Tim Crakanthorp’s family problems didn’t start this week

Former NSW Labor minister Tim Crakanthorp has had, by any estimation, an absolute shocker of a week.

He’s been referred to the state’s Independent Commission Against Corruption for a “significant” breach of the ministerial code after he failed to disclose what Premier Chris Minns called “substantial” private family holdings.

Those substantial commercial property assets are held by members of Crakanthorp’s family, including his wife Laura and his father-in-law Joe Manitta, in the Hunter region. So what does Santina Manitta, Joe’s wife and Tim’s mother-in-law, make of all this?

“Truly, sincerely, I don’t give a shit,” she told reporters from The Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald who had showed up at her house.

“Look, you’ve got to understand politicians are there because they’re fucking dumb. I told you if my son gets arrested, good, I’m happy for him … because he should never have been a politician. It is wasting his time.

“One day someone would shoot you. Lucky I don’t have a gun I would shoot you”.

Manitta then “claimed to be suffering a medical episode”, the Tele reports, whose reporter called an ambulance.

Remember during the ICAC hearings into former premier Gladys Berejiklian’s relationship with “we probably need a word stronger than disgraced” MP Daryl Maguire, and how we got to hear fairly painful conversations between the pair, with Berejiklian promising to “throw money” at his electorate just to get the guy off the phone? We can only pray to the gods of content that Santina features heavily in any equivalent material this time around.

This isn’t the first time Crakanthorp’s in-laws had made the news for giving him grief. Way back in 2017, then-transport minister Andrew Constance had an absolute ball at Crakanthorp’s expense in question time after it had been reported that Joe Manitta had nominated to run for the Liberal Party at a local government election.

“Instead of sticking up for his community [Crakanthorp] wants to run it down,” Constance said. “It is so bad — and I know the house will love this — that even his own father-in-law is embarrassed about the member for Newcastle … His father-in-law is running for council. Guess who he is running for? The Liberal Party.”

Labor’s call for a ban on property developers on local councils after the Salim Mehajer of it all was also good material for Constance, as Manitta had once been a developer.

“It is obvious that the member for Newcastle has been lobbying to ban property developers so he can get through Christmas dinner at the in-laws,” Constance said, which doesn’t quite work as a joke, but we at least now have a sense of the tone of those dinners.

The Newcastle Herald reported at the time that Constance’s speech was “littered with objections from Labor”:

MP Clayton Barr asked Mr Constance to ‘stay away from referring in the chamber to family members’.

‘It is a slippery slope and we should not go there,’ he said.

In Crakanthorp’s case, one wonders if anyone had any sense at the time of just how slippery that slope could turn out to be.