Everybody knows that things are very different in the NT but it now seems that NT Chief Minister Adam Giles has joined a certain Federal senior politician in having an elevated sense of the importance and role of politicians. In an interview with local ABC Radio in Darwin reported yesterday Giles waxed all lyrical like on the vexed issue of politician’s entitlements and the very, very important work that politicians do while far away from home. Giles was responding to claims by former CLP minister Robyn Lambley, who told the ABC that, when it came to ministerial travel in the NT “”You can go in any direction, with who you want, for as long as you want … usually the Chief Minister approved it.”

Earlier she had told Richard Margetson on ABC morning radio that she had been “directed” by Adam Giles to take a fact-finding trip to Istanbul just weeks before being sacked from as Health Minister. The ABC reported that Giles defended taking spouses or partners on ministerial travel in certain circumstances. Giles also displayed some apparent confusion with the notion of the separation of powers within the–admittedly confusing–political system in the NT, telling the ABC that: “I know that many politicians spend a lot of time away from home and they have a lot of regal responsibilities that they have to do,” he said.

Giles’ comments follow a spray delivered to a Darwin shock jock by Deputy Chief Minister Dave Tollner in late June that the prospect of an ICAC in the NT would ” … undermine the supremacy of your parliament.”

A local wag has suggested that henceforth Mr Giles, currently referred to formally as the Honourable Adam Graham Giles MLA, be from this time on be referred to as “The Right Honourable His Excellency Prince Adam of Braitling.”

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