17 Facts About Adam Giles

Adam Graham Giles is an Australian former politician and former Chief Minister of the Northern Territory as well as the former leader of the Country Liberal Party in the unicameral Northern Territory Parliament.

Adam Giles became a CLP member of the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly seat of Braitling at the 2008 election.

Adam 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.

Adam Giles was defeated at the 2015 CLP leadership ballot but managed to survive in the aftermath.

Adam Giles lost his seat of Braitling to Labor, becoming the second sitting head of government in the Northern Territory to lose his own seat.

Adam Giles was the most recent Chief Minister from the Country Liberal Party until the 2024 election.

Adam Giles's mother is Anglo-Saxon and his father was descended from the Kamilaroi people through Giles's grandmother.

Adam Giles's 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 Giles's mother remarried, and he took his surname from his stepfather.

Adam 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.

Adam Giles 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, and was the Liberal Party candidate for Fraser in the 2004 federal election.

Adam Giles replaced Terry Mills as Chief Minister of the Northern Territory and party leader at the 2013 CLP leadership ballot on 13 March while Mills was on a trade mission in Japan.

However, Adam Giles refused to resign as Chief Minister following the vote.

In October 2015, the then Country Liberal-controlled Northern Territory Government under Adam Giles granted the Chinese-owned Landbridge Group company a 99-year lease for A$506 million of Port Darwin.

However, on election night, Adam Giles lost 20 percent of his primary vote from 2012.

At this same election, Mills, the man Adam Giles had rolled three years earlier, took back his old seat as an independent.

Adam Giles later told AM that he had known for some time that the CLP would not be re-elected, but felt compelled to "put on a shiny face with the pearly whites" in order to maintain morale.