ANALYSIS: Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro says she is “buoyed” by a six per cent swing towards the CLP at the federal election in Solomon, but a deeper look at what the voters in Darwin and Palmerston said with their ballots should cause the Country Liberal Party and its elected members grave concerns for their political futures.

While some would argue a federal election result should not be used to criticise the Territory Chief Minister, the party itself made it a referendum on Lia in Darwin and Palmerston and the results were damning.

Saturday’s federal election was held less than nine months after the CLP formed government through surprising gains in the Darwin northern suburbs, a result that it appears would not be replicated today if a Territory election were called.

There are a number of reasons for this, long time Territory political observers say, but the Chief Minister’s failure to clean up the perception of ongoing graft, corruption and nepotism in the Territory public service is weighing heavy on her and her colleagues and anyone else caught in the CLP orbit these days.

As bad as Peter Dutton’s disastrous election campaign was nation-wide, the CLP’s handling of the Solomon campaign was equally atrocious.

True to form, Lia – whose face was splashed on corflutes and other campaign material – did not take any responsibility for the Solomon disaster come Tuesday morning.

Ms Finocchiaro was asked by an ABC Radio Darwin listener what responsibility she takes for the loss, given “public dissatisfaction with the handling of the Waterfront Corporation and perceived employment nepotism within the NT [Public Service]”, but did not respond to the question, stating instead: “We’ve been very clear about how this is a huge swing towards the CLP – Lisa Bayliss did an excellent job”.

ABC Radio let her off of the hook without pressing for a credible answer to a simple question about whether the Chief Minister would accept responsibility for a failure.

This is exactly the attitude that led party rank-and-file members to move a no-confidence motion in Lia in June 2023 and shows she has not learned anything about leadership since.

In contrast to Finocchiaro’s claims of a swing toward the CLP, polling data shows in Darwin’s northern suburbs, it was actually a swing back towards Labor from the 2024 Territory election, with just about every northern suburbs polling place, bar two, voting for Labor ahead of the CLP. It also appears roughly 13,000 voters in the Darwin and Palmerston area, including some in the Chief Minister’s own electorate of Spillett, turned their support away from the CLP – a huge figure which would swing any number of electorates across the region in a Territory election.

This will cause considerable consternation inside the party wing, with the perception now that those northern suburb seats, such as Karama, Wanguri, Sanderson, Casuarina, Fong Lim and some Palmerston seats that led to the CLP forming government are suddenly shaky and that voters are already looking to go back to Labor or possibly try more independents at the next Territory election in three years.

Lia’s dismissal of evidence of potential corruption at the Waterfront Corporation where her husband works and benefitted from $400,000 of taxpayer money through higher duties allowances over six years, approved by mates with no oversight and contrary to recruitment rules, is just one problem for the CLP’s leader, that points to ongoing governance failures and long-standing issues with the Northern Territory that Lia has been more than happy to ignore completely and hope they all go away.

The CLP seem to forget Labor lost the last Territory election for that very reason and the distrust the public had in them to fix our problems rather than cover them up.

There was her botched handling of the previous police commissioner, her “tough on crime” bail legislation which was proven to be ineffective and only for show, and what the public sees as a failure to take real action on our problems and a continuation of everything that was wrong with Labor and the governments before them.

Then there’s the head-scratcher of why Lia would threaten the NT Police rank-and-file with removing government housing for Darwin officers as part of EBA talks just a week out from election day. It was especially bizarre given that the CLP had been trying to make law and order a federal campaign issue because they thought it would help Bayliss, a police union vice president, get elected.

‘Epic fail of the CLP’: Source

Picking a fight with the police union amid all the latest public safety turmoil and days out from an election was not politically wise and an explanation should be provided, at least to Bayliss and the rest of the party.

“Why Lia decided to have a barney with the cops over housing during the election is beyond me,” one party source said.

“An epic fail of the CLP. The campaign was misguided, featured poor strategy, and execution.

“They were focussed on pork barrelling Palmerston, and forgot about the city and remote areas.”

The unresolved issues that go to the public’s waning trust in its institutions have begun to sting, despite Lia’s insistence the public is not concerned about them.

“This was the election to knock over Labor, but due to Lia’s mishandling of the corruption issues, we’re quickly losing the confidence of Territorians,” the party source said.

“In opposition, we were sold a better NT, but none of that has been delivered under the Finocchiaro CLP administration. It’s all selfish lip service.”

Bayliss probably feels a lot like Belinda Kolstead right about now. Belinda was the independent candidate for Goyder at the last NT election who made the fatal mistake of hitching her wagon to Kezia Purick’s burnt-out star, allowing Purick to speak on her behalf in media interviews and interfere in her campaign enough to see her lose big at the polls.

The only explanation for why the CLP put Finocchiaro’s face on those corflutes next to Bayliss, and in radio and tv ads, was that they honestly believed Lia was a popular Chief Minister who the public adores. The results show how wrong that self-serving perception was.

While no elected member of the CLP wants to publicly comment on the disaster and what it means for Lia’s future as leader, there is already disquiet and has been for weeks, with many fully aware what the results now mean for all of their jobs. A lot of the blame has also been placed on Lia’s former chief of staff and 2024 CLP campaign manager Alyson Hannam, who was involved heavily in Bayliss’s flawed federal campaign and the only other person outside of Lia who so grossly misjudged Lia’s personal popularity.

The results should not be a surprise given that Lia did not win the Terriotry election; Labor lost it and for good reason.

What happens at the next election will most likely spell the end of the party duopoly we have here in the Territory that has led to our stagnating potential amid collusion and corruption with senior NT public servants who are more interested in what they can get out of this place for themselves than governing it effectively for the public they serve.

The Chief Minister said on ABC Radio Tuesday morning that the results show Labor “is on notice”. The actual results show it’s Lia who has now officially been put on notice. But what will the party do about it?

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’ about the last CLP government.