ICAC’s sex, surprise and audiotape
The visa scam lining Daryl Maguire’s pockets had a real impact on the country in which the rest of us live. It’s why your kids can’t afford to buy a house.
The first — or, dare we say it, numero uno — shock of the week was obviously that Gladys was having sex.
Gladys, as in the bookish not bonkish NSW Premier Berejiklian. The child of immigrant parents who spoke no English before the age of five; who rose to become “girl dux” of her public high school and then “head girl” of NSW; whose modesty is encapsulated by her occasional attendance at the Armenian Apostolic Church of Holy Resurrection; perhaps also by the two Cheds biscuits she carries out of her house for breakfast each day.
Yes, that Gladys.
It was a bit like finding out that your parents still have sex, but look, we’re all grown-ups, aren’t we? But then no, wait, who did you say her boyfriend was?
The former member for Wagga — the daggy, and now dodgy, Daryl Maguire.
That set off another wave of denial, like, OK, we can accept you’re in a relationship, Mum, but there is just no way that wing-wang is ever going to be our stepdad.
And you can understand that, because Gladys is warm, and bright, and capable. She is humble and hardworking and he’s, well, a bit of a Daryl.
They met around 15 years ago, when Maguire was a member of the NSW parliament. He quit while under a corruption cloud in 2018, and has in recent times been without a job, living in Wagga under a mountain of debt, trying to get divorced, all the while holding out the hope of one day getting a clip from somebody else’s property deal.
She, by contrast, was — and, at time of writing, still is — Premier of NSW. A greatly admired premier. Can you even imagine the stunned-mullet expressions on the faces of the undercover ICAC operatives when they discovered, via phone taps, a relationship between them? Wait, is that … Gladys? There’s some stellar contact tracing right there.
She says she kept the relationship secret because it never amounted to all that much. She had hopes for it, but it never grew legs.
When this scandal first broke, women in particular seemed willing to cut the Premier some slack. Plenty of jokes about the shortage of good mates were made, with one wag suggesting that it’s actually quite difficult to find a single man in Sydney who isn’t under ICAC surveillance.
Only slowly did it dawn upon Gladys’s girl squad — it’s about equal in size to the female population of NSW — that this could actually hurt her.
Because how effectively did she quarantine herself from a lover’s dodgy deals?
That is the essential, indeed only, question — and that in turn brings us to what we might, for reasons of clarity, call Season Two of Gladys Has Sex.
The interest here is no longer prurient. It’s political.
Because never mind the esteem in which the Premier is held across the nation and the spectrum, it’s not actually up to voters whether she stays in her job or not. She’s Premier because her colleagues made her Premier. It’s a position gifted to her, by her teammates, all of whom desperately want it for themselves.
First sign of blood? They circle.
You can imagine how that looks: a bunch of pink and sweaty people texting each other through the night, weighing up offers of a new portfolio in a new ministry in exchange for their vote in a leadership spill. It’s mortifying.
There is a trip switch: the party probably won’t oust a leader if she is popular, because what would be the point of booting somebody out only to end up in opposition?
And what has been very clear this week is the amount of support there is out there for Premier Berejiklian’s position. In part, that’s because she’s a terrific Premier, especially in relation to her handling of the COVID-19 crisis.
But how much stink can a person ignore before they examine what’s in the nappy?
To put that another way, how much about her lover did Gladys simply not want to know?
She has known for some time that Daryl was at least dodgy. She sacked him in 2018 because he was under investigation for corruption. He quit politics, and she kept seeing him.
He agreed during testimony this week that he had been trying for years to put himself in “the best possible financial position” to retire from parliament.
He was, we were told, $1.5m in debt when he was an MP. He wanted to get that paid off, and he also wanted a board position, or a consultancy of some kind, before he quit.
As to what he did to advance his own position — well, his testimony this week amounts to a display of purulence rarely seen, even in NSW.
Maguire has agreed that he sought to monetise his public office and to profit from his standing as an MP. He admitted to being involved in a private company called G8way (pronounced Gateway, geddit?) which tried to bring Chinese businessmen and Australian producers together.
He agreed that he hoped to get a clip from deals involving tin, gold, milk powder, even an automated car wash, run by Fijians. It seems that he was hopeless at it.
In the cutest paradox, he couldn’t make money even from a planned goldmine.
To be clear, not all of this pitiable conduct was corrupt, or illegal. Back when Maguire was an ordinary backbencher — and we use the descriptor deliberately — he was allowed to have “outside employment”.
That said, there is no doubt that he sought to leverage his relationship with his high-flying girlfriend as he went about trying to make money.
Using “G8way Daryl” on some emails, and his NSW Parliament House address, on others, he urged developers to get in touch with the Premier, to see if she might give their deals “a tickle from the top”.
Draw up your proposal, he said, and “I’ll get it to her.”
He would tell people to shower her with praise, and “rub the ego”.
He breached her privacy by giving out her private email address and he would tell people to “just blame me” if she complained about these intrusions.
In one particularly unedifying encounter, he took a developer down to Gladys’s office at Parliament House, for what we can only imagine was a mortifying meet-and-greet.
