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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

There was a time when there was public outcry, from some quarters, that ICAC would even investigate Gladys Berejiklian – one of the most popular New South Wales premiers in the state’s history.

Flowers were left at her electoral office after she resigned, and callers into talkback radio were furious with ICAC for precipitating her resignation.

But now we know that Gladys Berejiklian was seriously corrupt when she was treasurer and later the premier.

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper, Mike Seccombe, on Gladys Berejiklian’s conduct and why it points to deeper corruption in our politics.

It’s Monday, July 3.

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RUBY:

So, Mike, the Independent Commission Against Corruption has finally released its report into the actions of the former premier of New South Wales, Gladys Berejiklian, and their investigation relates to the conduct that Berejiklian resigned over a couple of years ago now. Resigning at a time in which she was incredibly popular. So now that we have the report, tell me about what we've learned.

MIKE:

Well, yeah, this goes back to the ICAC hearings that we all sat through almost two years ago. And since then we've all been wondering what ICAC would find. It's been an extremely protracted process. So these hearings began, I guess, you'd say, at a time when Gladys Berejiklian was an extremely popular premier. You know, through the pandemic, everyone thought she was doing a good job. And when the hearings first happened, when she was called to give evidence, there was actually a bit of an outcry from some quarters that “why was ICAC looking into her at a time when she had so many more important things to do.” But she ended up resigning as premier, as we know. And until now, we didn't really know which way this would all fall when the report came out. But now, ICAC has released its findings, and they are that Gladys Berejiklian, along with her former partner, her unrevealed partner — until the inquiry — Daryl Maguire had engaged in serious corruption.

RUBY:

Okay. So, ICAC made findings that both Gladys Berejiklian, and the former Wagga Wagga MP, Daryl Maguire engaged in corrupt conduct. Can you take me back and tell me about the investigation into their actions and how ICAC first started looking into Berejiklian?

MIKE:

Sure. Well, it was kind of by accident, really. Initially, ICAC was investigating Daryl Maguire. And the initial investigation was something called Operation Dasha, which related to dodgy development approvals by the Canterbury Council in which he was implicated.

Archival tape – Daryl Maguire:

“My client is mega big, and got mega money, and wants two or three DA approved projects right now.”

MIKE:

And that sort of segued into a second one. Operation Keppel, which started looking into some of his other activities, and that's the one that Berejiklian wound up appearing before.

Archival tape – Reporter:

“No one quite knew what to expect from Gladys Berejiklian’s appearance at the ICAC, but it certainly wasn’t this.”

MIKE:

And the suspicion against Maguire was that between about 2012 and 2018, he'd engaged in conduct that could have constituted a breach of trust, i.e. corruption. The suggestion was that he used his position and his contacts to try to broker property deals, and had hoped to sort of monetise, I guess, his political office. And inter alia, ICAC began tapping his phone. They had secret recordings of his phone conversations, in which he spoke to various other people involved in these deals.

But the other thing that of course they picked up was the fact that he talked often to Gladys Berejiklian, which surprised everybody.

Archival tape – Gladys Berejiklian:

“I already got you the Wagga hospital money."

Archival tape – Daryl Maguire:

“They should have done it.”

Archival tape – Gladys Berejiklian:

“I spoke to Dom and I just said put the one forty in the budget.”

MIKE:

And not only that, he spoke to her in, you know, at some length about his various schemes, most of which I should say never came of.

Archival tape – Daryl Maguire:

“Good news, William tells me we’ve done our deal. So hopefully that’s about half of all that’s gone now.”

Archival tape – Gladys Berejiklian:

“That’s good. I don’t need to know about that bit.”

Archival tape – Daryl Maguire:

“No you don’t.”

MIKE:

But there were also indications of intimacy there. There were, you know, endearments exchanged and what have you.

Archival tape – Daryl Maguire:

“I don’t have anything planned although I thought I might like to go and meet your parents, now that I have all of this out of the way."

