Angus Taylor apologises to Clover Moore, denies his office forged travel expenses document

Energy Minister concedes he used incorrect numbers to attack Sydney Lord Mayor, but strongly denies his office forged a false document.

JOE KELLY and Olivia Caisley

2 min read

6:12PMOctober 25, 2019.

Updated 11:10PMOctober 25, 2019

Labor has referred Energy Minister Angus Taylor to the NSW police. Picture: Kym Smith

Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor has conceded that he used incorrect numbers to attack Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore over her travel expenses and carbon emissions, but strongly denies his office forged a false document.

Mr Taylor offered an apology to Ms Moore on Friday for “not clarifying those numbers with the City of Sydney before writing to her”. “On 9 September, my office, in preparing a reply to a letter from the City of Sydney Lord Mayor, accessed a report on the City of Sydney website,” he said.

“The details in that report were the basis of my letter to the Lord Mayor. What is clear now is that the numbers in that document were not correct.”

‘FORMATTING DIFFERENCES’: Read the Minister’s defence here

Mr Taylor rejected Labor’s “outrageous accusations” that his office “altered the document in question.”

“There is clear evidence on the City of Sydney’s own website, that there are different versions of the same report online right now,” he said.

“Clearly, given the document and its various drafts and versions, are on the servers of the City of Sydney, only they can prove which documents have existed, and may still currently exist.”

“Clearly, given the document and its various drafts and versions are on the servers of the City of Sydney, only they can prove which documents have existed, and may still currently exist.”

Mr Taylor said Labor had “dramatically overreached” by claiming the documents were forged or altered and by asking NSW police to investigate whether he had breached the law.

“There is absolutely no basis for these assertions,” he said. “The Labor Party has a track record of using police referrals as a political tool. And the shadow attorney-general has obviously done so in this instance without even a casual regard for the facts.”

In his statement, Mr Taylor included two different versions of the council’s 2017-18 annual report, with formatting differences.

The City of Sydney later acknowledged there were two versions of its annual report online — one uploaded as a PDF document and one as a Word document — but said the content was identical.

Labor want Angus Taylor referred to cops

It also rejected any suggestion the incorrect figures used by Mr Taylor were contained in any version of its annual report. “The figures used by the minister are not a small variation, they are grossly inaccurate,” it said in a statement.

Opposition legal affairs spokesman Mark Dreyfus wrote to NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller on Friday asking him to consider whether the minister had breached the law by allegedly making a false document with intent to “induce a journalist to accept it as genuine”.

Mr Taylor’s letter, later reported in Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph, said City of Sydney councillors had spent $1.7m on international travel and $14.2m on domestic travel.

However, the council’s 2017-18 annual report, available online, shows Ms Moore’s international out-of-pocket travel costs were only $1727.77 and domestic costs were $4206.32.

In his letter to Mr Fuller, Mr Dreyfus said the misinformation was “highly concerning” and should be considered for investigation. He pointed to section 253 of the NSW Crimes Act, which makes it an offence to create a false document with the purpose of misleading a journalist or influencing politicians in the exercise of their public duties.

Labor energy spokesman Mark Butler said it was “a serious indictable offence under section 253 of the NSW Crimes Act to make a document … with the purpose of seeking to influence the exercise of a public duty by a publicly elected official, in this case the City of Sydney Lord Mayor”.