‘Sir Lunchalot’ Ian Macdonald to sette bill for abusing office

Another former New South Wales minister, Ian Macdonald, is facing jail time for abusing his public office.

Former NSW government minister Ian Macdonald.

Catalina restaurant at the water’s edge of Sydney’s Rose Bay provided an idyllic setting for Ian Macdonald to make the deal of his life in December 2008.

There were few better symbols, too, of Macdonald’s excess and greed on that warm summer’s day than his choice from the menu: suckling pig washed down with a $300 magnum of pinot noir.

Macdonald contributed nothing to the $1800 bill, as usual leaving it to his companions. But what made this lunch special was his opportunity as the NSW Labor minister for primary industries to grant a coal exploration mining lease to an obscure company chaired by his mate, former union boss John Maitland.

Maitland would later walk away with a windfall $6 million from the sale of his shares in Doyle’s Creek Mining, the company handed the Hunter Valley mining lease by Macdonald that day with no competitive tender.

Although Macdonald would resign from parliament in disgrace over a travel rorts scandal two years later, he continued to prosper for a while through consultancy work and a generous taxpayer-funded pension.

After a six-week trial and several years of costly legal wrangling, it was not just Macdonald’s deal of a lifetime but his entire world that collapsed this week when a jury found him guilty of two charges of wilful misconduct in public office.

Maitland, formerly national secretary of the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union, was found guilty of being an accessory to misconduct in public office.

Both men are on bail until a sentencing hearing next month — but the prosecution has signalled it will seek a custodial sentence at least for Macdonald. That could make him the second former NSW Labor minister in six months to score a jail term after Eddie Obeid, the notorious party “godfather” who made and unmade premiers, was sent away in December for a maximum of five years.

At a personal level, Macdonald’s story is the Shakespearean-like tale of an opportunist who climbed the political ladder to an important position of public trust, never missed a shot at benefiting himself to the maximum, and ended up caught in a downward spiral that ultimately ruined him.

In disputing his guilt, the man once nicknamed “Sir Lunchalot” protested he was not wealthy. As his capacity to earn an income dried up and hefty legal bills ­overwhelmed him, he said he’d been forced to sell his cherry ­orchard at Orange in the state’s west and eke out a living cleaning local apartments.

The bigger story of Macdonald’s fall is how he was able to thrive for so long, thanks to the enduring patronage of his party in NSW, and take full advantage of a rotten culture that existed ­inside it — typified most by the awful Obeid.

Obeid set the gold standard for corruption, leading the way for some like Macdonald: Eddie was always in the game for Eddie. After mocking the legal system, declaring it had a “1 per cent chance” of scoring a conviction against him, Obeid’s luck ran out when he was found guilty on charges of misconduct in public office for failing to disclose family business interests in Circular Quay cafe leases. At the time he was a government minister and lobbying behind the scenes to win these lease contracts that would benefit his interests.

Labor’s incumbent NSW leader, Luke Foley, was quick to condemn Macdonald after the jury’s decision this week by declaring “he will now share a prison cell with Eddie Obeid”. Obviously keen to distance his party from bad apples and dismiss any suggestion Labor tolerated corruption, Foley persisted with some excitable rhetoric. “Lock him up and throw away the key,” he said.

It was in fact Foley, as the left faction’s assistant secretary in the NSW ALP’s head office in 2007, who tried to push Macdonald out of parliament by telling him his time was up as a Labor member of the state upper house and he should make way for others. Maitland was the key figure from the union and party left wing who then worked to save Macdonald.

Despite Foley’s best efforts, Macdonald stayed on.

If he’d been successful, Foley would have unwittingly ensured the 2008 deal with Maitland never went ahead — a deal esti­mated to have cost the state government tens of millions of dollars in coal exploration licence funds lost because the sale did not undergo a proper tender process.

In another irony of party politics, Foley ended up inheriting Macdonald’s upper house seat when the well-lunched Labor MP was forced out in 2010 after it was revealed he had received $6000 of taxpayer-funded meals and airfares while on honeymoon with his third wife. Foley moved to the lower house in 2015 when he became party leader. He gave evidence against Macdonald at his trial.

If there was any doubt about the links, Foley was keen to ­remind voters this week of the closeness between Obeid and Macdonald by reviving the gibe that “Sir Lunchalot” was also known as “Eddie’s left testicle”.

The relationship looks set to be explored in detail later this year when Macdonald and Obeid, possibly both transported from jail cells, face a committal hearing related to the corrupt granting of yet another lucrative coalmining exploration licence, this one on the Obeid family’s rural property Cherrydale Park at Mount Penny in the Bylong ­Valley, in the state’s west.

Like the Doyle’s Creek deal, allegations surrounding the Mount Penny deal — which ­reportedly netted the Obeid family $30m and potentially much more — first surfaced during ­investigations by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption.

Now at the committal stage of a prosecution, there is the prospect of a further trial with Macdonald and Obeid as an unhappy couple in the dock.

This week when the jury decision was read convicting them both, old mates Macdonald and Maitland did not look at each other. It’s possible the relationship has frayed beyond repair now that the good days are over.

Back in 2008, Macdonald and Maitland each brought something important to the dinner table that were key ingredients to making their deal at Doyle’s Creek almost seem legitimate — with the possibility it would ­escape detection as corrupt.

As the minister responsible for NSW mines, Macdonald could give the appearance of the lease deal being routine.

He even suggested as part of his defence that a study was conducted by his ­department, and there was no legal obligation to open the ­licence to a competitive tender.

Macdonald maintained this charade to the end. He argued that the Doyle’s Creek licensing ­arrangement was not only legitimate but awarded on merit and beneficial to the state because the company proposed to develop the site as a training mine. He ­promoted mine safety — an ­element of the training — as a government priority.

Maitland, backed by several businessmen, then entered the picture as Doyle’s Creek chairman and the perfect candidate to make the idea appear credible on the company side. While Maitland ended his career as the overall chief of the CFMEU, best known for its militant construction ­industry division, his own background was coalmining. He started his working life as a miner and for many years was the straight-talking president of the Miners Federation that later merged with other unions to form the CFMEU. Indeed, Maitland seemed to ooze credibility: training and safety were his mantras. He was respected and certainly had not been considered corrupt. He had even seemed to distance himself from the hurly burly of ALP politics.

Macdonald, nonetheless, owed Maitland after the former CFMEU boss had helped prolong his political career and keep the long lunches rolling a bit longer. Maitland, of course, did not follow through on the training, ­instead selling his stake for a whopping $6m.

During the trial, the crown prosecutor, Michael McHugh SC, said Macdonald and Maitland had more than a professional ­relationship. Macdonald was ­motivated to help out his mate ­because of their friendship but also to bolster his own commercial opportunities when he retired from politics.

There are no last laughs in this saga — but there is karma, or some justice, for one Labor politician. During his brief time as NSW premier, Nathan Rees sacked Macdonald from his ­cabinet. He fell out with Obeid. Rees recognised something was rotten. The pair then worked ­together to successfully oust Rees and ­replace him with their then preferred candidate, Kris­tina Keneally.

Rees did not hold back this week, saying Obeid and Macdonald were now “both convicted criminals, bits of criminal garbage”. The pair, he said, had been hanging off the boot of the NSW parliament for years and most people would say good riddance.