The threat by an upper house committee to arrest five senior Minns government staffers who have refused to appear before it pushes NSW parliament into dangerous, uncharted waters.
The partisan inquiry was set up in a bid to prove Premier Chris Minns knew there was doubt about whether the Dural caravan incident was a “real” terror plot but used it to ram through tough new hate speech and protest laws to protect the Jewish community.
A peeved assortment of far-right “independents”, far-left Greens and opportunistic Liberal MPs are claiming they were railroaded into passing the legislation on the basis of a deception by the Premier.
But their claims to be simply interested in “transparency” about the whole affair are transparently false.
It is clear from two previous sittings of the inquiry that many of its members have already decided there was a conspiracy to deceive them and are intent on undoing the legislation.
And intent, too, it seems, on pushing the absurd line that the anti-Semitic attacks in Sydney over summer were all a gigantic “con job”.
Police Deputy Commissioner Dave Hudson repeatedly reminded the inquiry that police had to treat the discovery of the explosives-laden caravan as a possible terror plot and couldn’t abandon that course simply because there were other possibilities – one being that a criminal might be using the caravan to leverage advantage.
The reality is the mastermind of the caravan “hoax”, Sayet Akca, has been revealed to be an extreme anti-Semite who was also the alleged paymaster behind the string of arson and graffiti attacks that left Sydney’s Jewish community terrified throughout summer.
Planning for the new hate speech and protest laws began well before the caravan was discovered by a road in Dural, when it had become clear that existing legislation wasn’t stopping hate preachers calling for the death of Jews.
Some of those on the committee now leading the charge against Minns were among the first to support tougher laws, including chair Rod Roberts, a former One Nation member, who repeatedly demanded tougher laws against hate speech as far back as December 2023.
On Friday, Roberts claimed the five political staffers were simply being called to provide information and weren’t being held to account. That would have been news to police officers and public servants previously grilled by the committee.
Libertarian MLC John Ruddick at one point demanded to know why Commissioner Karen Webb hadn’t had “any type of discussion with the Premier about the recent curbs on free speech in this state”.
When Webb responded “I’ll leave the politics to the politicians”, Ruddick accused her of “dereliction of duty”.
Let’s not excuse the Liberal Party from their bit-part in this mess. Having been dragged kicking and screaming into acknowledging he wouldn’t repeal the legislation, hapless Opposition Leader Mark Speakman is reduced to sniping from the sidelines, unwilling or unable to come up with alternative policy.
There are plenty of ways governments and premiers can be held to account. Minns has to face questions in parliament and at budget estimates, and ultimately, voters at the next election. That’s the way the system is supposed to work.
Hauling public servants before a trumped up parliamentary inquiry under threat of arrest is not.
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