Hatred at the heart of the WA Labor Party

Cleared of indecently assaulting a colleague, Steve Kaless is still dealing with the devastating fallout.

Steve Kaless with wife Tamara Lindsey. ‘There was the start of a campaign. It was definitely orchestrated,’ he says. Picture: Colin Murty

For a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fraction of time, the right hand of Steve Kaless — the then-media adviser to West Australian Treasurer Ben Wyatt — moved ­towards the left buttock of his ­female colleague.

That fleeting moment, captured in CCTV footage at The Ritz Carlton Perth’s Hearth bar after a boozy lunch for Wyatt’s office staff last December, was enough to force Kaless to resign in disgrace, see him subsequently ­arrested at home — in front of one of his young sons — for indecent assault, and ruin both his finances and his career prospects.

It would also shed light on the vicious, cutthroat world of internal Labor Party politics, where personal enmities and blinkered ambition regularly collide, often with devastating consequences.

Steve Kaless (in the red jacket), next to the complainant (face blurred), at a Perth bar in December, 2019. The alleged incident occurs near the end of this clip from CCTV footage.

Almost one year on from the incident, Kaless stands exonerated of any wrongdoing, but is still trying to process the sequence of events that led to his downfall. The 45-year-old and his wife Tamara Lindsey are convinced he was the victim of a deliberate campaign by rivals within WA Labor to force him out and potentially advance their own standing in the party.

The woman at the centre of the complaint against Kaless, and ­another colleague from Wyatt’s office, Brendan McGrath, alleged that Kaless’s hand had gone up the woman’s dress, into her underpants and back out again.

But it took just hours for the magistrate to find Kaless not guilty, with the CCTV footage contradicting the accounts of the woman and McGrath. The reputational and financial damage to Kaless, however, had already been done.

The Weekend Australian can now reveal how documents ahead of the trial, but never tendered, show the deep-seated dislike ­towards Kaless from some corners of the Labor Party in the weeks and months leading up to the Christmas party, as well as the concerns from others in Wyatt’s office that the pursuit of Kaless had gone too far and may have been clouded by other motivations.

‘Happy as Larry’

The identity of the woman is protected under West Australian law, which prevents the naming of women in such matters even when there is an acquittal. The Weekend Australian has instead chosen to use a pseudonym, ­Jessica.

In the record of an interview between Kaless’ legal team and an office colleague, Jessica’s pleasure was described when Kaless was arrested over the incident.

“Sometime after Kaless was charged (Jessica) walked into (the colleague’s) office with a big smile on her face. (Jessica) seemed ‘as happy as Larry’ and stated that Steve had been charged,” the ­record states.

According to the record, the colleague said she asked Jessica if she was concerned about having to go to court, with Jessica replying that “it would be good for her career because people would see that once she had started something that she followed through with it.”

The food fight

A statement signed by Wyatt’s senior policy adviser, Howard Pedersen, before the trial noted Jessica’s demeanour at the office in the days after the party.

“On the Monday and the Tuesday it appeared to me that (Jessica) appeared to have a sense of satisfaction that she was at the centre of a public political drama, without any awareness of the ­impact that it was having on the office and, in particular, Ben Wyatt who was about to deliver the state’s December financial outlook to the public, which is a major policy and political event,” Pedersen’s statement read.

“(Jessica) seemed to me to be revelling in the publicity. She seemed to have suddenly got a sense of empowerment. (Jessica) did not show any signs of being a victim.”

While Jessica was keen to see Kaless charged, a number of omissions and decisions she made have fed Kaless’s view that other factors may have also been at play.

She initially knocked back a ­request from police to carry out forensic tests of her dress and underwear from that night, later saying she considered the request invasive. She later handed over the underpants — with no trace of Kaless’ DNA subsequently found — but never gave them the dress.

