‘Blatant disregard of parliamentary process’: NSW inquiry into alleged branch stacking continues

When Castle Hill MP Ray Williams gave a speech to the NSW Parliament last June, he made allegations that go to the heart of debates around control of the Liberal Party and the influence of NSW’s most controversial business sector: property development.

The NSW upper house subsequently convened an inquiry into his claims that Liberal Party members had been paid “significant funds” to remove councillors on the Hills Shire Council and replace them with people who would be more inclined to support development applications from property developer Jean Nassif.

The hearings started yesterday, with the bombshell evidence from businessman Frits Mare that 26-year-old Jean-Claude Perrottet, brother of NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet, with a Liberal Party associate had asked Mare for $50,000 in 2019 to fund a branch-stacking operation against a factional enemy, federal MP Alex Hawke.  

Mare, who is not accused of wrongdoing, said the meeting had lasted about 15 minutes and “the word Hills or Hills Shire didn’t appear in the conversation at all”. He said he recalled the two of them saying he may want to contribute as payback for Hawke’s role in ousting former prime minister Tony Abbott, a friend of Mare.

“At that point I think I terminated the conversation … I just wasn’t interested,” Mare told the inquiry. “The member [Hawke], whatever I might think of him, he was elected by the voters, and it’s up to them to unseat him, not me.”

Mare said he had not seen either man since that occasion.

The issue for the premier is that, less than six weeks out from an election, both Jean-Claude and another brother, Charles, have failed to respond to orders to front the inquiry. Inquiry chair Greens MP Sue Higginson said the only conclusion she could reach was that the pair were making “a deliberate decision to avoid appearing before the committee”.

“The failure to cooperate with this committee demonstrates a blatant disregard of parliamentary process,” she said.

Nassif has also declined to appear, on the grounds that he is in Lebanon. The developer, who became famous in 2019 when a photo of his wife’s $480,000 yellow Lamborghini went viral on social media, owns development company Toplace. It has been the subject of proceedings in NSW Fair Trading over a number of complaints about building defects.

Nassif has spent millions of dollars buying land around Cherrybrook railway station hoping to build a large-scale development when it passes the approval process.

But the Hills Shire Council situation is a very small part of the whole picture, which is a fight-to-the-death factional war within the Liberal Party between the hard right (very conservative, Catholic, based in NSW around Sydney’s north-west Bible Belt) and the centre right (Scott Morrison and his factotum Hawke).

Anyone wanting to know the background of this unedifying saga should watch an investigation by ABC’s Sean Nicholls for Four Corners which revealed that the factional warlords spend more time fighting each other and threatening preselections of elected members than trying to win seats.  

The result of this is plain to see. At the 2022 election, the Coalition suffered its worst result in 70 years, losing an unprecedented 18 seats. The Liberals (plus the Queensland LNP) — which had previously held 34 of the country’s 84 urban electorates — lost half of them. Six fell to the community independents, or teals. There is only one Liberal MP in Adelaide and Perth, and none in Hobart, Canberra or Darwin.

There are now wall-to-wall Labor governments across the country, apart from the minority Coalition government in NSW, which goes to the polls on March 25, and Tasmania, where Jeremy Rockliff‘s government has a one-seat majority.  

On Thursday the inquiry will hear from Dr Michelle Byrne, the former mayor of Hills Shire Council. In his parliamentary speech last year, Williams said Byrne and six Liberal councillors had been removed in  December 2021 and replaced without the usual preselection processes.

The inquiry continues.