ICAC: ‘You want $170m? It will take just five minutes’, says Gladys Berejiklian

Gladys Berejiklian told her then boyfriend Daryl Maguire she had secured $170m for a hospital in his electorate ‘in five minutes’, according to an intercepted phone call.

Former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian fronts ICAC on Friday over her relationship with disgraced former Liberal MP Daryl Maguire.

Gladys Berejiklian told her then boyfriend Daryl Maguire she had secured $170m for a hospital in his electorate “in five minutes’’ because the treasurer does “what I ask him to do’’, according to an intercepted phone call played to a corruption inquiry on Friday.

Mr Maguire’s extensive lobbying outside formal channels also included discussions with Ms Berejiklian about the dismissal of a public servant. The former premier agreed to postpone the sacking to allow the official to finish working on a project that was dear to Mr Maguire’s electorate.

The recordings were played during a stunning six-hour hearing at the Independent Commission Against Corruption, throughout which Ms Berejiklian repeated a defence that she had no reason to declare her relationship with Mr Maguire, and still would not do so, because it was not of “sufficient significance”.

While she agreed Mr Maguire was notionally regarded as a member of her family, and conceded that she had given him a key to her home, Ms Berejiklian insisted the relationship was not committed enough to warrant ­introductions to her parents or sisters, a threshold she defined as pivotal for a formal declaration under the NSW Ministerial Code of Conduct. She also denied Mr Maguire derived favourable treatment during the course of their relationship, which ended approximately a year ago, saying he was on the whole treated similarly to other MPs seeking funding.

ICAC’s counsel assisting Scott Robertson revealed a volume of text messages between Ms Berejiklian and Mr Maguire regarding projects that he was pushing in his electorate of Wagga Wagga.

In one conversation, intercepted in May 2018, Ms Berejiklian boasted that she had reversed a major funding decision in the upcoming NSW budget to secure $170 million for a Maguire project, after he complained that Treasury officials had fobbed him off.

“I’ll deal with it. I’ll fix it,” Ms Berejiklian said, calling him back a short time later. She said she had spoken to Dominic Perrottet, the then treasurer, and asked him to override the Treasury officials. He has since succeeded Ms Berejiklian as NSW Premier.

“I just spoke to Dom and I said put the $140 (million) in the budget. He said no worries,” Ms Berejiklian said.

Then she added: “He just does what I ask him to do.”

“It’s meant to be $170m,” Mr Maguire replied.

“He’s putting it in, whatever it is … to be honest, it’s Brad’s fault for not being on top of what people want, OK?” Ms Berejiklian said, referring to Health Minister Brad Hazzard, who did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesman for Mr Perrottet said he would not comment while the inquiry was continuing.

Asked about the call, Ms Berejiklian told the hearing it would have been “impossible to do unless the project was already ready to go”, but then said she “could not remember” asking Mr Perrottet to adjust the budget.

“You told Dom, and he does what you say when you’re premier, is that correct?” asked Mr Robertson.

“That’s not the case. Neither of us would have done anything that was not appropriate.”

In a separate call played to the commission, Ms Berejiklian appeared to collude with Mr Maguire on the dismissal of a public servant, agreeing to postpone the sacking until work had been completed on the Riverina Conservatorium of Music, one of Mr Maguire’s pet projects.

“I can’t stand that guy,” Ms Berejiklian said. “His head will be gone soon.”

“Not until he fixes my conservatorium.”

 

“Yeah, OK. Tell him to fix it, and then after he fixes it I’m sacking him,” she replied.

Ms Berejiklian told the hearing that she could not recall “thinking” of taking action against the official, whose name has been suppressed, prompting a rebuke from ICAC Commissioner Ruth McColl.

“That’s what you said, Ms Berejiklian,” Ms McColl said. “That is what was just played to you.”

“Yes, but the person is still in the public service,” Ms Berejiklian replied.

After months of private examinations, two weeks of public hearings and a blaze of publicity, Ms Berejiklian’s appearance at the ICAC finally gave the community an opportunity to hear from the former premier herself.

Demand for the hearings crashed the commission’s website early in the day and forced a temporary halt to the proceedings, just as Ms Berejiklian had concluded a round of questions concerning whether she would disclose the relationship, given her time over.

“I would not have,” she said. “The threshold for me was did I feel there was a commitment that I felt I could share with my parents or sisters, and I didn’t feel there was sufficient significance.”

To counter this claim, Mr Robertson drew on a text message sent by Ms Berejiklian on April 12, 2018, in which she told Mr Maguire that he was “family”, resulting in several minutes of wrangling over the precise intent of the word. “I didn’t regard him as family as part of the ministerial code,” she said. “Not in the legal sense, no.”

Best friends, extended friends, even associates were considered “family” in Ms Berejiklian’s explanation of the term, confounding Mr Robertson’s line of questioning.

“What’s the answer to my question then?” he said. “Did you or did you not regard Mr Maguire as part of your family?”

“I didn’t regard him as a member of my family in the same way that I regard my parents or my sisters,” she said. “I regarded him as part of my love circle, part of the people that I strongly cared for.”

As the proceedings continued, Ms Berejiklian said her private communications with Mr Maguire amounted to nothing less than what occurred with other members of parliament, who similarly lobbied for funding and sought progress updates.

Not only did Mr Maguire retain no privileged access to her decision-making, she said, but the government felt it had lost the confidence of regional voters, which meant spending money in regional seats, such as Wagga Wagga, Mr Maguire’s seat, had become politically expedient.

“There was enormous concern about all our regional and rural seats. Our regional communities felt ignored, they felt we were too Sydney-centric,” she said.

This became the first of two central rebuttals offered by Ms Berejiklian to the ICAC’s examination of her conduct. The second was that neither she nor Mr Maguire derived a personal benefit from any funding decisions, neutering any need, in her mind, to disclose the couple’s relationship.

“Building a hospital is not a personal benefit to me,” she said. “It is a community asset. It is something the electorate needs. I would gain nothing but political favour or support from the community.”

Seizing on this logic, Mr Robertson asked Ms Berejiklian why, in that case, she had previously declared board appointments, and the employment of two cousins in the public service, but not Mr Maguire’s reappointment as a parliamentary secretary, which attracted a higher salary and greater status.

“I didn’t appoint him. I reappointed him,” she said.

“Yes, so when you reappointed him did you make any disclosures, because that was an appointment which might have a benefit as you described?”

“Well that was a position of public authority, and no I didn’t make any disclosures.”

Former premier Mike Baird and former deputy premier John Barilaro each told earlier ICAC hearings that Ms Berejiklian should have declared a potential conflict of interest in relation to Mr Maguire, as did Stuart Ayres, the current deputy Liberal leader, who said he would have sought advice about funding projects in the Wagga Wagga electorate.

Ms Berejiklian rejected their assessments.

“Respectfully, they weren’t in it (the relationship), so they wouldn’t have known my state of mind,” Ms Berejiklian said. “I respect them, they’re entitled to their opinion, but they were not in what I was. I was the only one who could determine the status of that relationship.”