In the woman’s initial statement, sworn just days after the Christmas party, she also ­described how she and Kaless “had a bit of a tiff” at a lunch earlier that day. She told police she could not remember what it was about, only that “it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary”. On the eve of the trial, her story changed. She said she now recalled that the lunchtime disagreement was over ­Kaless’s failure to contribute a “non gender-specific” item for the Secret Santa gift exchange. (He had purchased a set of cufflinks).

Kaless disputes that account, and says the disagreement was the result of Kaless taking Jessica to task for comments she had made at an earlier Christmas function.

Kaless says he had found out that Jessica had complained to two senior Labor Party figures about the Treasurer’s office, ­describing it as an office in turmoil and badmouthing Kaless and ­Pedersen. “All I tried to do was make it clear that it wasn’t a good move to go around slagging out the office,” he said.

Hot topic

The Weekend Australian can also reveal further details about ­Jessica’s movements on the night of the incident. She initially told police that she went from Hearth to the nearby Lucky Shag before “we ended the night” at the Hula Bula Bar. Shortly before the trial, however, she changed her version of events to note that she had also gone on to two more bars at The Westin and The Standard.

She told Kaless’ trial that she had not told police about the last two stops because she did not ­believe they were relevant.

At The Standard, Jessica met up with two more Labor staffers, her ex-boyfriend Matthew Kavanagh and his colleague Michael Watts. Both were policy advisers to minister Mick Murray.

Pedersen’s statement detailed how, by the time he and Jessica ­arrived at The Standard that night, the alleged incident was ­already a hot topic of discussion.

“When (Jessica) and I arrived at The Standard both Matthew and Michael already knew about the alleged incident at the Ritz Carlton involving Steve Kaless and (Jessica),” Pedersen said in his statement.

“They were talking about the alleged incident almost immediately.”

Watts, Pedersen said, told him he was going to report the allegation to Mark McGowan’s chief of staff, Jo Gaines, but Pedersen said he shouldn’t as Wyatt already knew of the alleged incident and his chief of staff, Roger Martin, would deal with it.

Over the next 48 hours, however, word of the incident would spread rapidly through the Labor Party rumour mill.

And the details of just what was alleged to have happened grew more outrageous as the story was re-told, graduating from a touch, to a grab, to a clumsy grope.

By Monday, there was talk that Kaless had been trying to rip off her underpants. In the middle of a crowded bar. At 7pm. Did the pace and volume with which those ­rumours spread effectively take the decision-making process out of Jessica’s hands? Was the ­momentum so strong she had no choice but to go along with it? And was she pushed to pursue the complaint by parties eager to see ­Kaless go?

Proper party people

There were certainly people inside the Labor Party who did not like Kaless and his proximity to Wyatt, one of the government’s most prominent and respected figures. Neither Kaless, a former chief of staff with Seven News Perth, ­ex-Productivity Commission policy wonk Aaron Morey, nor former oil and gas vice-president Roger Martin, were rusted-on party men, but quickly became three of Wyatt’s most trusted advisers after Labor came to power in 2017.

There was a view outside Wyatt’s office there was a lack of proper party people within.

Among the longstanding party apparatchiks within Wyatt’s office was Jamie Parravicini, whose dislike of Kaless was well-known in the office.

History of hatred

Parravicini had left Wyatt’s office in May 2019 but attended the Christmas party, and would later appear in the trial as a witness for the prosecution.

He would also later stand unsuccessfully for preselection for the seat of Victoria Park after Wyatt announced he would retire from politics, a decision he ultimately reversed.

Parravicini himself made his dislike for Kaless clear in his police statement. “Kaless is extroverted, loud and talkative. I find him arrogant and he always needs to have the last word,” he said.

“I don’t think he is particularly liked in the office.”

According to the records from the colleague’s interview with ­Kaless’s legal team in July, it was clear Parravicini did not like ­Kaless while they worked together. “It was obvious during this time that Jamie hated Kaless and was very jealous of him. Jamie never used the words hate but it was ­obvious to (the colleague). It was always obvious that Jamie had some sort of vendetta against Steve,” the records said.

Parravicini told police he did not speak to Jessica between the night of the alleged incident and the following Tuesday.