Archival tape – Gladys Berejiklian:

“Oh ok, that’s nice.”

MIKE:

Anyway, that was how it started. Ultimately, Maguire quit the Parliament in 2018. In the midst of that first inquiry. And then in 2020 came the revelation, the public revelation, that he and Berejiklian were close, and had been for, at that point, quite a number of years.

Archival tape – ICAC:

“At least as at the 13th July 2018, you were in a close personal relationship with Mr Maguire?”

Archival tape – Gladys Berejiklian:

“That’s correct.”

MIKE:

Initially, Berejiklian said that the relationship wasn't particularly significant, and that's why she hadn't gone public with it.

Archival tape – Gladys Berejiklian:

“I'm a very private person, and I didnt feel the relationship had sufficient substance for it to be made public.”

MIKE:

That was one reason. The other was that it might be awkward to have a Premier or Treasurer in a relationship with another member of Parliament. Though this suggestion on her part that it wasn't a particularly significant relationship kind of sat oddly with some of the stuff that Maguire said in his telling. They were both in love. He loved her. He believed that she loved him, and he said that they'd actually discussed getting married and having a child.

So he portrayed the relationship as being rather more serious than she did.

Archival tape – ICAC:

“You loved her?"

Archival tape – Daryl Maguire:

“Yes.”

Archival tape – ICAC:

“So far as you could ascertain she loved you as well?”

Archival tape – Daryl Maguire:

“Yes.”

MIKE:

Anyway, at the time the relationship first became public, Berejiklian seemed to think that her premiership could survive it. She went on radio, tried to downplay the revelation, saying, you know, it wasn't really anything to do with her competency to continue her job.

Archival tape – Gladys Berejiklian:

“Thank you for your understanding. Well, I know it's hard to take in. And it was a shock. It was a shock for me when I found out.”

Archival tape – Radio Host:

“No, I found it so sexy. You got no idea. I thought, this is amazing.”

Archival tape – Gladys Berejiklian:

“I had to tell the whole world about what I've been through. And, yes, I accept people to judge me because we're human, and you have to ask those questions. But I also really appreciate that people value their all, the job I'm doing and I do. I always put the public first.”

Archival tape – Radio Host:

“I know you always do.”

MIKE:

But when it was announced that the inquiry was actually being broadened to include her actions, not just the actions of her boyfriend, then she quit the premiership.

Archival tape – Gladys Berejiklian:

“Good afternoon, everyone. I'm here to make a public statement and won't be taking any questions. I've had to make an extremely difficult decision overnight, but one which I feel obliged to do because of the love and respect I have for the people of New South Wales, and the high regard which I have for the Office of Premier. I was advised late yesterday afternoon… “

RUBY:

Right. But there was still this question hanging over her while ICAC investigated around her relationship with Daryl Maguire, and whether that influenced the decisions that were made to spend money in his electorate. So what has ICAC now managed to establish about that?

MIKE:

Well, ICAC found that Berejiklian had a conflict of interest, and did not declare it, and that this was significant enough to warrant the finding of serious corruption. The particular allegations, or the particular events that led to the corruption findings against her were that back in 2016, as New South Wales Treasurer, while in this relationship with Maguire, she oversaw money being put aside for an organisation called the Clay Target Association in Maguire's electorate, $5.5 million. There had been an assessment of the project proposal which said that it didn't stack up on a cost benefit basis. But nonetheless, Berejiklian forced it onto the Expenditure Review Committee agenda, and also sought to get the cost benefit analysis redone such that it would pass muster. Then subsequently, as Premier in 2018, she promised $20 million for Wagga Wagga Conservatorium of Music, which was pork barrelling, essentially. And it found that she had engaged in serious corrupt conduct because she promised this money without ever revealing that she had a relationship, that should have caused her to recuse herself from the decision making process. The second issue was that she never came forward with concerns that Daryl Maguire might be, himself, engaged in corrupt conduct, and on the basis of some of her conversations with Maguire, it was pretty clear that he'd spoken to her in some detail about various of his schemes, but she didn't tell ICAC or anyone else. Daryl Maguire, for his part, has been found to have improperly used his office as an MP to the benefit of a company that he effectively controlled, called Gateway International Proprietary Limited. He was in substance the director, and he was effectively running Gateway International out of his office. I mean, there were stories that came before the inquiry about bags of money being brought to his office, about staff and other resources being used to pursue his private business interests through his parliamentary office.

