ANALYSIS: Territory Labor knew it was coming a couple weeks ago, most likely for much longer, but that didn’t stop their elected members and backroom boys and girls from engaging in their trademark collective disassociation from reality.

Nicole Manison was last week telling anyone who would listen that Labor was back in, with their boy Shlok Sharma – the ALP’s Wanguri candidate and overall NT campaign manager – a shoe-in in that safe Labor seat and running a smooth campaign that would see Labor retain government. They even convinced some political pundits that Labor would win. That Labor would win!

But the reality was much different and their volunteers knew it. Even Shlok did, as he frantically phoned around to the northern suburb’s Greek community and other powerful voting groups, looking to wheel and deal and make them an offer they couldn’t refuse in exchange for their support in the last week of the campaign.

But the swing was on and all of Labor’s last ditch efforts proved fruitless. There was just no way to tell how big and devastating the swing would be because everyone kept quiet after performing their civic duty.

Real Territorians know how to suffer adversity, but a corrupt government that continued to lie, continued to serve its own interests and failed to address the community’s problems will not be tolerated and treated as rubbish, the kind you take out on a Saturday afternoon.

“They have the baseball bats out for us,” one poor Labor campaigner in Darwin’s northern suburbs was overheard saying a couple weeks back.

The revolt was quiet and ruthless.

Labor was stripped of their heartland of the Darwin northern suburbs in such a jolting and unforgiving manner that it will take years for them to process it all.

Most of those from the Gunner-Fyles years, as they will come to be known, suffered humiliating defeats.

There is no greater current example of Labor’s arrogance than Natasha Fyles, who was forced to resign in disgrace last December, but played the public for fools by running again in Nightcliff, where she attempted to distance herself from her own leadership by refusing to say if she personally supports the Middle Arm petrochemical hub and hoping that would get her re-elected. Unfortunately it may have, but not without Fyles suffering on camera for the first time ever what humans know as humility, when it looked like her safe seat was gone as well.

Other Labor ministers like Joel Bowden and Brent Potter – who fancied themselves the next rightful inheritors of Labor – were turfed unmercifully and for the same reasons. One lost to an independent and the other possibly a Greens candidate to rub in just how despised they were by the public, with both polling third in their electorates.

Then there was Kate Worden and Lauren Moss, two more ministers in safe suburban seats, who did not see what hit them coming on Saturday night.

The carnage was devastatingly brutal and somehow beautiful in its fury and righteousness. Most of the Labor bastards who thought they owned the Territory were put in their place when the public was done with them.

But the CLP did not win this election. Labor lost it by their own conduct over the last eight years, including during the last four, reinforced by their ministerial shenanigans earlier this year being exposed by this masthead, and every other scandal before. They had corrupted their core Labor values.

It was Labor’s culture that Territorians rejected. The lying, the arrogance and the stink of corruption.

This was the 2016 CLP bloodbath all over again and for much of the same reasons, but specifically for a party that claimed eight years ago it would restore integrity in government.

During her election night concession speech, Eva Lawler opined that voters had made their decision a “long time ago”.

That’s true as Gunner and Fyles disgraced the Labor party at every turn, but Lawler needs to accept her own role in this humiliating and historic defeat. Aside from failing to show true leadership at every opportunity, when party men and public servants behaved badly, she chose to cover it up, deny it and accept no responsibility.

Then she moved Labor to the right, in an attempt to capture public anger and use it for her own ends, taking out radio ads playing up her illegal curfew in Alice Springs, as proof she was moving the party into the CLP’s domain of being “tough on crime”.

The Chief Minister was promoting the fact she broke the law because she thought it would play well to the masses.

Then there was one of Lawler’s bad boys flashing his toothy grin to the cameras Saturday night, after winning his clearly unlosable seat of Gwoja, smugly indicating he will be the next Opposition leader.

Fat chance, Chansey.

What a decimated team Labor has now. It’s looking like the so-called “black caucus” that helped Lawler get in as Chief is all that remains, with Paech, presumptive opposition leader Selena Uibo, Dheran Young and Manual ‘Killer’ Brown, rounded out by political outcast Fyles.

That might be laughable politically, with so many poor performers and despised individuals, but Labor did it to themselves and deserve this rabble.

The party of the northern suburbs woke up on Sunday with only one Darwin seat to its name.

A drubbing like this is clearly not about a single issue

This big a defeat is not all about the crime crisis, despite what some have claimed. Does anyone really believe the CLP and Lia Finocchiaro can fix that crisis with more jails for children, more cash in cops’ pockets and dubious “legislation”?

Election night was about turfing a bad government who failed to hear the public and their concerns about crime, most definitely, but also a government that became what they hated the most: the previous Giles CLP government, which was defeated as badly at the 2016 election.

The CLP’s boring and evasive 2024 election campaign has left us all with serious questions about what we just voted in and how it will function in government.

There is nothing for CLP campaign manager Alyson Hannam to be proud of in the campaign, which amounted to hiding out in a closet and hoping the public would vote a bad government out.

Those of us who remember the Giles CLP days cringed when party president Shane Stone took to the stage ahead of Lia Finocchiaro’s victory speech to bask in the limelight of the party’s victory himself on Saturday night. It was unprecedented, but completely in keeping with the Country Liberal Party.

If that wasn’t a stark enough reminder of the misogyny and dysfunction of the old CLP, Stone doubled down by raising the spectre of Foundation 51 founder Graeme Lewis – a man, who if he wasn’t dead, might well be in jail, if the NT had some sort of body that effectively dealt with corruption.

Lewis has been dead for more than six years, but somehow he contributed to the CLP’s victory, Stone told everyone, we’re guessing in the form of a bequest of cash to the party in somebody else’s name.

As the NT Independent editorial on Friday suggested, for the sake of our democracy we wanted to see a CLP minority, propped up by independents who would ensure that party politics were taken out of policy making, with real change forced upon the party system that has brought us to the perilous state we are in.

The role of independents like Robyn Lambley, Yingiya Guyula and probable new independent Justine Davis, along with potential NT Greens member Suki Dorras-Walker, will be crucial to holding this government to account.

Finocchiaro has her work cut out for her now, including dealing with the good old boys and the other sleazes we can hear slithering to the surface looking for cushy political-appointment jobs the CLP is known for, on top of the mounting problems we currently face.

She would be wise to remember that the risk of instability in the ranks increases the more members a party has, as the CLP has shown us before.

This election was one for the ages and a new benchmark in Territory politics. Territorians showed again that they will not suffer incompetence and corruption in their government.

But there is something more menacing about these results and it is something the CLP should note.

The voters have wielded their power and won’t be afraid to do it again just as devastatingly in four years if this new CLP government gets up to its old antics. What we need in the meantime are more options outside the major party system.

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.