Hypocrisy behind Keneally’s defence of whistleblowers
When it comes to treatment of whistleblowers, Shadow Home Affairs Minister Kristina Keneally has a shocking track record, writes Miranda Devine. She’s the last person who should be leading Labor’s attack on Peter Dutton.
The last person who should be leading Labor’s attack on Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton over rough treatment of whistleblowers is Kristina Keneally.
Incomprehensibly elevated to shadow cabinet over Western Sydney talent Ed Husic, Keneally has been bequeathed the weighty shadow portfolio of Home Affairs, which she prosecutes with more gusto than gravitas.
After all, she carries baggage that no one in NSW can forget.
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It’s not simply that she was the last of the so-called puppet premiers of Eddie Obeid, the Labor powerbroker jailed for misconduct in public office. It’s not just because she presided briefly over the fag-end of a corrupted 16-year government before being ejected from office in 2011 in the worst political defeat in Australia’s post-war history.
No, far worse is her lack of support for whistleblowers. Take Gillian Sneddon, the former electorate secretary of Keneally’s colleague Milton Orkopoulos, the predatory paedophile who was Aboriginal affairs minister.
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He was jailed for 13 years in 2008 for supplying teenage boys with drugs and sexually abusing them.
The following year, Keneally became premier and a few days later Sneddon wrote her a letter pleading for help after losing her job, and detailing how she had been victimised by the Labor Party since she blew the whistle on Orkopoulos.
Sneddon never received a response from Keneally.
“I was treated like I was the scum of the Earth, for being a traitor to the Labor Party,” Sneddon said when she was awarded more than $400,000 after suing the NSW government for bullying and harassment.
When Penrith Labor MP Karyn Paluzzano was caught out rorting her parliamentary allowance by her staffer Tim Horan, then-premier Keneally dismissed his allegations as “vexatious”.
Keneally even issued a press release revealing he was under investigation by the parliament.
Paluzzano was later sentenced to 12 months home detention.
So harsh was Keneally’s criticism of Horan that she was referred to ICAC over whistleblower protection laws by the opposition.
ICAC cleared the then-premier but one thing is not in doubt; Keneally is no champion of whistleblowers.
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