Annabel and Gregory Digance ordered to stand trial on blackmail charges after trying, and failing, to claim they had no case to answer
A former MP and her husband will stand trial accused of blackmailing Labor leader Peter Malinauskas – despite initially refusing to enter pleas to the charges.
Police & Courts
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Former MP Annabel Digance and her husband have been ordered to stand trial for blackmail – after initially refusing to enter pleas to the charges.
On Wednesday, the Adelaide Magistrates Court ruled allegations the couple sought to blackmail Opposition leader Peter Malinauskas should be determined by a jury.
Asked how they pleaded to the charges, Mr and Ms Digance both answered “no case to answer”, which sat poorly with Magistrate Simon Smart.
“I regard that as an unresponsive answer … this is not an opportunity to make a statement, it is your opportunity to answer the question,” he said.
Following an adjournment for legal advice – and apologies made, on their behalf, by counsel – Ms Digance pleaded not guilty while her husband took issue with the court’s phrasing.
“I’ll just say at the start I’m ‘Gregory’, I don’t know why you call me ‘Greg’, but I plead not guilty,” he said.
The Digances will now face the District Court – and their trial date will be set at a hearing just days before the 2021 state election.
Ms Digance, 63, and her husband, 60, are alleged to have sought to blackmail Mr Malinauskas to secure her return to politics.
The couple, however, claim Mr Malinauskas illegally recorded conversations between them to silence a parliamentary committee into bullying allegations she had raised.
Their bid to have Mr Malinauskas and another senior Labor figure called to give evidence, ahead of their pleas being entered, was unsuccessful.
On Wednesday, Robert Cameron, for Mrs Digance, said the case should be thrown out entirely.
He said state law specifically excluded “negotiations to secure a political benefit” from being considered blackmail so long as they did not include threats of violence.
He said the Digances were “negotiating” with Mr Malinauskas – nut Mr Smart said that did not accord with his reading of the recorded conversations.
“Negotiation denotes two parties seeking to arrive at a compromise … these seem to be couched in terms of demands, quite frankly, which were being rebuffed,” he said.
“I don’t think there was anything, on my reading of it, that Mr Malinauskas wanted … it was a one-way discussion.”
But Mr Cameron said negotiations “always start with a demand”.
“This is an essential part of the political process, it’s a part of democracy,” he said.
Mr Smart said such an argument “would be a matter for a jury, I would have thought” and ordered the couple to stand trial.
He remanded them on continuing bail to face the District Court in March.
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