Territorians love their holidays—it’s an integral part of the much vaunted lifestyle they worship. July is show month. Starting in Alice Springs, each region gets a Friday off for Show Day, one glorious long weekend after another, finishing up in Darwin at the end of the month.

Which makes the decision by Minister for Indigenous Affairs Mal Brough to hold a meeting with Tiwi traditional owners to finalise the 99-year lease of Nguiu on Bathurst Island on Show Saturday a Machiavellian one.

A good number of the 50,000 people who visit the Royal Darwin Show will come from the Tiwi islands, and won’t be around when Brough flies in to stitch up the first of the 99-year leases he claims will open home ownership on Aboriginal land.

He is offering a sweetener of $5 million to the traditional owners drawn not from the taxpayer, but from the same Aboriginal Benefit Account he funded the 2006 Dreaming festival with in Queensland. So he is effectively using Aboriginal money, drawn from royalty equivalents from mines on the mainland, to pay rent to Aboriginal people off the coast.

At least some of the members of the Tiwi Land Council executive have been claiming that by signing this deal now, Nguiu will be exempt from the removal of the permit system, alone among the 100-odd communities Brough has said will lose its protection. Brough is yet to disabuse them of this notion.

There may be another reason for doing the deal on a Saturday. Lawyers representing disaffected Tiwi islanders opposed to the 99-year deal are looking to taking out an injunction against the action—something more complicated to achieve in the middle of a three day weekend.

Not that all this will worry too many of the Top End’s lotus eaters. The following week will see the Darwin Cup public holiday—what other capital city gets two long weekends in a row?