Who is Adam GIles?

Photo courtesy of: CAAMA Radio, Alice Springs

Australia’s first Aboriginal head of a government has come to power, but under shady circumstances that are becoming all too common. This is not an Obama moment.

Adam Giles -- a friend of federal opposition leader Tony Abbott, a former staffer for John Howard, and once housing worker in the defunct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission -- is the 40-year-old Chief Minister of the Northern Territory.

He’s a politician I often spoke to in Alice Springs, where I reported for the local newspaper from 2008 to 2011.

Originally from the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Giles cut the figure of a Territory politician in RM Williams boots, blue jeans and a bold-striped shirt.

When asked on the street for a cigarette, he’d dish out two gold Winfields. His tipple is XXXX gold. He rides quadbikes and watches the offroad Finke Desert Race when it’s on.

His political aptitude is undoubted, Giles is fabled to have guided a brand new election strategy that snatched bush votes from Labor.

The strategy neutralised the Labor government of the day, who complacently relied on bush votes while spending on creature comforts in the leafy northern suburbs of Darwin.

But he’s now the leader of a fractious Country Liberal conservative party, moving ever further from its former identity.

Make no mistake, this is a good thing. In the swinging 80s the party was known for opposing land rights claims and fighting elections on race issues.

Now we have an aboriginal head of a 1.3 million square kilometre, sparsely populated jurisdiction of 212,000 people, about a quarter or 56,000 of whom are Aboriginal according to the 2011 census.

We are warned not to think about the government in racial terms. Giles, in his first outing said he was governing for all Territorians.

"We operate in an era of reconciliation. We are all trying to provide opportunities for Indigenous Australians to compete at the same level as all Australians."

"I'm no different. I've got here on my own, I’ve got here with the support of my family and I'm in this position now as the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, not the Indigenous Chief Minister of the Northern Territory."

Speaking for the first time publicly on the steps of Parliament House this week, he abolished the Aboriginal advancement portfolio.

“Indigenous affairs is mainstream.” said Alison Anderson who held the portfolio, “It’s everybody’s business to look after Aboriginal people. We are 30 per cent of the population. You don’t have 70 per cent of the population have a whitefella minister do you?” she said.

“There’s not a black or a white way to do things, there’s a right way to do things.”

These words speak volumes about the makeup of Giles’ party and its priorities.

There are the Aboriginal MPs that appear to vote as a bloc, Alison Anderson, Bess Price, Francis Xavier and Larisa Lee.

With 16 government MPs in the 25 seat parliament their four votes have the capacity to change laws. If they don’t like it, they can threaten to leave, as they have done in the past.

The challenge of service delivery in that fundamentally difficult part of the world gave Giles and his old political partner Anderson, ammunition against the previous government.

Between them they stoked a fire, claiming government waste in aboriginal housing programs in the bush communities.

They would walk the violent streets of Alice Springs with journalists, where children roamed until morning and stabbings were commonplace, to bruise the previous government on law and order issues, and truancy.

She calls him “brother”, but a week ago called him “little boy” and chastised him for his part in a prior leadership challenge, this seven-month old government’s second.

Having Anderson in the government is an unfolding story. She flip-flops. There appears to be no alliance she isn’t prepared to sacrifice. Her loyalty was tested when she was a minister in the previous Labor government, famously moving to the cross benches and contributing to the Labor government’s spiral into minority.

But this move was seen as her showing her true loyalty for the Country Liberals.

Back on the parliament steps, Giles used the same sentiment that Prime Minister Julia Gillard expressed when she won the party’s support from Kevin Rudd.

“We had lost our way as a government,” he said. He denied the existence of a coup plot to oust his "friend", former chief minister Terry Mills.

"I'm sorry for Terry to hear this news while he is overseas," Giles said, referring to the circumstance under which he came to rule.

A former school principal turned politician, Mills was at the Japanese headquarters of electronics giant JVC spruiking the NT and its stable (it had only had two leadership challenges by then) seven-month old government when his deputy called with the news.

His deputy, former policeman Willem Westra van Holte, was only in the job for six days since the prior leadership challenge before Giles’ plot matured.

It was enough time for van Holte to appear on the front cover of the Katherine Times newspaper declaring a win for his home town. His was a lightning-fast term in a government role.

Mr. Giles, backed by the bush MPs, booted Mills in his absence, reportedly to avert a move to install a different MP as chief minister.

It all occurred in the lee of the leadership storm in Victoria, where Ted Baillieu stepped down and new Liberal Premier Denis Napthine ascended, and while the shadowy ballet between Kevin Rudd and the Prime Minister who dumped him, Julia Gillard, continues to play out. It is to my curious mind linked.

It’s called the New South Wales Disease now, since NSW Labor churned through four premiers in a race to the bottom which trashed the party brand in the late 2000s. A governing party is free to boot their leader mercilessly mid-term.

It seems the will of the voter no longer registers. Once, a party would slice away dead skin in the wilderness of opposition. Not any more.

The audacious new political narrative states that a purple patch of polling brings on the axe.

Mills was interviewed in Tokyo and in his steady, philosophical manner answered a question on whether there was an "Aboriginal dynamic" emerging in his party. He said: "There are some who have been quite determined to make a change. They now have the support to allow them to live with that change."

Now Giles and his government is in charge of closing the gap on Indigenous disadvantage. It’s the rope that might hang him.

@dandotmoss