Former NT Attorney-General John Elferink calls for axe to drop on ICAC Former NT Attorney-General John Elferink calls for axe to drop on ICAC

A former Northern Territory Attorney-General has called for the winding up of the NT’s corruption watchdog ICAC saying it has been a complete waste of time and money. Find out why.

Former Attorney-General John Elferink leaves the NT Supreme Court after giving evidence to the Royal Commission into youth detention.

Former Northern Territory Attorney-General John Elferink has called for the winding up of the NT’s corruption watchdog ICAC, saying it has been a complete waste of time and money.

Mr Elferink, who was a Minister in the former Giles CLP Government, said for an organisation that spends $6m each year ICAC has fallen short of expectations.

“It’s time to wind ICAC up and return that money to the NT Police fraud squad and Ombudsman they can cover the field as they always had done in the past,” he said.

Mr Elferink said that while Attorney-General in August 2015 he indicated in an article that the NT’s various law enforcement bodies were up to their respective tasks and that they had been doing their work properly.

John Elferink, former NT police officer and MLA in Adelaide. Picture: Liam Mendes / The Australian

“The McRoberts conviction and the investigations into the pensioner travel concession schemes bore that out, at the time, without reference to an ICAC,” Mr Elferink said.

He was referring to the former Northern Territory police commissioner, John McRoberts, who was jailed in June 2018 for 12 months after being found guilty of attempting to pervert the course of justice.

“In that article I suggested that an ICAC would be substantially useless in the NT and given years of hindsight that appears to be the case.

“Despite numerous promises of results, the gravity of the matters uncovered frankly do not warrant the expenditure. The citizens of the NT don’t buy it either.

“The declaration by ICAC that a former Speaker was corrupt didn’t wash with the voting public in the year she was re-elected.

“She was returned by the voters in what is effectively exoneration by ballot box.

“The reason for it was that when the actual wrongdoing was considered by the voters the magnitude (or more to the point minortude) of her sins was well understood and led to the equivalent of an indifferent shrug by the electorate.”