The New South Wales Labor leader, Chris Minns, has defended sacking a senior member of his shadow frontbench via voicemail less than 24 hours after giving her an ultimatum to come forward with evidence of corruption levelled against a candidate at the next election.
Minns announced he had sacked the Bankstown MP Tania Mihailuk from shadow cabinet on Sydney radio station 2GB on Friday morning, after she used parliamentary privilege to level serious accusations against her own party.
In a late-night speech on Tuesday, Mihailuk linked Labor’s upper house candidate for the next election, Canterbury-Bankstown mayor Khal Asfour, with the corrupt former minister Eddie Obeid and accused party leaders of ignoring the “horrific influence” of property developers in the party.
Asfour strenuously denied the accusations, and referred them to the Icac himself. The council has also said it would instigate its own independent inquiry.
But after speaking with Mihailuk on Thursday, Minns said he decided to sack her from his shadow cabinet after she failed to agree to a “settlement” in which she would refer the allegations to the Icac or cease using parliament to attack colleagues.
Minns said he first spoke to Mihailuk about the accusations Wednesday afternoon and then again on Thursday where he talked through “what I thought was the appropriate way of dealing with this issue”.
“I gave her a couple of hours to come back to me with an answer [but] I didn’t receive an answer yesterday afternoon. I tried again last evening on the phone and via text, I tried again this morning via text message and then phone call that went unanswered, but I did leave a voicemail message,” he said.
“I haven’t heard back.”
It has been bruising week for the NSW opposition leader, which began with Mihailuk’s speech overshadowing a major health policy announcement before a front page story in the Daily Telegraph showed embarrassing CCTV footage of Minns’s brief visits to Sydney hospitals where he filmed a series of Instagram videos bemoaning the state of emergency departments.
Premier Dominic Perrottet seized on both issues on Friday, criticising the Labor leader for sacking Mihailuk.
“I don’t believe you should silence and sack a strong woman for speaking out about alleged corruption in the NSW Labor party,” he said.
Mihailuk’s accusations related to rezonings in the Canterbury-Bankstown council area which resulted in “significant discrepancies in planning controls”. Those changes, she said, had left “valuable land” as “virtually worthless” for ratepayers.
She launched a series of accusations against Asfour about the redevelopment of land in the area, including alleged links to Obeid.
“Candidacy for such a privileged position, you would expect, warrants comprehensive scrutiny, particularly given Labor’s recent Icac woes and the well-documented Icac findings against former ministers, which marred the last NSW Labor government,” she said.
On Friday Minns denied he had sought to gag his own MP, saying that she had failed to produce evidence of the accusations against Asfour and indicating the accusations had already been examined by the Icac which had declined to open a formal investigation into them.
“I did ask her [whether she had evidence] repeatedly,” he said.
“I said these are obviously extraordinary accusations. They need to be backed up with evidence … I think that there’s appropriate channels for which people should pursue these sorts of actions.
“I don’t believe using parliamentary privilege at 11.30pm at night is the appropriate form of action and I stand by that.”
During her speech Mihailuk said she had previously raised the issues with the former NSW general secretary of the Labor party, Jamie Clements, and the current secretary, Bob Nanva, but Minns said he had not spoken to either of those two people before he made the decision to drop her from the shadow ministry.
The outburst comes amid a bitter preselection stoush in Sydney’s west. A series of redistributions leading to the abolition of the neighbouring seat of Lakemba has forced Mihailuk to switch seats.
Asfour has been nominated by Labor’s right faction for an eight-year term in the state’s upper house at the March state election.
This week he accused Mihailuk of being “gutless” and “cowardly”, and challenged her to “repeat those outrageous and unsubstantiated claims outside the parliament”.
“She has used parliamentary privilege to launch a cowardly attack on me and my family and I call on her to produce evidence of any wrongdoing to the relevant bodies,” he said.
Mihailuk has been contacted for comment.
