Brett Dixon joins the chorus of people calling on them to clear the air about their decision making process in cabinet that led to the Turf Club receiving a $12m grant to build grandstand

Darwin Turf Club chairman Brett Dixon has turned up the heat on the NT government by joining the chorus of people calling on them to clear the air about their decision making process that led to the club receiving a $12m grant to build its grandstand.

• READ THE FULL STATEMENT: Brett Dixon responds to ICAC’s grandstand investigation

DARWIN Turf Club (DTC) chairman Brett Dixon has turned up the heat on the NT government by joining the chorus of people calling on them to clear the air about their decision making process in cabinet that led to the club receiving a $12m grant to build a grandstand.

In an 11-page statement released late on Monday, Mr Dixon said the decision by the Chief Minister Michael Gunner and his cabinet ministers to give the DTC $12m was made the same morning the DTC submitted its submission for funding support.

Mr Dixon said he signed the DTC’s submission for NT government funding support on the morning of June 13 and it was approved a few hours later by NT cabinet ministers.

In the statement, he described the same day response as “so sudden and unexpected”.

“I maintain that the findings made against me of ‘corrupt conduct’, ‘misconduct’ and a ‘breach of public trust’ are untenable and I have today commenced judicial review proceedings out of the Supreme Court against the ICAC to quash them,” Mr Dixon said in the statement.

“I didn’t make the decision to award a government grant. Yes, I attempted to persuade and I pestered and I garnered support for something I saw great value in for the Territory, but it was always for others to decide if they deemed it worthy.

Michael Gunner and Brett Dixon.

“I do not know what material cabinet considered beyond the submission provided by the management of the club,” Mr Dixon’s statement says.

“ … the workings of cabinet are the subject of a claim for public interest immunity so they can’t be inquired into and they cannot be reported on, unless of course the government waives that immunity in the interests of transparency.

“The government hasn’t done that. Instead it has sat back and watched others, including its own employees, who were just doing what was expected of them, be publicly humiliated and it has then exploited a process it was immune from to demand the resignations of hard working volunteers.”

The Territory’s former corruption watchdog Ken Fleming found five people, including Mr Dixon, fellow DTC board member Damien Moriarty and Mr Gunner’s former chief of staff Mr Alf Leonardi, engaged in improper conduct following his investigation into the NT government’s awarding of a $12m grandstand grant to the DTC in June 2019.

Mr Dixon said he was subjected to a witch hunt and forced to submit to a closed-door process, dressed up as an objective inquiry, that was intimidatory and unfair and at the end of which a report was published that “distorts facts and ignores others”.

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He said the ICAC report “manipulates the truth”.

“I did not ask for any favours,” Mr Dixon said in his statement.

“The government could have dismissed my approach, but instead they enthusiastically embraced it. I cannot speak for why they did so.

“I did no more than follow the suggestions I received from the government all along.”

Mr Dixon wants a police investigation into the ICAC report process and for the new NT corruption watchdog Michael Riches to investigate the “apparent leaking” of confidential evidence that he says only the ICAC office was in possession of but has been published by an online media outlet.

Mr Dixon said he had reported the matters to the NT Police and “trust that they will be investigated with the same vigour that the ICAC investigated me”.

In his statement, he refers to seized audio recordings of DTC board meetings “which somehow have turned up in the hands of one media outlet”.

He also said critical words were omitted from a text message that was published in the final ICAC report and then in a subsequent media article.

As further evidence of “leaking”, Mr Dixon said a series of words omitted by the ICAC from a text message he was sent “fundamentally undermine the interpretation the ICAC put on the text in the report”.

Mr Dixon highlighted a “media outlet and its associates” that claimed “to have seen a text message from my mobile telephone which I was forced to hand over to ICAC during this process”.

“Part of the text message is quoted in the final ICAC report … The quoted section in the ICAC report omits key words which follow and which fundamentally undermine the interpretation the ICAC put on the text in the report,” Mr Dixon says.

“While not identified in the ICAC report, the sender of this message has since been identified by a media outlet which claims to have ‘seen … the original message referred to in the ICAC report’ and ‘confirmed through various sources’.

“It wasn’t confirmed by me or the sender. So who was it? Who else could have access to it? Why is the quote from the message in the ICAC report incomplete?

“Why is what is quoted by these media outlets as a complete faithful reproduction of the entire text missing the same words omitted in the ICAC report?”