ICAC Operation Landan: School Infrastructure CEO was ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ to junior staff

NSW’s former school infrastructure chief pressured his data analyst to fudge population projections, putting new schools in Sydney’s booming north and southwest at risk the ICAC has heard.

NSW’s former school infrastructure chief pressured his head analyst to inflate population projections in order to milk more funding out of Treasury, putting new schools in Sydney’s northwest at risk, the Independent Commission Against Corruption has heard.

The ICAC’s Operation Landan is investigating whether ex-School Infrastructure NSW CEO Anthony Manning engaged in corrupt conduct by misallocating school funding to contracts for consultant mates, and whether he and his HR adviser Wendy O’Brien took reprisal action against whistleblowers.

At Thursday’s public hearing, NSW Department of Education Director of Data Insights and Planning Analytics Jannatun Haque described Manning as a “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” figure, whom junior staff wanted to avoid getting on the wrong side of.

“If you were on his good side, then (the interaction) was very positive, and it was something where he disagreed with you, it was brutal,” she told the inquiry.

Ms Haque also detailed to the ICAC an instance from 2021 in which Manning had tasked her with creating statewide enrolment projections, then commissioned yet another consultancy firm - SGS Economics & Planning - to produce new figures when Ms Haque refused to budge.

Pictured is Anthony Manning, the Chief Executive of School Infrastructure NSW, which builds new government schools, with a Duck & Whale sticker on his laptop, which is a magazine for Porsche enthusiasts. Picture: Supplied.

“The numbers were much lower than what he had expected, and then when he asked me to amend them, I said ‘no’,” she said.

“Then he said, ‘if you can’t do what I need you to do, I’ll find someone else who can’.”

Manning had demanded Ms Haque “change it to be higher,” she claimed, including by factoring in higher migration.

“When he talked about those things, I said that I do agree with all of the other factors that he’s talking about, but they are simply not school-age population - that’s why I couldn’t amend the numbers.”

Ms Haque said Manning “didn’t need to explain” why he was worried about her numbers, because a “lower figure would mean it would be much more difficult to get funding from Treasury in terms of the capital works portfolio”.

However, the then-CEO’s concern was “misplaced” she told the inquiry, and that to inflate the statewide projection would not only be “misleading and incorrect, but secondly it will really do a disservice to where we need to spend money”.

Oran Park Public School was built from prefabricated pieces. Schools in Sydney’s southwest were done a “disservice” by overestimating statewide student population figures, Ms Haque said.

“We need the local context because we actually need more money,” Ms Haque said.

“We need billions of dollars for the north- and southwest of Sydney.”

The extent to which the Education Department had underestimated student enrolments in Sydney’s northwest and southwest growth corridors was revealed in a February 2024 audit.

The audit confirmed incoming Education Minister Prue Car’s suspicions that poor planning had led to a deficit of infrastructure in the city’s fastest-growing communities, including Schofields where the actual population of school-aged students in 2023 was triple the projected figure calculated in 2016.

In Marsden Park actual enrolments were eight times higher than projected, and in Oran Park enrolments were nearly four times higher.

ICAC hearings resume on Monday and are expected to run for another five weeks.