Kenneth Charles Fleming KC, the Northern Territory’s first Independent Commissioner Against Corruption, died in Brisbane on 18 April, aged 77. It was my pleasure and privilege to work as a researcher on his team.

Fleming’s Northern Territory appointment was a microcosm of his greater career, one that centred on his commitment to justice and the rule of law.

The son of an oft-posted lay pastor, he was born somewhere in Queensland in November 1946.

He graduated from the University of Queensland with a Bachelor of Laws in 1975 and, having completed Articles of Clerkship, was admitted to practice as a Barrister in Queensland in 1976.

That launched him into a mixed legal practice covering family, civil and criminal matters in Australia and providing advice on cases in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.

In 1988, he was appointed Queen’s Counsel by which time he’d litigated in all Australia’s major courts and those of Vanuatu and Solomon Islands.

As a QC his practice shifted to matters under appeal, which is the normal course for senior counsel.

In 1999, Fleming was appointed Senior Trial Attorney by the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).

In essence, he was responsible for the prosecution of individuals who were, in 1994, Ministers in the Rwandan government alleged to have conspired to commit genocide.

There followed a number of other ICTR appointments together with appointment as an Interim Prosecutor in the Special Court of Sierra Leone.

The cases involved were certainly not for the faint-hearted and following their conclusion, he was involved in restructuring Ethiopia’s legal services before returning to his practice at the Queensland Bar in 2003.

There he continued work for and on behalf of his international colleagues, including teaching legal students and practitioners in the jurisdictions in which he’d been earlier involved.

This international experience gave rise to a number of conference speaking engagements and teaching in Australian law schools in which his areas of expertise included genocide, advocacy and ethics.

His appointment as the Northern Territory’s inaugural ICAC was on the recommendation of an independent advisory panel comprised of the NT’s leading jurists.

Following the turmoil of 2012-16 CLP governments, Michael Gunner’s victory for the ALP was claimed after a campaign of “restoring integrity to government”, central to which was the creation of ICAC.

When Attorney-General Natasha Fyles moved the motion to appoint Fleming in May 2018, she said:

“Investors need transparency and accountability to invest.

“Businesses need to know that winning contracts is about what you know and do, not who you know.

“Integrity builds our reputation nationally and globally.

“We must acknowledge that the chaos and turmoil in the past left businesses without confidence…

“Many of the huge challenges we face, from youth justice to remote housing and delivering better health and education outcomes for our kids, require trust and confidence between the government and community.

“Trust and integrity are the foundations for a healthier, smarter, safer, more sustainable and prosperous Territory.”

The Assembly unanimously supported the motion after which the imprimatur of the Administrator was required (and forthcoming).

Ken Fleming commenced as Commissioner on 2 July 2018 and retired in July 2021, two years before his appointment expired.

While he had many professional talents, including being a gracious and gregarious leader, becoming a public servant—albeit wholly independent—was not one of them.

He did not suffer fools and deeply resented any real or apparent politically motivated intrusion; several fiery appearances before parliamentary committees are testamentary to his levels of discomfiture.

And he was to discover how ruffling feathers in a small jurisdiction can resonate in unexpected ways, principally because of the sole degree of separation.

Perhaps most famously, Fleming had to stand aside from oversight into a police shooting at Yuendumu after ill-considered words to a protesting crowd in Alice Springs in 2019.

Some headlines he attracted were fair and reasonable coverage of his tenure as the NT’s inaugural ICAC, but they should not eclipse the power of work that Fleming and his team undertook, a smattering of which was publicly reported.

Nor should they eclipse the investigations that proved unfounded or vexatious and will never see the light of day; it was those invisible investigations that proved his fidelity to the principles of justice and the rule of law.

Vale Ken Fleming.

Dr Robyn Smith is a Conjoint Fellow at the University of Newcastle, a PhD (Political History), Master of Cultural Heritage and Bachelor of Arts (Journalism & Anthropology) from Darwin. She is well written on the history, heritage and politics of the Northern Territory and is presently researching frontier massacre sites in the Territory. She worked with Ken Fleming as a researcher in the Office of the ICAC.