Adam Giles
Adam Giles
Main page
1123926

Adam Giles

logo
Community Hub0 subscribers
What are your thoughts?
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Adam Giles

Adam Graham Giles (né Romer; born 10 April 1973) is an Australian former politician and former Chief Minister of the Northern Territory (2013–2016) as well as the former leader of the Country Liberal Party (CLP) in the unicameral Northern Territory Parliament. Giles is the first Indigenous Australian to serve as a head of government in Australia.

Giles became a CLP member of the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly seat of Braitling at the 2008 election. The Terry Mills-led CLP opposition defeated the Paul Henderson-led Labor government at the 2012 election, winning 16 of 25 seats. Giles was elected by the CLP party room to replace Mills as Chief Minister and CLP leader less than a year later at the 2013 CLP leadership ballot. Giles was defeated at the 2015 CLP leadership ballot but managed to survive in the aftermath. Multiple defections saw the CLP reduced to minority government a few months later. At the 2016 election on 27 August, his government was heavily defeated by the Labor Party, suffering the worst defeat of a sitting government in Territory history. Giles also lost his seat of Braitling to Labor, becoming the second sitting head of government in the Northern Territory to lose his own seat.

After leaving politics, Giles has hosted a Sunday night current affairs program, The Adam Giles Show, on Sky News Australia since May 2018. He was the most recent Chief Minister from the Country Liberal Party until the 2024 election.

Giles was born Adam Graham Romer in Springwood in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. His mother is Anglo-Saxon and his father was descended from the Kamilaroi people through Giles's grandmother. His grandmother discovered that she had indigenous ancestry during the 1980s, but has said she did not regard herself as Aboriginal. When his parents split up, Adam's mother remarried, and he took his surname from his stepfather.

Giles studied accounting and real estate after leaving Blaxland High School, working in property management before moving into public housing management for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). He then moved to Canberra to work in the Australian Public Service as a social and economic policy advisor for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (2001–2007), and was the Liberal Party candidate for Fraser in the 2004 federal election.

As a member of the Northern Territory's Indigenous Economic Taskforce, Giles travelled and worked throughout the Territory before settling in Alice Springs. There he stood as a CLP candidate for Lingiari at the 2007 federal election, losing to Labor incumbent Warren Snowdon.

Following the retirement of Loraine Braham, the CLP-turned-independent member for the Alice Springs-based seat of Braitling, Giles was preselected as CLP candidate for the 2008 Northern Territory election. He won with 2,052 primary votes, or with 70% (2,475 votes) after preferences were distributed—thus reverting Braitling to its traditional status as a comfortably safe CLP seat.

Following the 2012 Northern Territory election, Giles became the Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Local Government.

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.