Adam Giles has suggested lawyers who exposed abuse in the Northern Territory’s Don Dale youth detention centre could have been politically motivated, asking: “How many lawyers on the Four Corners show were members of the Labor party?”

The Northern Territory’s chief minister made the comment during a debate with territory Labor MP Natasha Fyles on Darwin’s Mix 104.9FM on Friday morning, but swiftly denied he was attempting to politicise the issue.

“I’m not making suggestions, I’m trying to focus on the kids,” he said. “When I get attacked about politics when I’m trying to do the right thing by fixing the system, I’m going to fight back.”

He also confirmed he had seen footage of six teenage boys being sprayed with teargas in Don Dale’s behavioural management unit before it was shown on Four Corners, but said: “The first I’d seen of any footage before we came to government was on Monday night.

“I had seen the footage of the gassing component before because that was in our time of government – it has been referred to police, it has been in media,” he said. “But any of the footage before we came to government I hadn’t seen.”

The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, announced a royal commission in response to shocking footage shown on the program, which depicted children in detention being assaulted, sprayed with teargas and, in one instance, hooded and shackled to a chair.

The lawyer Peter O’Brien, who acts for Dylan Voller, an Indigenous boy reportedly subject to incidents of physical abuse at the hands of guards at the territory’s youth detention centres between 2010 and 2015, dismissed suggestions the allegations were political.

Tweet from Peter O’Brien. Photograph: Twitter

“Only someone who uses child imprisonment as a political bargaining chip could suggest that the current allegations of abuse are political,” he said on Twitter.

Jared Sharp, senior criminal lawyer for the Northern Australia Aboriginal Justice Agency, who also spoke on the program, said he was not a Labor member and accused Giles of “outrageous mud smearing.”



Tweet from Ruth Barson Photograph: Twitter

Since the footage aired on Monday night, Giles has repeatedly pointed to incidents that occurred under the previous Labor government, saying on Sky News on Tuesday that “the Labor party in the Northern Territory has a lot to answer for”.

Turnbull confirmed on Thursday that the territory government had had input into the terms of reference for the royal commission, which will be conducted by former NT supreme court judge Brian Ross Martin and is to report to parliament by 31 March.

Tweet from Jared Sharp. Photograph: Twitter

Lawyers and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations said the territory government should have been excluded from the process, because the inquiry would examine policies, decisions and actions taken under the guidance of Giles and his ministers.

The attorney general, George Brandis, said that Giles had been the first person to say there should be a royal commission, in a 1am press release on Tuesday, and that his “contribution to this process has been exemplary”.

“This is a chief minister saying there should be a royal commission into his own government and previous Labor governments in the Northern Territory,” Brandis told ABC’s AM program on Friday.



“I found Mr Giles extremely cooperative. In fact, the terms of reference are somewhat broader than they would otherwise have been as a result of Mr Giles’s contribution.”