RUBY:

Right. Okay. So when it comes to Gladys Berejiklian, though, there are two issues here. One is this undeclared conflict of interest around where money is being allocated, as you say, essentially pork barrelling. And then there is the fact that she didn't report her suspicions about Daryl Maguire's conduct to the corruption watchdog. And in the eyes of ICAC, those two things both amount to corruption on her part. So if that is the case, what are the repercussions for her?

MIKE:

Well, we've seen some repercussions already, I guess, because she's out of politics. They will not, however, be any recommendation that she face criminal charges.

The usual course of events is that a corruption finding is made and ICAC can then, if it deems it to be necessary, refer that to the Director of Public Prosecutions, and a decision is then taken as to whether there will be criminal charges pursued. They've made no such recommendation in Gladys’ case. They have, however, in Daryl's. The litany of his misdeeds, identified by the report, is really too long to fully detail here. There were a lot of them. So suffice to say, he's in a lot of trouble. And he faces a strong likelihood, I think, of criminal charges.

RUBY:

We’ll be back after this.

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RUBY:

So Mike, since ICAC began looking into Gladys Berejiklian, I think there's been this sense that she is an upstanding and good person, who perhaps made the wrong decision to enter into a relationship with Daryl Maguire. But in the grand scheme of things, in the grand scheme of New South Wales corruption stories, her failings perhaps were unfairly emphasised. Now that we actually have these findings and the findings do in fact show corruption. How much does that public image of her hold up?

MIKE:

Yes, you're right. She had an extremely good public image. Back before all this blew up. I mean, if you go back and look back at the time Scott Morrison, then the Prime Minister, said the attacks on Berejiklian were shameful and a disgrace.

Archival tape – Scott Morrison:

“The most shameful attacks on the former Premier of New South Wales, Gladys Berejiklian, Mr Speaker. What was done to Gladys Berejiklian, the people of New South Wales know, was an absolute disgrace…”

MIKE:

And many New South Wales Liberal Party figures were critical of the ICAC process, particularly for pursuing her at a time when, you know, there was a pandemic, and she was leading the state's response. More recently, Matt Kean, the former New South Wales treasurer, described the investigation as a, quote, “public political lynching of Gladys Berejiklian.”

And he was also very critical of the length of time that the investigation was ongoing. I mean we’ve waited years for this. And he said, you know, “if ICAC can’t work faster, it should at least keep its investigations secret until such times as final findings are ready to be made public”.

Archival tape – Matt Kean:

“Spend millions of taxpayer dollars, and an infinite amount of time and resources to tell us something they could have told us two years ago. They didn’t need to create all the media circus, which they did. They issued …”

MIKE:

The sentiment has been shared to some extent by Labor, too. The Labor leader, now Premier, Chris Minns, when he spoke up on this on Thursday, he said that he thought that it had taken too long. He said that an ICAC investigation was not necessarily a circumstance where an MP should automatically have to step down.

Archival tape – Chris Minns:

“If you’re an official or a public servant that is the subject of an inquiry, to hold your life, effectively, up for years and years is just too long, so if there are changes that can be made….”