Berejiklian doesn’t just present as a goody-two-shoes. She hardly drinks. The developer in question had turned up during a sitting week with a model of his planned development under his arm.
Maguire invited him up for red wine, and they set about boozing and then, “after a few glasses of red” the developer said: “Can we go and see Gladys? Can we go and see Gladys?”
Why?
Apparently because “he adores her and wanted to say hello … he was at the stage where he just insisted (on seeing her)”.
And so, Maguire told his developer friend: “Well, we can go and see” — meaning, go and see if she was there.
But first, he made the developer put his wine glass down. Why?
“I wouldn’t let anyone walk around parliament with a glass of red,” he said. “I would frown on that.”
He insists that Gladys steered well clear of making any promises to anyone at that meeting.
“Niceties were spoken,” he said. “The conversation was very short, I’m sure it was less than two minutes … I don’t even think a photo was taken … and that was it, we were gone.”
Well, he’s gone for all money.
Yet the degree of anoesis on display was astounding. He seemed not to understand how these deals, or planned deals, would impact on her. Then again, perhaps he didn’t care.
And so to August 2020, when the Premier — by now in the midst of the pandemic — was summonsed to appear before a secret hearing of ICAC, where she learned that many of her private conversations with her lover had been recorded.
Yes, and all their sweet nicknames for each other — she called him Hawkiss, which we’re told by an Armenian speaker of our acquaintance is what your great aunt calls you when she pinches your cheeks; he called her Glads — would soon to be made public.
She immediately cut him loose.
In her testimony on Monday, Berejiklian said the relationship ended in August.
When Maguire was asked if they were still together, he responded: “Not after the events of this, I wouldn‘t think.”
But of course, it’s one thing to prove that he was her lover.
What is of interest to the public is whether he was also a kelson, that bit between the developer and the Premier, trying to manoeuvre her government in a direction that would benefit him financially.
In his testimony, Maguire said he would only speak to the Premier about “general problems I was having with life”, including his $1.5m debt.
He insisted that he “drew a line” and would only have a “general discussion” or give a “general overview” without entangling her in anything that might get her into trouble.
This doesn’t really put her in the clear. Whatever the outcome of the ICAC hearing, some believe that the Premier has breached of the Ministerial Code of Conduct (yes, that was quite the “October surprise”, wasn’t it, the fact that NSW has one?).
Under the code, ministers must declare the financial interests of their family members and “any person with whom the minister is in an intimate personal relationship”. Does that mean, any person that anyone has sex with? No, it means intimate personal partnerships, where there’s mutual dealing on things like housing, income, investments and so on.
The NSW Premier has her own house. She has her own job. She keeps her own bank accounts.
They were talking about maybe going public with their relationship one day, but he was still married (separated), and she’s funny about that kind of thing.
She was also Premier, and he’d been sacked for corruption.
Awks, as the kids say.
Over at Parliament House, the leader of the NSW Opposition, Jodi McKay — representing the far-from-virginal-when-it-comes-to-scandal NSW Labor Party — was screeching in an unseemly manner across the chamber, describing Berejiklian as a “sounding board” for corruption.
In a scene reminiscent of girls school hair-pulling, Gladys invited her to “say it outside”.
She continues to insist that she was not corrupted by her lover’s attempts at, shall we say, Glads-handling. She wants to keep leading the state, and since ICAC has not to date been able to lay a glove on her, well, why not?
She’s been doing a terrific job.
Her involvement with this Daryl has been disastrous for her, but it is worth looking at the ways in which Maguire’s style of politics impact upon us all.
Here’s just one example: the ICAC inquiry this week revealed a visa scam in which Maguire was involved.
It seems that a Chinese-Australian went to him, hoping to set up a scheme by which they would charge Chinese citizens upwards of $40,000 for an Australian visa.
They’d then set up sham jobs, so it would look for all the world like the Chinese were coming out to work in Wagga. But these Chinese visa-holders were not coming to Australia to work in the regions. Nobody ever actually turned up for work. There is no obvious benefit to anyone in his electorate of Wagga, and that’s because there were no jobs that desperately needed doing.
The people involved in this scam were not diversifying the community, or populating zones outside the capital cities, or doing any of the things they were supposed to be doing in the national interest. It was a cash-for-visa scheme.
The scam put thousands of dollars into Maguire’s pocket, but it also had a real impact on the country in which the rest of us live.
You can draw a line from the visas being extruded at volume to Sydney’s sky-high property prices, for example.
It’s why your kids can’t afford to buy a house anywhere near a capital city. It’s why the university experience of so many young Australians has been so dismal. It’s why you feel sometimes that you can’t get ahead.
Australians could at one time sniff with some disdain at third world countries, where business is all about the payment of bribes and kickbacks — but it seems it’s not so different here.
It can make the rest of us feel like chumps, going to work to earn a wage and pay our taxes, while others consider a career in crime, which these days means going into politics.
One can, on a human level, feel some sympathy for Gladys. The heart is a lonely hunter. But where on earth was her head?
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