A look back at some of the more curious entries in the death records of the Northern Territory from the early years of last century.

Adam Giles has to restore credibility to the troubled CLP government, which last week he described as “divided” and “in crisis” under former Chief Minister Terry Mills.

Newly-appointed NT Treasurer John Elferink has banned departmental staffers from supporting their minister during Estimates hearings. Will this shed more light on government processes or draw a veil across democracy in the NT?

Terry Mills has travelled to Japan to find some gas for the NT and promote the NT economy. Will he still have a job when he gets back?

For mine, Anderson used “boys” and “little boys” as dog-whistles to the broader Aboriginal community in the NT to send a barely-encoded message that the pretenders to the Mills throne are no more than boys, uncircumcised (or sub-incised) grown men unworthy of consideration as men.

Yesterday afternoon the slow moving train wreck that is the Northern Territory Country Liberal Party government led by Terry “Freckles” Mills drove itself over a cliff. Just six months old and riddled with in-fighting and struggling to get a message — any message — across, the CLP may soon split into a smattering of fringe [...]

Previous CLP Governments under Marshall Perron and Shane Stone, including the still involved Barry Coulter would not have hesitated to support Pacific Aluminium. The current Chief Minister’s risk adverse dithering stands in stark contrast to the “we can and will do it” attitude of his precedessors.

In 1963 I signed the historic bark petition which opposed the Gove refinery and bauxite mine and started the land rights movement, and which is now displayed in Parliament House, Canberra. In 2011 I signed the historic mining agreement with Rio Tinto Alcan which guarantees the refinery and bauxite mine for another 42 years. How the wheel turns!

Gillard’s clumsy attempt to thwart the NT Labor Party’s pre-selection process may have the good and the great shouting Peris’s name from the rooftops as a political masterstroke by Gillard. It will play well down south but in the NT – where we’ll have to make the choice to vote for her or not – it may just be seen as a cruel and cynical attempt to make a dish of very cold revenge of Trish Crossin and take a dump in the local party’s lap at the same time.

For mine we need more Little Pricks puncturing the speech bubbles, cant and spin of politicians and to provide some much needed levity into political debates that are all too often almost impossibly obscure and removed from our blunted daily realities.