But records from Jessica’s work mobile — her personal mobile phone records were not handed over — show that there was an ­almost 20-minute-long phone call between the pair the morning after the incident.

He also tried to solicit at least one further complaint against ­Kaless from another staffer who he said had been touched inappropriately. The colleague said she overheard Parravicini telling the woman that Kaless’s three young sons needed to know the type of person he was.

‘Start of a campaign’

On Tuesday, December 17, just a day before the state budget update, Wyatt fronted a press conference to address the scandal.

At the press conference, and despite the early stage of the police investigation, Wyatt said Kaless’ behaviour meant his position was untenable and said he would support the complainant “in whatever decisions she makes”.

But it was Wyatt’s sympathetic comments about Kaless and his children, and his statement that “these things are tragic for everybody, for the victim, for Mr Kaless, for his family and for my office”, that may have further spurred Jessica to pursue the matter.

“(Jessica) told (the colleague) that Ben saying he felt sorry for Steve made her angry and this was the reason she decided to make a statement to the police to have him charged,” the record from the colleague’s interview says.

“(The colleague) tried to explain to Jessica that she was taking his comments out of context but she was not open to that.”

By the time Wyatt had started his press conference, however, Jessica had already met with representatives from the Department of Premier and Cabinet and had agreed that it should be referred to police. The day before, Kaless had been called in for his interview with the same officials. With no specific allegations made against him, he says he was given no choice but to resign.

Less than half an hour after he left that meeting, he received a phone call from a journalist asking about his employment status. The following day, he would first learn of the police investigation after it was reported in the media. The pace with which word spread made him all the more certain there was a concerted effort by the party machine to bring him down.

“Without question, there was the start of a campaign. It was definitely orchestrated,” Kaless said.

Records from the formal investigation include a police note from December 17, just four days after the event, saying it was “not possible to see offence” in the CCTV footage from the bar.

But by January 8, after days of a media and political frenzy, the police running sheet noted that the CCTV “corroborated (the) complainant’s account”.

Kaless says he has watched that passage of footage hundreds, if not thousands, of times since, with many different people. Each time, he says, their reaction is the same. “Every time we’d show another legal eye or someone who was helping us out, they would look at it and go, ‘that’s not it, that can’t be it, are you sure you’ve got the right time from the police?’” he said.

Previous incident

The CCTV footage does, nevertheless, make for uncomfortable viewing. Kaless is clearly drunk, attempting to strike up conversation with people in the bar and high-fiving strangers.

He touches several men and women during the video, and there’s a stagger in his walk as he moves about the bar.

At one point he does appear to deliberately touch Jessica’s backside without any reasonable ­explanation, but it seems clear he did not put his hand up her dress and inside her underpants as ­alleged. “There‘s something very humbling about watching yourself when you know when you’ve had too many beers. I think anyone would recoil in horror, having to watch themselves,” he says.

Kaless has a big, exuberant ­personality that can put people offside. In 2017, he was reprimanded over an incident with a female ­reporter at another Christmas function and sent her an apology. Kaless told The Weekend Australia he had a good memory of that night, was still to this day unaware of what he was accused of, and ­remained “flabbergasted” by the whole episode. But that meant the allegation was always going to attract more scrutiny — and the pressure for him to leave may have been more intense — than it otherwise would have.

His decision to drink as much as he did may look ill-considered in light of his previous reprimand, and the magistrate herself said Kaless’ manner that evening was “suspicious” and unbecoming of a person of his seniority.

But he was certainly not the only member of the office to get drunk that night, and both in the footage and the magistrate’s not-guilty verdict it was clear that the episode that forced his departure and ruined his career did not happen as alleged.

Kaless is now pursuing a compensation claim surrounding the events that led to his departure.

A spokeswoman for Wyatt’s office issued a brief statement on the situation. “The former employee ­resigned from his position. The matter is the subject of legal proceedings and the Department of Premier and Cabinet is dealing with the matter,” she said.