David Penberthy: Water theft claims stink of mates doing favours for mates
NSW has a long history of dodgy dealings and mates doing favours for mates. This latest scandal doesn’t surprise me in the least, writes David Penberthy.
THE revelations about the deeply suspect management of the Murray-Darling Basin by bureaucrats and irrigators in NSW should be seen against the dubious backdrop of Sydney’s political culture.
In his wonderful old book Wild Men of Sydney, chronicling the rakish world of 19th century NSW politics, the author Cyril Pearl proposes the following league table of Australian impropriety:
“Some day someone will write the full story of Australian roguery, from the rum racketeers of the First Fleet to the beer racketeers of the Second World War, from land swindlers to mine swindlers... the dramatis personae will be well-assorted — red-coated English officers and wide-hatted Australian squatters, knights and nobodies, politicians, policemen, aldermen, racing-men and brewers; every state will provide a scene or two, though unquestionably New South Wales will steal the show.”
Given a choice between due process and transparency — or the cutting of corners, a quiet word in the ear, and the promise of a quick buck — Sydney often stumps for option two. Its civic life has long been tainted by a significant minority of schmoozers who use the old mate’s act to manipulate the system for their own ends, at the expense of the city’s law-abiding majority.
Once Bob Carr retired as Premier in 2005, having valiantly resisted the influence of factional undesirables, NSW Labor became seriously corrupted by left boss Ian MacDonald and right numbers man Eddie Obeid, now serving 10 and five years jail respectively for their abuse of power.
The most extraordinary phone call I ever received from a politician came from Macca, as he likes to call himself, while I was editing the Daily Telegraph, about a story we had discovered about a planned V8 Supercar race in Sydney’s western suburbs.
It was a great story for our blue-collar readers, one I had already decided to run on page one. But in the course of the conversation, where I had already told Macca I would be splashing with the story, he said that if I could promise positive, prominent coverage, then he would guarantee that my newspaper won the lion’s share of the government-funded advertising for the event.
It was a classic Sydney conversation, where even though the minister had already secured his preferred outcome, he still went down this deeply suspect path.
Under the reign of Obeid and McDonald, NSW Labor subjected voters to three premiers in three years, yet when the Liberals won power in Australia’s biggest election landslide, a bunch of conservative MPs fell like ninepins after it emerged they had engaged in dodgy dealings with property developers.
In NSW, no party or arm of government is safe, be it the crook old world of the NSW Police before the Wood Royal Commission, or local councillors on the take.
Against this backdrop, I am prepared to believe almost anything about what passes for good governance in NSW, with the latest being the explosive allegations involving the potential theft of our water through the secret manipulation of the Murray-Darling Basin plan.
The claims aired by Four Corners on Monday go to potentially illegal conduct within the management of the nation’s water supply, where water that had been bought back by taxpayers to save our rivers was in fact being secretly accessed by irrigators. Worse, when the relevant department became aware of the practice, it did nothing to act on it. Or more accurately, it may have been in on it.
As South Australia’s former Water Minister and National Party MP Karlene Maywood wrote on these pages: “These are not allegations about the rights and wrongs of the Basin Plan. These are very serious allegations about the law and the obligations of all governments, citizens and corporations to uphold it.”
While we should stress that the allegations made by the ABC have been disputed in NSW, there is a uniquely Sydney tone to the nature of the conversations that were aired on Monday night between the NSW water bureaucrats and the irrigation lobbyists who stand to benefit commercially from the more generous release of water.
Rather than sounding like a dispassionate explanation of the legalities, these talks had the tone of mates looking after each other, especially the offer by the bureaucrats to share confidential internal government information with the irrigators, once those documents had been shorn of any government identification.
The department in question has argued that there was nothing wrong about the fact that it was talking to irrigators, saying that it had to talk to all the stakeholders in the water space. But that argument is undermined by the fact that the confidential documents they offered to the irrigators were described as “ammunition” for their cause. This could suggest that this supposedly independent department was actually coaching Australia’s most controversial farmers to get the best possible result in terms of water access.
Late Wednesday the NSW Government announced that it would hold a parliamentary inquiry into the claims. There is a possibility that the state’s ICAC will also conduct its own investigations. You would think that it should, given that we are talking about $3 billion in taxpayer-funded water subsidies here.
Whether these inquiries alone are enough to get to the bottom of all this remains to be seen. When it comes to transparency in NSW, history suggests we should expect the worst, as it has a history of not delivering it.