The rise and fall of Daryl Maguire
His dodgy dealings blew up the career of a premier in her prime. The story of Daryl Maguire’s rise from Harvey Norman salesman to an MP resigning in disgrace is just as hard to fathom.
You can spend a lifetime hoping to attract attention. Or you can be as fortunate as Tim McMullen, a NSW vigneron who was the recipient of one of the grandest gestures of product placement in recent times. McMullen planted his first vine in 1995 at his home on the outskirts of Wagga Wagga, a property infused with history: the bushranger Captain Moonlite visited in the 1800s, and in 1920 Edward VIII, the future king, stayed over during a tour to thank Australia’s World War I soldiers.
But it’s a comparatively recent event that made his brand newsworthy. Seven years ago, in a move that caught him unawares, a bottle of McMullen’s wine was inserted onto the world stage by his local member of parliament. In Australia for the G20 summit, Chinese leader Xi Jinping was attending a Sydney event whose guest list included premier Mike Baird and several ministers. Much to the surprise of some attendees, Daryl Maguire, the dogged member for Wagga Wagga, also appeared and greeted the Chinese leader with a bottle of wine from his electorate. “I think he just had it in his office,” McMullen says of his MP’s decision to hand the leader of the world’s most populous nation a bottle of Borambola’s export label merlot, complete with a special King Edward VIII label produced for the Chinese market. “If he had a local product he could hand out and promote, he did it graciously.”
A photograph of that encounter shows Maguire shaking hands with President Xi, leaning in to him and beaming – a single frame that, even without the bottle of red visible, would go on to have multiple ramifications. “That photograph, that was very, very powerful for our business,” says McMullen, who was happy to expand his brand’s reach in China. The presentation was reported by Beijing media, and Maguire would go on to boast that he had met the Chinese leader.
For others, however, the image has assumed a less auspicious association: it is also now known as exhibit 319 in a wide-ranging corruption inquiry centred on Maguire and stretching as far away as China. In the photo, standing in line behind the member for Wagga Wagga and smiling happily as he greets the Chinese President, is his senior colleague, the then transport minister Gladys Berejiklian – the woman he was already referring to affectionately as “Hawkiss” (Armenian for “my beloved”) in private messages that would become excruciatingly public.
The next NSW premier and the soon-to-be disgraced member for Wagga Wagga were on the path to becoming lovers, as the nation would sensationally discover. The consequences would be disastrous. After their secret was exposed under the intense gaze of the state’s peak anti-corruption body, Berejiklian would eventually resign as premier, even as investigators continued to circle. And while Maguire revelled in his apparent proximity to power that day, the one-time country salesman described as a “pain in the arse” by the state’s former deputy premier John Barilaro would become irrevocably linked to the downfall of one of the nation’s most popular leaders.
By his own admission Maguire, now 62, was an unlikely entrant to Macquarie Street. Yet he remained in the NSW Parliament for almost 20 years, winning five elections, joining the library committee and the select committee on salinity, appointed opposition and then government whip, and always, it seems, cajoling – colleagues, businesses, other politicians – with his ever-expanding dreams for Wagga Wagga.
Depending on who you ask, he was either a brilliant or a terrible politician, hard-working or lazy, effective or ineffective, always up to something or never up to anything, genial or foul-mouthed. “A good politician, but probably one of the worst businessmen I have ever seen,” is the assessment of one Wagga Wagga operator. Among the few points of agreement are that he was full of front, and a determined advocate for his community. “He’s one of those guys who think there are three great cities in the world: Paris, Rome and Wagga,” says former NSW Liberal leader John Brogden.
“I view my electorate as the centre of the world,” Maguire declared in his maiden speech to the NSW Parliament in mid-1999. Sitting roughly halfway between Sydney and Melbourne, with its flourishing and diverse farming regions and Wagga Wagga, population 69,000, at its commercial heart, the Riverina has been a lifetime’s focus for Maguire, who has spent much of his life in the area. His great grandfather Sunda Singh was a Sikh hawker from Punjab who moved to Australia in the late 19th century. He became an adept businessman, owning a farm and several shops, and one of the first cars in Swan Hill. That success did not filter through to all his descendants. Maguire’s early life was challenging; his mother died when he was seven, and his father, a drover, could barely write his name.
One of Maguire’s earliest jobs was as a mechanic in Griffith. He later moved to Wagga Wagga, where he ran a Harvey Norman franchise and left an enduring impression. “You talk about quality in sales people and you give him a mark out of 10, it would have been about eight, eight and a half. He was way above average,” recalls Harvey Norman boss Gerry Harvey, who was sorry when his franchisee, so proficient at self-promotion, decided to leave after several years for a run at politics. “Some people love being the centre of attention and they like doing their own ads and people recognise them, and he was very, very good at that.”
Maguire was preselected as the Liberal Party candidate for Wagga Wagga, which had long been a reliable seat for incumbents. “He actually doorknocked the city for months,” recalls former councillor Paul Funnell. In March 1999, Maguire became one of only two new Liberals elected to parliament that year. “This is such a conservative, rusted-on seat,” says Funnell. “The Liberal Party could have put up my blue heeler dog and they would have got the same vote.”
