In March 2024, a day after formally opening an investigation into whether five Territory Response Group officers had lied under oath about a set of mock "awards" handed around their unit — including one printed on an Aboriginal flag — the Northern Territory's second Independent Commissioner Against Corruption, Michael Riches, made a private undertaking to the man whose officers he was about to investigate. He told NT Police Commissioner Michael Murphy he would not make adverse findings against the five, to avoid what he called "adversarial positions" that might slow the inquiry. Judge Patricia Kelly, the interstate jurist eventually brought in to finish the file, later found evidence that "tend[ed] to contradict" the officers' own sworn statements — but Riches' earlier pledge had by then made much of it unusable. On 14 November 2024 the ICAC closed the investigation, Operation Beaufort, with no adverse findings against anyone. It is a small scene from a small place, but it carries the whole argument of this article: in a Territory of roughly 265,000 people (approx.), where the corruption commissioner, the police commissioner and the people under investigation all move through the same handful of Darwin institutions, having a watchdog on paper is not the same thing as having one in practice.
That episode was one thread in a longer run of turmoil at the top of the Territory's anti-corruption office — turmoil that, across 2025 and 2026, gave the Finocchiaro CLP Government the case it needed to abolish the standalone Independent Commissioner Against Corruption (ICAC) altogether and fold it into a single new Integrity and Ethics Commission. Whether that was a genuine fix for a body that had stopped working, or a further concentration of power in a jurisdiction already too small and too close-knit to easily police itself, is the question this piece sets out to test.
A watchdog built on a chief justice's warning
The Northern Territory was one of the last Australian jurisdictions to create a standing anti-corruption body, doing so after a review by former NT Chief Justice Brian Martin AO QC, whose Anti-Corruption, Integrity and Misconduct Commission Inquiry report was tabled in the Legislative Assembly in May 2016; the Gunner Labor government accepted 50 of Martin's 52 recommendations in principle. The result was the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption Act 2017 (NT), passed in November 2017, giving the new office power to investigate "corrupt conduct" — behaviour serious enough to be a crime — alongside lesser categories of "misconduct" and "unsatisfactory conduct" across the public sector and local government. Kenneth Fleming QC was appointed the first Commissioner on 13 June 2018, started on 2 July 2018, and the office began accepting complaints on 30 November 2018 — more than a year after the Act passed, and over two years after Martin had reported.
Fleming's own term showed the friction this article is about. In 2019 he drew accusations of bias after telling an Alice Springs rally, held after a police shooting, that people contradicting a particular account of events were "guilty of corrupt behaviour" — remarks he later withdrew from acting on. He retired on 6 July 2021, roughly three years into the job. His replacement, Michael Riches, was recruited directly from South Australia, where he had been Deputy Independent Commissioner Against Corruption — a deliberate choice, given how few senior Territory lawyers lack local entanglements, to import independence rather than risk it.
Turnover, an eleven-month investigation, and a merger
Riches' own tenure ended over the question it began with: can a Territory-sized integrity system hold its own leadership to account? In June 2024, the NT Office of the Commissioner for Public Employment (OCPE) opened an investigation into workplace conduct allegations against him. Riches went on indefinite leave; Deputy Commissioner Naomi Loudon initially acted, before Finocchiaro appointed Greg Shanahan acting Commissioner in December 2024. The eleven-month OCPE investigation, completed 7 May 2025 and later published in redacted form, substantiated five of eight allegations and found four breaches of the ICAC's own code of conduct, including giving "inappropriate attention" to female staff; of eighteen staff interviewed, only three had anything positive to say about his leadership, and even they broadly corroborated the complaints. Riches resigned when Finocchiaro announced she would make the findings public, and the file went to the ICAC's own statutory watchdog, Sydney-based Inspector Bruce McClintock SC. Shanahan left the acting role on 31 August 2025 and Loudon resumed it — meaning the Territory's central integrity office ran under interim leadership for most of two years, from mid-2024 until the merged body stood up in 2026.
The government treated the Riches episode as proof the model itself, not just the appointment, had failed. In July 2025 Finocchiaro commissioned McClintock and the Hon Graham Hiley AM RFD KC, an acting NT Supreme Court judge, to review the Territory's four statutory integrity offices — the ICAC, the Ombudsman and Information Commissioner, and the Health and Community Services Complaints Commissioner. The review, conducted without public or independent stakeholder consultation, took about a month and found nine unfilled ICAC positions, chronic recruitment difficulty and reputational damage from repeated leadership gaps; it also argued no single Commissioner should have to combine deep legal expertise with the separate skills of running an agency. Finocchiaro tabled the review on 4 September 2025, telling Territorians the ICAC had cost taxpayers about $35 million (approx.) since 2018 amid a "continued loss of public confidence." The Legislative Assembly passed the Integrity and Ethics Commissioner Act 2025 on the night of 25 November 2025, merging all four bodies into one Commission under a single Commissioner, one chief executive and function-specific assistant commissioners; the Auditor-General's office was carved out and kept independent. The new body became operational in the first half of 2026. On 13 May 2026, Finocchiaro named former Ombudsman and Information Commissioner Peter Shoyer as the inaugural Integrity and Ethics Commissioner and former Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw as chief executive; McClintock — co-author of the closed-door review recommending the merger — was reappointed as the new body's Oversight Inspector.
