“The standard you walk past is the standard you set.”
These are the words of Premier Gladys Berejiklian in parliament earlier this month after her triumphant March re-election as she got stuck into Blue Mountains MP Trish Doyle for not intervening or protesting when she was at an event where former Labor leader Michael Daley made offensive comments against Asian immigration.
But these words have come home to roost for the premier and her “Customer Service” Minister Victor Dominello after revelations in The Australian about the leak of hundreds of motorists’ private details to the Liberal party dirt unit and a journalist.
That leak, as The Australian has revealed, occurred despite the head of Revenue NSW specifically requesting the spreadsheet containing the private speeding offence details of Michael Daley and his wife and hundreds of other motorists, mistakenly given to the minister’s office, be deleted.
It beggars belief that Dominello did not know about this departmental request, which occurred last November, at the time that an article was published about Daley’s driving record in The Sydney Morning Herald during the election campaign. Yet the minister made no protest or inquiry at the time as to why the information was released.
If Dominello did not know about this request to delete the file last November, it seems he is unfit to run a political office and unfit to be a minister. He refused in parliament this week to answer when he knew.
When Berejiklian promoted Dominello, with whom she is close, to be one of eight cluster ministers post-election, she effectively put him in charge of all state government data, knowing that his office was under police investigation over the leaking of some of that information in a bid to try to wound the then opposition leader. Ten staffers have been interviewed by police.
How can any NSW citizen trust this office with their data?
As for Dominello, he got up in parliament earlier this month and made a joke of the fact that his office was under investigation.
And he and the Premier steadfastly refused yesterday, using tricky bureaucratic language, to reveal if Dominello had declared to cabinet or the premier that his family had an interest in conveyancing, or declare that the minister’s cousin, Beth Dominello, had made a complaint personally to him about econveyancing company PEXA, at the time Dominello was pushing reforms to disadvantage PEXA.
Mr Dominello told parliament: “I received an email from my cousin who is one of about 34,000 lawyers in NSW. She sent an email in relation to a complaint, a frustration she had with PEXA and a bank.”
He said he had sent the matter to his agency for a response.
Asked about the email from Ms Dominello to PEXA, a spokesman for the minister said: “The Minister adheres to the highest standards of integrity, and complies with all his obligations at all times.”
A spokesman for the Premier said: “The Minister has advised [he] . . . has acted in accordance with his obligations under the Ministerial Code of Conduct at all times.”
There is little doubt that if Mike Baird were still premier, he would have acted on this leak scandal.
After MP after MP was named adversely at ICAC, he canned them all. Swiftly.
Berejiklian seems to prefer that such matters just go away.
When it came to former Wagga Wagga MP Daryl Maguire being named adversely at ICAC, Berejiklian, who was on holidays, took days — and a lot of pressure — to get Maguire to fall on his sword. Even then, she had to get former premier Barry O’Farrell, who himself fell over an ICAC scandal, to call Maguire to make it happen.
One former Berejiklian staffer said to another government staffer at the time “it’ll blow over.”
Perhaps that is what the Premier is hoping for now. That “it’ll blow over”.
But ultimately, how the Premier deals with the Dominello matter is a test of her integrity. If police cannot find evidence to charge, ICAC should investigate this matter with public hearings. And Berejiklian and Dominello should find the staffer who leaked this information and sack them immediately.
Because, as the premier so beautifully put it, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept.
That’s right, Premier. It really is.
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