At 40, Maguire’s new career was underway. “I come to this place from very humble beginnings and, some may say, against all odds,” he said in his maiden speech, before invoking his late father. “He taught us values: to be honest, have respect, work hard and be tenacious – to never give up. He taught us that your word is your bond and you must earn people’s trust.”
One of those traits – tenacity – would underscore Maguire’s parliamentary career.
Being an incumbent in a safe seat seems an enviable position – Maguire stood for re-election every four years and was voted back in every time – but it also has disadvantages. “A safe seat member has to fight harder,” says National Party federal president Kay Hull, the former member for the federal seat of Riverina, which takes in part of Maguire’s former state electorate. There’s also the risk of your community being overlooked. Says Wagga Wagga mayor Greg Conkey: “We were a very, very safe seat and because of that we missed out on a lot of things: infrastructure, the police station was falling down, the court house was neglected for years.”
As he had promised, Maguire agitated for his community. “He was so proactive, so out there all the time, like a dog at a bone, always trying to make sure that Wagga got their fair share,” says vigneron Tim McMullen. “For me, on the surface of it, Daryl was amazingly supportive and was always trying to join the dots in terms of trying to connect people. I would have, for example, Chinese groups come to the winery and we would potentially wine and dine them and Daryl would come out to the winery and reinforce what we do.” Says Wagga RSL boss Andrew Bell: “He was always trying to put together proposals that would help the area.”
Several former politicians remember him often pestering on behalf of his electorate. “That’s the only way you can achieve for your community,” says Hull, who was deputy mayor when Maguire led the chamber of commerce. “When it comes to having to deliver or advocate on behalf of what [your] community wants, you leave no stone unturned and you will be a pain in the arse. It’s an asset.” But a former Liberal MP remembers Maguire as abusive and manipulative: “You generally tried to avoid him at every turn.”
While his local newspaper reported, after several years in office, that he was becoming known as Daryl Do Nothing, social media photos suggested Maguire was everywhere: from the opening of a local bonsai exhibition to the turning of the the first sod on Wagga’s new $4.4 million ambulance station. By the time his parliamentary career was over, the city would have attained a long list of new or updated facilities, from court house to fire station, a massively upgraded hospital and a multi million dollar clubhouse and function centre at the Australian International Clay Target Association. Maguire, the comparatively low-ranking MP, had cajoled his way to accessing the highest levels of government – meanwhile using the trappings of office to further his own business interests.
While the Riverina remained the centre of his world, Maguire developed a strong interest in China. Through its sister city relationship with Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, Wagga Wagga had formal links with the country going back to at least 1988. In 1995 Maguire, as chamber of commerce president, was part of an eight-member delegation to Kunming’s export commodities fair. Over the following four years, before he entered parliament, he was involved with at least two more official Chinese visits to Wagga Wagga. During his years as an MP, he made more trips.
Capturing even a corner of a Chinese city’s market could transform a business in regional Australia. Says a Wagga businessman who twice travelled to China on trips organised by Maguire: “You were sort of an official party. You were not a president of the US but we used to get picked up by government officials… They would take you around and introduce you… You would have lunch with the deputy mayor, and everyone felt important.” On one visit Maguire took the businessman to a building that was to have housed a shop selling Riverina produce. “It was pretty much falling down around us.” As far as he knows, the shop never opened. “Nothing ever came off,” he says. “You sort of went without expectations.”
“He’s a very flamboyant kind of person, very helpful,” says friend Joe Alha, a Sydney property developer for whom Maguire has made multiple representations to planning officials and even as high as the Premier’s office. (Hoping to get some top-level government help with development problems, a tipsy Alha was taken by Maguire to the Premier’s office in September 2017. “I can’t believe her office is that big,” he told Maguire in an intercepted call on his way home.)
Now 44, Alha was 22 when he met Maguire at a Liberal Party function. “For me as a young person growing up in the business world I was very privileged to have someone in government, and older and wiser than me,” he says of the former MP, adding: “[In] my experience, my hand on my heart, he is one of the most honest, hard-working nice guys, just genuine, doesn’t want anything from you… He was always helpful whenever I rang him and whenever my mates rang him.”
Alha would later tell the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption that Maguire was very actively trying to cultivate business between Australia and China. He went to China twice with him. The first trip was about a decade ago, when Alha was starting to develop properties. “He said to me, ‘Why don’t you come along? I’m in China, I’ve got to do something official, and I can introduce you to people and just look around at building materials.’” On the second trip, about five years ago, Maguire tried to introduce him to “a very large, successful developer in China and he wanted to tee me up and see if I could get funding”. Although the plan did not eventuate, Alha was grateful. As he says: “These things don’t come across a lot of people’s desks in a lifetime.”