The strongest case
A government that published its own appointee's failings, and a resourcing problem the merger genuinely answers
Credit belongs first to a government that never had to build any of this: the 2017 Act was Labor's initiative, following an independent review it did not have to commission and mostly implemented in full, giving the new office real coercive powers rather than the toothless "corruption prevention" model some smaller jurisdictions settled for, plus a statutory Inspector to watch the watchdog itself. Recruiting Riches from South Australia specifically to sidestep the Territory's small legal community was a serious, good-faith attempt to design around the exact conflict-of-interest risk this article is built on. What belongs to the Finocchiaro Government is not the Riches scandal — an appointment and workplace culture it inherited — but its decision to make the OCPE's findings public rather than quietly move him on, a choice a government with less to gain from the story could easily have avoided. The McClintock-Hiley review's central diagnosis is also hard to dismiss on the numbers: a Territory of roughly 265,000 people cannot easily resource four separate specialist integrity agencies, each recruiting from the same tiny pool of qualified staff, without the unfilled positions and leadership gaps that helped produce the Beaufort outcome. Sharing corporate services and investigative capacity across one commission, instead of four agencies competing for the same scarce staff, is a defensible response to genuine scale constraints — not obviously a pretext.
The evidence
The clearest evidence is the leadership timeline itself. Of the ICAC's roughly eight years of existence, from July 2018 to June 2026, close to thirteen months (approx.) were spent under an acting rather than a substantive Commissioner, on top of the further months Riches spent on leave before he resigned — and both of the office's two full-time appointees left under a cloud of some kind, one over a bias controversy, the other over a substantiated conduct finding.
Beyond the personnel record, the structural numbers point the same way. The Legislative Assembly's own Standing Committee on the ICAC — meant to scrutinise the Commissioner's performance and annual reports — is made up of three government members, one Opposition member and one crossbencher; with the CLP holding 17 of the Assembly's 25 seats outright, government members control the committee meant to hold their own government's watchdog to account, and there is no upper house anywhere in the Territory's Parliament to provide a second, independent check. On donations, the Territory's disclosure threshold — $1,500 a financial year since reforms recommended by the 2018 Mansfield inquiry took effect on 1 January 2020 — is tighter than the federal regime, evidence the same small Parliament has, at least once, voluntarily narrowed its own room to hide political money.
The critique
Judged against the government's own justification — a considered fix for a genuinely broken system — the process does not hold up. The McClintock-Hiley review was commissioned in July 2025, completed within about a month, consulted only the affected agencies' own staff, and was never shown to the public before Cabinet accepted its recommendations in full. The Centre for Public Integrity called the process "rushed and closed," urged the government to withdraw the bill for an open review, and warned that folding the Ombudsman's administrative-complaints function into a corruption investigator's office risks "confusing mandates" and creating exactly the self-investigation problem — an agency examining its own department — that separate bodies exist to avoid. The verdicts since have been similarly blunt: Transparency International Australia's Clancy Moore said the merger "creates obvious risks around conflict of interests and political interference" and called its funding a "critical weakness"; the Australian Democracy Network's Andrew Beaton called it "a dangerous concentration of power and weak oversight"; NAAJA, the Australasian Council of Auditors-General and former Commonwealth Ombudsman Allan Asher all rejected the bill; independent MLA Justina Davis said it "concentrates extraordinary power in one person and removes critical checks and balances"; Opposition Leader Selena Uibo said it "reduces oversight and opens up serious conflict of interest concerns." A bicameral parliament would have given this bill a second, independently elected chamber to slow it down. The Territory's single 25-seat chamber, with the CLP holding 17, needed only its own numbers — and passed it within three months of the review that recommended it.
The appointments that followed compound the concern. No advertised recruitment process for the chief executive role has been disclosed; the advisory panel that recommended Shoyer and Kershaw has not been made public beyond its chair, Justice Peter Barr; and the Act itself sets no requirement for open recruitment or published merit criteria for future appointments — nothing legally stops the next round being handled the same way. The small-jurisdiction irony is hard to miss: Kershaw, the new chief executive, is reported to be close personal friends with the sitting NT Police Commissioner, Martin Dole — precisely the entanglement the 2021 decision to import Riches from South Australia was designed to avoid, now sitting at the top of the merged watchdog.
Operation Beaufort shows what a single point of failure looks like. One Commissioner's private assurance to the Police Commissioner, made before any evidence had been gathered, was enough to make a genuine allegation of racism and false sworn statements practically uninvestigable. Nothing in the new Act's design — one Commissioner, one chief executive — removes that failure point; folding the Ombudsman, Information Commissioner and Health Complaints Commissioner into the same office means more of the Territory's integrity work now turns on one person's judgement, not four independent officers covering different ground.
A Territory that imported its second corruption commissioner from interstate to avoid conflicts of interest has just appointed a chief executive reported to be close friends with the police commissioner he may need to investigate.
The risk to the future
One office, one Commissioner, and no second chamber to test it
The merger has not yet been tested by a genuine crisis. Its design rests on the character of two people appointed through a process nobody outside government has seen, in a Territory too small to easily find an arm's-length replacement if either fails the way Riches did, overseen by an Inspector who co-wrote the report recommending the job he now holds, and scrutinised by a parliamentary committee its own government controls in a chamber with no upper house to force a pause. The 2026 reform does not remove the single point of failure Operation Beaufort exposed — it makes more of the Territory's integrity work depend on it. If lost public confidence was the real casualty of the last two years, as the government's own justification says, the surest way to lose it again is for the next well-connected appointee's private undertaking to surface only after the fact — except now with no separate Ombudsman, Information Commissioner or Health Complaints Commissioner left standing to catch what the merged office misses.