Burt the psychic crocodile doesn’t have a good track record picking Northern Territory elections. He got it badly wrong in 2016 and 2020. But in fairness, he’s not the only one who struggles to digest the eccentricities of “frontier” politics.
“Who’ll win the NT election? I’ve got no fucking idea,” writes Bob Gosford, who has been posting dispatches about the Territory for almost two decades in his blog The Northern Myth.
“Anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool, a liar or both.”
Territorians go to the polls on Saturday. Labor has been in power for eight years – Michael Gunner led the party to two election wins but resigned in 2022, exhausted from the pandemic.
Gunner’s replacement, Natasha Fyles, quit after just 18 months when online publication the NT Independent revealed she held undisclosed shares in a mining company.
When former school principal Eva Lawler became the new “chief”, as Territorians say, in December, Labor appeared to be heading towards a landslide loss. A Redbridge Group poll from August 2023 put primary support for the government at 19%.
“Lawler to her credit has steadied the ship,” Gosford tells Guardian Australia. “I don’t think anyone hates this government. And governments get thrown out when people hate them.”
Country Liberals confident in Darwin
The Country Liberal party, which governed the NT for 27 straight years before 2001, is banking on an “it’s time” factor to win back government and has been buoyed by more than 50,000 early votes being cast. In some electorates more than half of voters have already had their say.
The CLP holds seven seats and needs to flip six more to govern in an outright majority. Its campaign has been mainly focused in inner Darwin – the CBD seats of Port Darwin and Fong Lim – and in the capital’s northern suburbs.
“The swing is on in the northern suburbs,” a CLP figure says.
While the CLP appears to be in the contest, concerns remain about the effectiveness of its campaign outside Darwin, and the performance of the opposition leader, Lia Finocchiaro.
Internal critics of Finocchiaro point to the party’s results at various byelections during the past eight years – losing all four – and bucking a historical trend that when government MPs retire, voters usually swing hard against their party.
Most Territory campaigns focus on Darwin and its outer suburbs, but there are also sprawling “bush” seats that take in dozens of remote Aboriginal communities and small highway towns.
The last time the CLP won government, in 2012, the party unexpectedly won over the bush. This time party sources say the campaign outside Darwin has been “very underwhelming” and there are concerns that two remote seats – Barkly and Namatjira – could buck the Territory-wide trend and scupper hope of a majority.
Whatever happened to spicy NT politics?
Lawler has used her decision to implement a snap curfew in Alice Springs in April as part of her campaign advertising. She has repeated the line that it was a decision that “not everyone agreed with, even in my own party”.
Labor’s crime policies are pitched as “tough love”.
The CLP is promising new bail laws – which it says will be passed in its first week in office – including a presumption against bail for serious violent offences and repeat offenders, and making bail breaches by children an offence.
Environmental issues were thrust into the spotlight this week after a Four Corners report about the impact of a burgeoning cotton industry on the Territory’s water resources. The Environment Centre NT and the Arid Lands Environment Centre have called for a royal commission into “a fatally compromised system of land and water management”.
Gosford says environmental campaigners have become more effective and influential in the NT in recent years but that suggestions the Greens could win a seat are unlikely.
The Gunner government came to power in 2016 in a landslide that reduced the CLP to just two seats, after a term of government marked by integrity issues, personal scandals and power struggles.
Gunner deliberately set out to run a boring “no surprises” government but integrity and transparency concerns have come to plague Labor too.
The party established an Independent Commission Against Corruption, which would later investigate how government staffers spent nearly $15,000 on flights to remote communities, which coincided with mobile polling stations at the 2020 NT election.
In 2021 a Labor MP was exiled from the caucus after a situation dubbed in the NT parliament the “cocaine sex scandal”. Fyles resigned after her undisclosed shares were discovered. The police minister, Brent Potter, publicly apologised over past Facebook posts he admitted were “absolutely racist”.
All of which must make for a pretty spicy election, right?
Seasoned Territory poll watchers say it has been the opposite.
“Someone needs to check the election campaign to see if it still has a pulse,” says Christopher Walsh, the editor of the NT Independent.
Gosford says when he sat down to write an election preview he thought to himself: “I don’t think I’ve seen a more boring election than this one”.
“Give us a punch-up, give us a screaming match, give us tears … there’s nothing.
“The CLP has been campaigning since [the start of the year], they’ve been in campaign mode all that time. I think they’re just exhausted.”
Polling offers little guidance
Even Burt the crocodile seems to have given up trying to predict how Territorians will vote.
“We’ve retired him from any predications,” a spokesperson for Crocosaurus Cove says.
One of the biggest difficulties analysing NT politics is that Darwin is a particularly transient place. Some estimates suggest that up to half of the voters in Port Darwin – the CBD seat where most people live in city apartments – would have arrived in the Territory since 2020.
Party strategists say this might dull the mood for change in the electorate. It might also mean that voters have already forgotten the chaos and dysfunction of the Terry Mills-Adam Giles years that put the CLP into the political wilderness.
Polling is also intermittent and unreliable, given the vast makeup of the Territory, its remote communities and regional towns. Pollsters cannot get reliable data from the bush, so numbers are often skewed towards the big population centres and seats above the “Berrimah line”.
Another challenge is the size of the Territory’s electorates – most have fewer than 5,000 voters. The common wisdom is that this heavily favours incumbents, especially those who put in the effort to be seen each Saturday having a laksa at the local markets. The small seats encourage a sort of retail politics that cannot be captured by territory-wide polls.
Labor is particularly worried about the northern Darwin electorate of Wanguri – a seat it has held since 1989 – due to the retirement of Nicole Manison, the popular former treasurer. Manison holds Wanguri with a 17.3% margin.
ABC election analyst Antony Green has Wanguri among his seats to watch, despite the huge margin, due to Manison’s retirement. Commentator Malcolm Mackerras is predicting a very narrow CLP victory, including in Wanguri, but admits that prediction is made in the absence of any reliable polling.
“It’s just like a big local council and that’s where the hyperlocal [campaigning] comes in,” Gosford says.
“This would be the fourth time that the government has changed in the whole of the Territory’s self-government.
“I think Labor will get home, either a very narrow majority or a hung parliament. But that’s what I think today. If you ask me tomorrow you might get a completely different answer”.
