ANALYSIS: Social media “bro” and NT Police Minister Brent Potter thought he had buried his past in July 2022 when then-chief minister Natasha Fyles made the Captain’s Pick that overruled the Labor Party to preselect him for the Fannie Bay by-election.

The vitriolic posts shared on Facebook between 2013 and 2019 weren’t deleted then because he was ashamed of them – they were still on his page in 2022 – they were deleted because killing them is what served him and the Labor Party at the time.

It was a clear path to power for a man with no job prospects just two years earlier, before his sister-in-law secured him the sweet gig on the fifth floor in 2020, as “senior” adviser to the deputy chief minister and eventually the chief minister.

It was in this role that he attempted to line his own pockets by purchasing shares in a government-backed Major Project in 2021 and also played a key role in securing $10 million in public funds for his former boss’s new company to “build” amphibian airplanes, despite the company to date never having built a single plane and pulling a similar stunt in NSW where it claimed it would contribute $100 million to the state economy.

It isn’t just that Potter exudes toxic frat-boy energy with strong Manchurian candidate vibes that’s unnerving, it’s his documented conduct over many years that causes the most concern. The racist and derogatory posts are the latest, that fill in a few missing years, and present the man in full.

His short time in public life paints the portrait of a type of low-level grifter, a confidence man, who found his way into Territory Labor because it benefitted him, rather than because of a belief in the party’s values and policies. What has become of the party was all too happy to take the smooth-talking charlatan in.

He repeatedly and with great relish mocked Labor values and policies in the years leading up to his adviser gig – amongst the racist and homophobic stuff – while also posting offensive material punching down on just about everyone who isn’t a “bro” like him.

As Potter discovered this week, your sordid history cannot be deleted online with the push of a button and those social media posts that he thought were hidden were instead splashed all over the NT Independent website on Wednesday and Thursday, spanning a six-year period when Potter was 25-to-31-years-old, exposing more about him than he ever wanted the public to know.

This is not about the culture police coming for him for a one-time error in judgment, it’s about revealing who he really is and what he stands for. And what this shows is a man capable of saying and doing anything – even posting Nazi memes about wanton killing and calls to arrest Jews for practicing their religion, while denigrating women and posting slurs against gay men, while promoting his own brand of “toxic masculinity”.

He publicly apologised on Thursday after his failed excuse on Wednesday that the posts were some sort of high “satire” and shared amongst veterans who would “get them” because he was an ADF member at the time and it was the ADF that made him that way.

On Thursday, he presented contrition and apologised at the press conference, while saying the words battered women across the world have heard forever: “All I can say is that since then, there’s been a lot of growing done; I’ve changed”.

But he also continued to blame the ADF for creating him and “requiring a certain type of person”, essentially claiming that he had recently de-programmed himself.

That press conference raised more questions than it answered and did nothing to restore public confidence in Territory Labor’s confidence man.

He essentially shit in a sack and handed it to the Chief Minister to deal with.

Unfortunately, Eva Lawler, despite being given every chance to do the right thing, has shown to date she is incapable of managing this, despite earlier this week calling people who share hate speech online “cowards” and vowing to not tolerate racism in the Northern Territory.

For Lawler, it was either get rid of Potter on principle and deal with the criticism of a disorganized and dysfunctional Cabinet, or keep him and deal with the criticism of hypocrisy for protecting a man who for many years, into his 30s, posted hurtful and hateful comments repeatedly and with no remorse until he was called out for it.

But Potter also showed he was willing to hijack the party publicly, claiming during the press conference that Labor and Fyles knew about his posts and that Fyles made the call to let him run as a Labor candidate despite clearly never having held Labor values.

This throws the party into his stinky sack and makes it harder to boot him without the party accepting it knowingly allowed a man who posted misogynistic, racist and homophobic content over many years to run as its candidate and then promoted him into Cabinet.

Just last month, Potter was attacking the CLP’s Josh Burgoyne for not revealing the details of a car crash he allegedly caused that injured two people. But where was he or Labor in 2022, to come clean and own up to the disgusting comments and publicly disavow them before he was elected?

Just last year, the party also hid Member for Arafura Manuel Brown’s driving conviction for killing a woman with his car, then permitted him to lie about it after the NT Independent revealed the scandal. It seems cover-up of candidates’ past is standard party policy.

Potter a punchline for police after massive hypocrisy and creating double standard

NT Police Association president Nathan Finn is quite right to suggest the police rank-and-file have lost all respect for Potter and the Chief Minister at this stage.

Finn revealed Potter had become a punchline in the office, given the hypocrisy of him saying as late as Monday that he will not tolerate racism, when the posts on Tuesday showed something quite different, including the one where his wife casually used the n-word that the Minister had permitted on his page for years.

“It’s the Potter calling the kettle black,” Finn said on Mix 104.9 on Thursday.

Coming back from that is impossible for a politician. It makes Potter’s role as Minister completely untenable. He simply does not have the confidence of the police force to continue in the role.

Part of Potter’s problem is he cannot be trusted to be truthful and disregards facts that don’t align with his script.

When presented with those facts, Potter refused to acknowledge them on Thursday. He constantly said the offensive posts were all posted while he was in his 20s – at one point even claiming he was 20 at the time. This is untrue.

A number of posts, bashing Labor and promoting “toxic masculinity” over feminism were made in 2019 when Potter was 31. He agreed at one point that his current age is 36, but when asked to subtract five, he refused to admit it.

He even set up a scenario in which he claimed to have become more left-leaning as he grew older – a type of political Benjamin Button – contravening the old adage that most people become more conservative as they get older. At this rate, by the time Potter is in his 50s, he’ll be organising protests and smoking weed in a van.

But that’s if anyone actually believes he has changed. The only change we saw this week was his story, the story of a man who has proved through his actions since hooking up with the fifth floor gang that he only has self-interest at heart.

The best punchline was delivered by the Police Minister himself during the press conference on Thursday, when he was asked why he was in the Labor Party after showing it such utter contempt over many years.

“But I found a group of people that I best align [with in Territory Labor],” he said.

Which, as we told him when we were done laughing, we believe entirely and might be the most honest thing he has ever said, given this arrogant and out-of-touch government – a group that protected a paedophile in its ranks, stole money from taxpayers to fund their last election campaign, built a grandstand through corrupt means and lied to Territorians repeatedly about everything from crime to their budget figures.

Territory Labor hasn’t had values since before Michael Gunner and his crew desecrated it over the same years Potter was mocking it while posting his racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic content. Possibly the only objective left is individual self-survival ahead of an election.

Any hope that Eva Lawler can restore even a modicum of integrity for Labor before that is fading fast.

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.