History made with change at territory's top Conservative: Adam Giles argued against an apology to the stolen generations. Forty-one years after Neville Bonner was elected to the Senate in his own right, Australia's most reactionary electorate has become the accidental trailblazer. Amid the hullabaloo surrounding Julie Gillard's championing of Nova Peris' political aspirations and Tony Abbott's pledge to recognise Aborigines in the constitution, the Northern Territory's turmoil-ridden Country Liberal Party elected Adam Giles as Chief Minister. He is the first indigenous person to head an Australian government. Giles, whose paternal grandmother was a Gamilaroi woman born in the Pilliga scrub, leads a CLP rent by petty feuds and an unstable coalition of four indigenous MPs elected by disaffected Labor voters who have the power of life and death over the leadership. Can Giles hang on until the election due in 2016? Certainly, his chief ministership will be fraught. Only the week before, MP Alison Anderson dismissed him as a "little boy" and threw her weight behind incumbent Terry Mills until she suffered one of her many mercurial changes of mind - she's been a member of the ALP, an independent and the CLP - and backed Giles. Mills, a poor performer and victim of tumbling popularity, was dumped - just seven months after he won government - while visiting a Japanese facility where gas exported from the $34 billion INPEX liquefied natural gas facility in Darwin will arrive. "The Japanese had the Chief Minister as their guest and back home his colleagues are nibbling him to death" one territory businessman said. These guys are just so gormless, they would have no idea of the crude, clueless, bumpkins they are. Perhaps the locals are inured to CLP shenanigans. Even as 16 MPs lined up to shiv Mills, 11-5, on Wednesday, political assassination was far from territorian minds. The big story that morning on the NT News website concerned an Alice Spring prostitute who was packing up to leave town after various implements were stolen from her car. The headline: "Screw this: Dildo duffing has hooker huffing." Territorians go through chief ministers like tissue paper. There have been 11 since 1974. Sometimes their behaviour has teetered between risible and tragic: Paul Everingham turned the Lindy Chamberlain case into a political cause, Ian Tuxworth spent thousands flying around Australia opposing handing over Uluru to traditional owners, Shane Stone and Denis Burke had a three-strike mandatory sentencing policy and Clare Martin's gridlock on Aboriginal issues paved the way for the Howard government intervention in 2007. Giles, 40, was born in the Blue Mountains. In his maiden speech, he described his father, Robert Graham Romer, as "a union man, an activist and a fighter for the BLF [Builders Labourers Federation]," and the son of a "Gamilaroi woman born in the Pilliga scrub." The couple split, and his mother, Jan, took up with his stepfather Jim Giles. He tried real estate, and worked on public housing with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission before becoming a social and economic policy adviser for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Giles first appeared on the national stage in 2004 when he stood as the Liberal candidate for the safe federal Labor seat of Fraser then held by Bob McMullan. One of the few indigenous candidates running, he attracted media interest by rejecting calls for John Howard to allow Parliament to say sorry to the Aboriginal stolen generations. "Sorry is a five-letter word," he said. Is it going to give someone a job? Giles then settled in Alice Springs with his wife, Tamara, a former television journalist, where he worked with Centacare and stood without success as the Country Liberal Party candidate for Lingiari in 2007 before being elected the MP for Braitling in the 2008 territory election. The following year, he complained the federal government planned to move dongas from the Alice to Christmas Island. "We're taking potential demountables off disabled kids in Alice Springs to house scum asylum seekers in Christmas Island," he told the territory's Legislative Assembly. One of Giles' first acts after being sworn in on Thursday was to scrap the post of minister for Aboriginal advancement. Thirty per cent of territory voters are indigenous.