James Morrow: From Labor’s ‘boss lady’ to House of Cards fall
Showing up in the witness chair for her 2pm session, NSW Labor boss Kaila Murnain looked nothing like the “boss lady” she, until recently, described herself as on Twitter.
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Until today, it would have seemed unlikely that even a million monkeys sitting at their laptops covering a million ICAC hearings for a million years could have come up with the line: “The witness testified that the first thing she did after learning of a large and potentially illegal donation from the Chinese was call Sam Dastyari for advice.”
Yet here we are.
What’s more, that wasn’t even the most surprising revelation to come out of NSW Labor boss Kaila Murnain’s testimony before the anti-corruption body.
Showing up in the witness chair for her 2pm session, Ms Murnain looked nothing like the “boss lady” she, until recently, described herself as on Twitter.
Instead, the vibe was more recalcitrant high-schooler who had been dragged into the principal’s office for smoking: slumped, slouched, shoulders bent inward, lips pursed, and eyes cast downwards. Clearly, this was not a woman who was thrilled to be there.
And who could blame her, given the revelations of bags of cash and allegedly dodgy donations — including a cool hundred grand from the billionaire property developer Huang Xiangmo — that had happened under Ms Murnain’s watch when she was assistant general secretary of state Labor.
Ms Murnain’s testimony was a play in two acts.
For an hour, she played a desultory back and forth with counsel assisting, Scott Robertson.
Her repeated inability to recall exact times or conversations or events certainly undercut her well cultivated image as a large and in charge powerbroker, and for a time the testimony was about as dull as one of the ethnic “friends of Labor” dinners her work in 2015 was so focused on.
The only moment of anything approaching levity occurred when, in a debate about the layout of desks and offices at NSW Labor HQ, Ms Murnain said that back in 2015 she was the only assistant general secretary of the party with an office. Assistant secretaries, she said wryly, were left to fend for themselves out in the open plan.
Then, after a short break, the hearings were suddenly overtaken by an Aussie remake of House of Cards.
We learned of the after-hours meetings on Hospital Rd behind Parliament House when Ernest Wong told her there might have been a problem with a large donation — namely, that the $100,000 in question might not have been given by who they thought it was, but rather, a prohibited person.
Ms Murnain’s memory recovered enough to remember her words on hearing of the problem: “What the shit?”. Before anyone could recover from this admittedly unforgettable turn of phrase, Ms Murnain then described calling, yes, Sam Dastyari for advice, and crying while being driven around the Domain — “in a northerly direction,” as counsel assisting helpfully offered — with him to seek his counsel.
But that was just the start. After speaking to Mr Dastyari — whose own history with Chinese money speaks for itself — Ms Murnain called the lawyers, specifically NSW Labor's lawyer Ian Robertson AO, national managing partner of Holding Redlich, who told her to meet him at his Martin Place office.
After a text message indicated her arrival at the top of the building’s escalators, Ms Murnain told the hearing that Mr Robertson escorted her to his offices upstairs where he told her that “there’s no need to record this meeting, don’t put it in your diary, I won’t be billing you for this either, and don’t tell anyone about it.”
As Ms Murnain herself might have said: “What the shit?”