Independent Member for Goyder Kezia Purick will retire from politics at the August election, after 16 controversial years in NT Parliament, highlighted by her sensational resignation as speaker in 2020 after an ICAC report found she engaged in “corrupt conduct”.

Ms Purick, who suffered a massive 23.9 per cent swing against her by rural voters at the 2020 election, made the announcement on Mix 104.9 Thursday morning.

“I’ve done my bit,” she said.

“It’s time for someone else to step up. I’m stepping out … I’m just going away. I’m not going far. But it’s just time for me. And it’s time for my family.”

Ms Purick, 66, said she was inundated with support and “love hearts” from her supporters after announcing her retirement.

“It will be sad. I mean, I’m still around for another six months or something, looking after people in the rural area because there is a lot of challenges still there,” she said.

Ms Purick first entered politics as a CLP member at the 2008 election, but was caught leaking information about the CLP’s policies directly to Labor after she felt snubbed when then-CLP chief minister Terry Mills gave the deputy role to Robyn Lambley over her in 2012. She quit the CLP in 2015.

In 2017, Ms Purick was caught up in a scandal involving the use of taxpayer funds to pay for Commonwealth Parliamentary Association events and putting reimbursements into a bank account she and former clerk Michael Tatham managed “for general purposes”.

The 2020 ICAC report found she had engaged in “corrupt conduct” when she used public resources as speaker to interfere in the establishment of a new political party run by Mr Mills and Ms Lambley and then lied about it.

Ms Purick has attempted to rehabilitate her public image in recent years with frequent appearances on Katie Woolf’s daily radio show following the damning report.

She has spent most of the last four years outside the speaker’s chambers railing against the Office of the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption. She had claimed on the day she resigned as speaker that she had not been afforded procedural fairness – a claim that has not been backed up with evidence – and that was repeatedly rejected by former ICAC Ken Fleming. The report into her conduct remains on the ICAC’s website.

Ms Purick once told the NT News that she had reached an out-of-court settlement with the ICAC in relation to the report into her conduct, but that has never been confirmed by anyone other than her and terms of any alleged settlement have not been disclosed. She had taken legal action to prevent Mr Fleming from referring her to the DPP for charges and claimed that some of the information used in the investigation was protected under parliamentary privilege.

In early 2020, while knowingly under investigation by the ICAC, Ms Purick attempted to establish and sit on a parliamentary committee that would have oversight of the anti-corruption body.

Ms Purick also came under fire for hefty liquor expenses she charged taxpayers while in the speaker role as revealed in an NT Independent investigation, including tens of thousands of dollars on bottle shop runs, and $100,000 for special dinner parties for herself and preferred social groups, over a span of three years.

She most recently attracted controversy last year, when she accepted an all-expenses paid trip by Big Tobacco to attend a tobacco conference in Seoul, Korea where she claimed on a panel that the Australian Cancer Council and the Heart Foundation are opposed to vaping because they “don’t have enough evidence” about the dangers of e-cigarettes.

She later suggested to conference attendees that “prescription vaping can be a part of a solution to the issue [of smoking] in Aboriginal communities”.

Her unfounded claims about the Cancer Council and the Heart Foundation were strongly rebuked by both organisations that had to publicly state their advice to the public was based on facts and science.

Ms Purick was narrowly re-elected to her seat of Goyder at the August 2020 NT general election despite the massive 23.9 per cent swing against her by voters.