EDITORIAL: The Tanzil Rahman affair is turning into one of the more bizarre political scandals in recent NT political memory, made all the more absurd by Rahman’s refusal to provide any substantive comment for weeks concerning allegations he bullied female parliamentary staffers, letting the Chief Minister do the talking, whose handling of the matter has once again raised questions about her judgement, leadership and overall credibility.

The pressure on both Rahman and Lia Finocchiaro to explain was turned up a notch this week in Parliament when Speaker Robyn Lambley unleashed a calm but stinging rebuke of the Member for Fong Lim, urging him to drop the legal threats and apologise to the two staffers.

Nobody can say for sure who Rahman was threatening to sue in his poorly phrased and ill thought-out statement issued on International Women’s Day. Maybe everybody he feels crossed him.

But Lambley’s public dressing-down, intended or not, dispelled a few lies the Chief Minister has been throwing around, attempting to make it sound like it was being investigated by some independent body when claiming she couldn’t talk about a “sensitive HR matter”. There was no investigation and there never will be.

There is nothing preventing her from explaining the “serious allegations” against one of her MLAs that has already been made public and confirmed by those with knowledge of the matter.

The CLP used its numbers in Parliament to block a motion this week to refer Rahman to the Privileges Committee for investigation with no explanation. It was made clear there will be no oversight, outside of Lambley telling Parliament the matter had been resolved to her satisfaction as the defacto public employment commissioner for the Legislative Assembly and to the satisfaction of the two female staffers late last year.

Nobody will say how the matter was resolved and if there were any consequences for Rahman. And we now know that resolution did not include an apology or acknowledgement.

This is where the latest debacle gets stranger. The CLP controls the Privileges Committee and if they wanted to continue their deceptive approach they could have accepted the motion to refer him and eventually clear him of wrongdoing, all the while telling the public they can’t comment on a matter that’s under investigation.

It’s starting to appear Lia and her office want to see this particular scandal continue to bleed publicly, perhaps to let the party eventually disendorse Rahman as their candidate for Fong Lim when the time suits, while keeping him muzzled.

The failure to properly address this scandal is unusual on every political level, pointing again to dysfunction in the Chief Minister’s office, while raising questions about the stability of Lia’s leadership. Why would she not explain what action she took upon learning of the Rahman scandal rather than leaving all CLP MLAs to wear the latest example of inaction against men behaving badly?

Why have only two ministers in the last two months held a proper press conference?

The public would be right to infer something else is going on here that Lia doesn’t want exposed.

Rahman should also remember he was elected to serve the public and when “serious allegations” are made, he needs to front up and explain himself rather than issue vague statements about taking “legal action” in an attempt to silence everyone involved. A politician with a major platform to communicate to the public appears weak, arrogant and foolish when he threatens ambiguous legal action while declining to simply explain his actions.

Those actions, it has been reported, involved Rahman’s alleged verbal abuse and “losing his shit” against the two female parliamentary staffers on the committee he chaired tasked with reporting to the CLP Government on how it should legislate Voluntary Assisted Dying laws, which all involved indicated came amid intense pressure to produce a report under a tight deadline.

That rush is hard to understand and made all the more strange this week in Parliament when the government was unable to provide any definitive timeframe for when it plans to introduce those highly-anticipated VAD laws.

Chief Minister has history of protecting and covering up misconduct

The timing for Lia is not ideal, but it never is for a leader and it is hers to wear. Dragging this on is only compounding the larger problem.

After recently losing massive political capital for unilaterally selecting David Connolly as Administrator and fighting for him against common sense and decency – which saw her defend his racist, homophobic, and misogynistic social media posts and speeches – Lia has now shown she will take no action against a member who is alleged to have bullied women.

We previously mentioned the political poison Connolly’s appointment brought into the wider community, but it appears Lia is not done drinking it up.

It’s reminiscent too of her first real leadership test one year ago, when she was presented with an ICAC report that informed her the then-police commissioner engaged in misconduct involving “negligence and incompetence” and a misuse of public resources when he hired a mate for a senior role while attempting to make the hire look above board.

Her first instinct was to hide that it was Michael Murphy and play the investigation’s findings down as nothing more than an “educational tool” for public servants.

But once he outed himself as the unnamed “senior public officer”, Lia moved to terminate him, not because any new facts had been presented, but because the public and political pressure intensified after the revelation the police commissioner had engaged in misconduct, which she had known about for weeks.

Then there was the protection offered to Andrew Kirkman after a judge found he had bullied a female staffer and misled a court about it. We’re still not sure how many millions that cost taxpayers and why under this CLP Government he was not outright sacked for the misconduct, but instead moved around to a different department, although it’s unclear where now, presumably into some extra-secret consultancy role at the Darwin Waterfront Corporation.

Lia has shown she shares the same political instincts as former Labor chief ministers Michael Gunner, Natasha Fyles and Eva Lawler: delay, deny, cover-up and accept no responsibility.

That didn’t work for Labor either.