MIKE:

He even opened his press conference with praise for Berejiklian, saying that she had done a very good job of steering the state through the pandemic, and so on. As to the length of time it took. You know, I think it's fair enough to say that there's a pretty bipartisan consensus that ICAC took way too long to get this one out there. On the other hand, I've spoken to a bunch of legal experts about this, who say that the commissioner involved, Ruth McColl, is noted for taking a long time to produce her findings, but is also noted for her thoroughness. And, you know, you simply can't ignore the fact there’s… it's a pretty overwhelming case, that she was severely conflicted. And I think it's very hard to ignore that, you know, ICAC got it right when it said that this amounted to being corrupt.

RUBY:

So, Mike, what are the lessons we should take out of the corruption of Gladys Berejiklian then? What does it tell us about the existing rules for politicians, that someone who was considered to be so upstanding, was actually corrupt?

MIKE:

Interestingly, it's worth noting, I think, that that apart from the findings about about the two people involved, this report also included a bunch of recommendations suggesting ways in which the whole process of the allocation of public money should be tightened up, that there should be more clear guidelines around the way in which grants were made, and that there should be reforms to the the way which politicians are required to conduct themselves. Oddly enough, we haven't heard the politicians talking nearly as much about this. And I think that that's probably a more important thing.

In the grand scheme of things, if we go to those two grants, we're talking about, what, $25 million? Well, we've had a number of audit reports into the New South Wales Government over recent years showing just massive, massive pork barrelling. I mean, hundreds of billions of dollars taken, you know, where things were supposed to go through a due bureaucratic process. That process was just jettisoned. Decisions were made, effectively, by the Premier and Deputy Premier of the state as to how many should be dispersed. It really wasn't done properly and according to Hoyle. And I think, really, to an extent, we can see Berejiklian and Maguire as kind of symptoms of a disease rather than the disease itself. You know, the pork barrelling problem is enormous. And interestingly enough, Berejiklian was a defender of it. I mean, she actually came out after one of those audit reports, which found that, you know, they had pork barrelled to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and said, “well, it's not illegal. Everyone does it from time to time. Let's move on.” essentially, is what is what she said. So I think quite apart from the specific instances, there's a bigger subject here to be addressed. And I would hope that the politicians go to that one as well.

RUBY:

And Mike, it's interesting to consider these findings in the context of the national version of the New South Wales ICAC, the NACC, which actually opens today, and there has been a lot of criticism of the NACC’s powers. For instance, we know that it's hearings are initially private rather than public. So what comparisons do you think we can make about the NACC, and and the New South Wales ICACs at this point? And what do these findings say to you about the importance of this federal body that's opening today?

MIKE:

Well, I think it's very important. And we know that, you know, a number of parties already have long lists of individuals and cases that they would like to see the NACC take up. And you're right, the legislation for the national body, I think, only requires that there be public hearings in exceptional circumstances. What those circumstances are, I think, will be left up to the body itself to determine. So I suppose the best we can say there is, we'll wait and see just how public they are. My personal view is that I think ICAC has done very good service for the state of New South Wales. And accepting the fact that this report took a long time to come out. I think that the public hearings, in this case, serve to show the public at large that there were real issues here. The fact that we could tune in and see Berejiklian being evasive, we could see for our own eyes the contradictions in her story compared with Maguire's story, I think gives us a little certainty that ICAC was on the right track, and that its report has actually accurately reflected the circumstances, and that its findings are entirely legitimate. So I'm generally a supporter of the way ICAC has worked. And all I can say about the national body is it will be interesting to see just how public it actually is.

RUBY:

Mike, thank you so much for your time

MIKE:

Thank you for yours, cheers.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

In France over the weekend, protests over the police shooting of 17 year old Nahel Merzouk stretched into a fifth night — paralysing much of the country.

The protests increase pressure on French President Emmanuel Macron, who’s popularity has cratered since the last election — he has ordered 45,000 police onto the streets to quell the riots.

And…

Social media giant Twitter has once again been thrown into chaos, with owner Elon Musk setting reading limits for users.

Those who do not pay for the service, under Musk’s Twitter Blue subscription will be temporarily limited to reading somewhere between 600 and 1000 tweets per day.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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