside area of the coffee shop.

It’s Darwin of course, where you routinely run into people you don’t want to see on at least a weekly basis and the polite Darwin thing to do is put your head down and quietly ignore them, but never mind that, this was a chance to slug Gosling with another breach of bail charge so the Connollys set to work.

Some covert snaps were taken by the Honourable couple, with the first showing a frumpy, middle-aged man with a big head and thick glasses, wearing shorts with socks and sneakers, who, to be fair, could maybe pass as Gosling from a distance. But without anyone in their party ascertaining who the man was, they quickly sent the pics off to police to get Gosling in another breach of bail charge.

But it wasn’t clear if a breach had occurred at that point.

Troublingly, their full secret dossier contained a pic of an entirely different man sitting near their table with the “female acquaintance”, who they also claimed was Gosling, appearing to suggest he had breached his bail by getting within 15 metres of Connolly. This despite the man at the nearby table not having glasses and clearly wearing different clothes than the first man they photographed. All four pictures were taken within nine minutes.

The first showed the man with the large head walking outside at the café in a white shirt and grey shorts. The next pic was the other man sitting with a woman at an outside table near His Honour The Honourable’s party, who was clearly wearing a blue shirt with white shorts and was missing the glasses the other man was wearing minutes earlier.

Pictures three and four were blurry, with one showing the first man who somewhat resembled Gosling appearing to have his hand over his face and walking outside while the other was even blurrier.

Apparently that was enough for the detectives to form a professional opinion and issue the formal caution. Clearly they have never won a game of Guess Who?.

Without interrogating the credibility of His Honour The Honourable’s claims, checking the photos independently, clearly failing to notice the different clothes two separate men were wearing, or seeking to review any nearby CCTV footage, the detectives sent Gosling’s lawyers a letter issuing the caution and threatening further legal action if he continued to breach his bail conditions.

“The photographs taken certainly look like him,” Detective Sarah Hutchinson wrote to Gosling’s lawyers.

“That said, I am certainly open to being corrected – it may well be that Mr Gosling has a doppelganger in Darwin.”

Sure, there could be some supernatural powers at play that conspired to create the exact double of the federal member, who happens to frequent Darwin cafes on Tuesday mornings and shapeshifts his face – and clothes – when he sits down next to the Administrator.

Or it could also be that police were simply taking the word of a man who, in addition to holding the powers that come with running the Northern Territory, has a long history of making publicly disparaging and insulting remarks about Gosling’s boss the Prime Minister and the Australian Labor Party more generally.

Who appears now to be lurching at shadows and shapeshifters to try and inflict further damage on Gosling through the NT Police Force.

“The above conduct [of possibly being at a café] is alleged to constitute a breach of Mr Gosling’s bail conditions, specifically the condition preventing him from approaching within 15 metres from the Administrator,” Hutchinson wrote.

She then issued the “formal caution” in relation to the alleged breach and added sternly that “any further alleged non-compliance with his bail conditions may result in further police action”.

What is clear in all of this is that the police were afraid to tell the Administrator he was wrong and point out the discrepancy involving photos of two different men in different clothes. They also failed to make a coherent argument of when exactly the alleged breach of bail occurred.

Administrator’s credibility completely shot when it comes to assault charges

The latest debacle is further embarrassment for Connolly, the police and the Northern Territory overall. You don’t have to like Luke Gosling to see what’s happening here, for the same reasons you did not have to like Zach Rolfe to know police attempted to destroy evidence in his murder case and manipulated other expert evidence. You also did not have to like Colleen Gwynne to see that police maliciously investigated her a few years back for a case that was thrown out of court on day one.

The only way the Gosling case could get worse is if we were to learn that the NT Police has been secretly surveilling Gosling with phone taps and other techniques while sifting through his trash and personal financial statements since the embarrassing Boatshed incident. At this point we couldn’t put anything past them.

The perception has been reinforced with this latest stuff-up that the CLP’s man in Government House and the CLP Government itself want the Federal Labor Member charged and convicted for political reasons and the NT Police are only happy to oblige and not scrutinise evidence provided.

Gosling’s lawyers responded to the police to say they would do their job for them and seek CCTV footage to prove their client was dropping his kids off at school across the city at the same time Connolly and Brosnan were dealing with the shapeshifter at Cullen Bay.

“That evidence would materially assist the defence in testing the reliability of the same witnesses’ identification evidence in the substantive [assault] proceeding,” Gosling’s lawyers wrote.

The current defence is that the only two witnesses the prosecution and police can produce to the alleged assault on July 17 can’t clearly identify the alleged assailant in broad daylight. And one of those witnesses has a long and publicly documented hatred for Labor and the current Federal Government.

Sounds like it won’t take too much to discredit His Honour The Honourable in court, although he damaged his own credibility long before he arrogantly accepted the role Lia Finocchiaro offered him that he was nowhere near qualified for.

We did not call for an independent body to investigate because we believed one side over the other. We called for it because it was in the best interests of justice and the Northern Territory.

Acting NT DPP Pat Williams understood that when he bowed out from prosecuting the matter and referred it to an independent, interstate prosecutor.

If the Melbourne-based prosecutors haven’t written this place off as a joke by now, they’d certainly be getting nervous that their professional reputations are on the line with this shitshow. Which explains why the other bogus breach of bail charge from the cricket match against Gosling brought by Connolly was dropped last week.

Once again, and despite being given every opportunity to provide crucial integrity on its investigation, the NT Police couldn’t get over its own hubris and may have now seriously botched the entire case.

Why Connolly couldn’t have handled any perceived aggression from Gosling at the public event calmly like the statesman he is supposed to be instead of dragging it through the already overstrained police and courts system is further evidence he is not suitable for this important job.

Somebody will need to be held accountable for all of this when it’s finally over. Not only for the costs to the Territory, but the reputational damage as well.