News Service from House Harris

NT: Wanking drug runner sentenced to prison

DARWIN, Jan 7 AAP - A drug-runner who filmed himself masturbating while driving at 150 km/h has been sentenced to two months jail.

Brendon Alan Erhardt, 39, was pulled over by police on July 16 last year, 25km south of Daly Waters.

He was returning to the Northern Territory from Adelaide, where he had used an inheritance from his dead mother to buy a Holden SV6 and 5kg of cannabis.

Inside the car, police discovered 10 packages of cannabis hidden in a blue esky in the boot, two cannabis plants on the back seat, two drug pipes and a loaded .22 rifle.

Erhardt told the officers he had been masturbating shortly before being stopped for speeding on the 130km/h stretch of the Stuart Hwy.

He had filmed himself travelling at a speed of 150km/h.

"(It is) conduct one might expect of a much younger immature person to engage in," Magistrate Sue Oliver told Darwin Magistrate's Court on Wednesday.

Erhardt pleaded guilty to six charges, including carrying an unregistered and loaded firearm, driving dangerously and driving unlicensed.

Sentencing him to two months in prison, Magistrate Oliver said his behaviour was strange and humiliating.

"The circumstances of the driving are bizarre to say the least," she said.

"And I would have thought it would cause him some embarrassment to have it aired in a public forum."

Erhardt was also fined $2,000 and disqualified from driving for six months.

The father of two is already serving time in prison over the same incident, after he pleaded guilty in the NT Supreme Court to supplying a schedule two drug and possessing two cannabis plants.

He was sentenced last month to three years in prison with a non-parole period of 12 months.

The Supreme Court heard Erhardt "panicked" when he was stopped by police and told them that he found the drugs at a rest stop about north of Coober Pedy.

He said he planned to take them home and smoke them himself.

"The offending is serious. Such crimes are prevalent," said Justice Stephen Southwood.

"The offender imported almost 10 times the commercial quantity of cannabis into the Northern Territory from South Australia."

The two prison sentences are to be served concurrently.