Yahoo Finance The questions left unanswered by Gladys Berejiklian's budget estimates appearance
In budget estimates this week, Labor’s Adam Searle tried to force the New South Wales premier, Gladys Berejiklian, to explain who organised a 2016 meeting between her and the former Wagga Wagga MP Daryl Maguire to discuss upgrades to a highway more than 100km away from his electorate.
The meeting, first revealed by the Sydney Morning Herald, took place in November 2016, when Berejiklian was the state treasurer and the two MPs had been in a secret “close personal relationship” for more than a year.
Ministerial diary disclosures show the meeting was held to discuss the Cobb Highway in the NSW outback township of Ivanhoe. Though it was some 140km away from his electorate, Maguire had paid $8,000 for a property a few hundred metres away from the highway only a month before.
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A year later, in September 2017, he purchased another nearby property for just $750.
A few days after that second purchase, a phone call intercepted by the Independent Commission Against Corruption revealed Maguire telling Berejiklian of his plans to turn the properties into a money-making venture.
“And they like my idea of an Airbnb for the Ivanhoe houses so I’ll have to work that one out next, anyway. It just all takes time doesn’t it,” he said.
“Not enough hours in the day.”
Searle’s efforts to have Berejiklian explain the meeting proved to be in vain. The premier instead insisted that sealing the highway had been a longstanding bipartisan issue.
“It was on the record for years and years,” she said. “To suggest otherwise is just wrong and it is incorrect, and any meeting held on this topic would have been after these matters were publicly canvassed.”
But why Maguire was present, who organised the meeting, and who else attended, is a mystery.
Berejiklian’s ministerial diary disclosures list the other attendees as “Central Council Western Division”.
The Guardian has not been able to find any evidence such an organisation exists but in estimates Berejiklian referred to the “Western Division Councils”, an organisation made up of several local councils in far-west NSW that had been pushing for the Cobb Highway to be upgraded for several years.
Berejiklian’s office did not respond to an inquiry about who the other attendees at the meeting were, but when the Guardian contacted the Western Division Council’s then president, Leigh Byron, he did not recall meeting with Berejiklian.
“I assume I would have known, I was the president at the time,” he said.
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It marks just the latest in a string of scandals that the premier has endured in recent months. Berejiklian’s appearance at budget estimates on Thursday was dominated by questions about her dealings with Maguire during their relationship, including whether she signed off on the approval of a $30m conservatorium in Wagga Wagga.
As the Herald previously reported, approval for the funding was written using the premier’s letterhead. Although she did not sign it, the letter read that “the Premier and I have agreed to the reservation of up to $20 million … for the project”.
On Thursday Berejiklian was questioned on why Maguire had announced the funding would be successful six months before a decision was eventually made. She insisted it was normal practice for MPs to announce funding ahead of time, and denied she had been personally involved in its approval.
“Obviously, all funding arrangements for all grants or any other funding allocation is made by the appropriate agency or the appropriate minister through due process. I really do not have any further line of sight on this matter,” she said.
The questions around Berejiklian’s relationship with Maguire have ramped up again following Icac’s announcement this week that it had extended its inquiry for the second time.
Labor has been particularly insistent in questioning why she failed to make a referral to Icac herself following Maguire’s resignation during a separate Icac inquiry back in 2018.
At the time, Berejiklian said in parliament that “if any member [of parliament] … has any new information or issue of concern, they should refer it [to Icac]”. But, as the Australian reported last month, she had been personally briefed two months before that statement that two ministerial advisers were making disclosures to corruption investigators about Maguire.
Searle said given what Icac had revealed Maguire told Berejiklian, it should have triggered her to make a similar referral.
“Her own department and ministerial staff in her government acted, but she failed to. That is not nearly good enough for the premier of NSW,” he said.