Maguire’s interest in China was widening. In mid 2011, he became chairman of the NSW Parliament Asia Pacific Friendship Group. The following year, a company called G8wayInternational was established. While the plan was that he would only be appointed a director after he retired from politics, Maguire effectively ran the firm; he later conceded he used the business, which touted his access to “high levels of government”, to make personal profits, eventually turning his parliamentary space into a part-time office for it, without declaring any interest or income that he earned. By 2013, Maguire, through G8wayInternational, was involved in a scam migration scheme for Chinese nationals that eventually saw tens of thousands of dollars in cash handed to him at Parliament House. None of the applicants would ever work on a consistent basis for the employers who sponsored them.
Meanwhile, MP Maguire travelled often to China, his trips invariably busy. A proposed itinerary, documented by ICAC, included visits to multiple cities, stops at universities, markets and the Great Wall, and several meetings. How much he actually achieved for his electorate on these visits remained questionable. “The first time you go to China you think there’s so much opportunity over there,” says financial planner Julian McLaren. He was president of the Wagga Wagga chamber of commerce in 2012 when Maguire asked if he would like to travel to Shenyang as part of plans to build a Chinese business centre in Wagga. But as McLaren would later tell ICAC in a record of interview: “The thing that struck me was when we actually went there and actually spoke to the… people, they kind of didn’t really get why we were there and why they were investing in Wagga.”
Wagga Wagga City Council later signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese state-owned Wuai Group for a proposed $400 million trade centre, with a Chinese warehouse to be built in Wagga. Maguire and then premier Barry O’Farrell attended the signing. But in late 2013, the council canned the idea and withdrew an offer of land for the development.
With its grand announcement and subdued ending, it was symptomatic of much of Maguire’s extracurricular activity. “He’s the kind of guy who is always out there, at a dinner or lunch, always talking to people, talking about ideas,” Alha says now. “But what ever eventuated?” Maguire introduced him to more than 50 major overseas property developers (“flooding me with people; at some stages, they were coming in busloads”) but as Alha told ICAC, none of those referrals led to an investment. “Nothing that Mr Maguire has referred to me over the last 15, 20 years of my relationship with him in relation to property development has ever succeeded.”
Success or not, Maguire was busy. Privately, hismarriage was failing. Sometime between 2013 and 2015, he started a relationship with future premier Gladys Berejiklian. There was also a looming retirement that needed to be funded, and he had unspecified debts of close to $1.5 million. (In an intercepted call with Berejiklian in September 2017, Maguire was hopeful that a deal at Badgerys Creek, near Sydney’s new airport, would make him enough money to clear his debts. “I only want to pay off the house… the rest of it I don’t care about. I’m happy to have as much investment debt as I can possibly have. I just want to get rid of the bad debt.”)
While his political life seemed solid after so many years in parliament, he appears to have had few political allies. When quizzed about his friends, the only name that comes up regularly is former premier Barry O’Farrell, now Australia’s high commissioner to New Delhi. (He declined to be interviewed.) But by 2015, in his fifth term, Maguire’s dreams for Wagga were as strong as ever. At the state election that year the local newspaper, The Daily Advertiser, reported that the veteran MP’s wish list for his electorate included a new conservatorium of music, and he was also determined to “see through several infrastructure commitments, namely the new Wagga Base Hospital”. In early 2016 he approached sports minister Stuart Ayers and treasurer Berejiklian about millions of dollars of funding for the Australian Clay Target Association in Wagga Wagga.
Soon after, the air around Maguire began to sour. In mid-2016, the NSW ICAC was investigating allegations that officials associated with the former Canterbury City Council, in Sydney’s south-west, had acted dishonestly in relation to planning proposals. A phone intercept caught Maguire and former Canterbury councillor Michael Hawatt discussing commissions they could make from brokering the sale of big development sites. The proposed buyer in those transactions, according to ICAC, was Country Garden Australia Pty Ltd, a Chinese property developer whose interests were purportedly being represented by Maguire.
The member for Wagga, whose seat lay hundreds of kilometres from Sydney, was now on ICAC’s radar and under investigation. Called to testify at a public inquiry on July 13, 2018, Maguire admitted he and Hawatt planned to share commissions they obtained from developers – who sold their properties to clients of Maguire.
The revelations, coming from a sitting MP, were extraordinary. That day, Maguire resigned from the Liberal Party and moved to the cross bench. Berejiklian, who was by then premier, was among those calling for him to go. “I was shocked by the events [at ICAC] and I spoke to Mr Maguire late that afternoon to express in the strongest possible terms my deep disappointment,” she said in a statement a few days later. “I would encourage him to think carefully as to whether he can effectively represent the people of Wagga Wagga.” Three weeks later, Maguire resigned from Parliament and by August 2018, his long political term was over. But his downfall was not.
Berejiklian was proving to be a popular premier for the nation’s most populous state. While the Wagga Wagga by-election forced by the Maguire scandal had reduced her government’s majority, she won the 2019 state election. Through catastrophic bushfires and an ongoing pandemic she would become a reassuring presence to many and she prided herself on her adherence to rules.
Still, Maguire’s shadow lingered, at first vaguely and then ominously. In September last year, ICAC announced a public inquiry as part of Operation Keppel into allegations that Maguire had breached public trust by improperly gaining a benefit for himself or those close to him. He was being investigated on multiple fronts: the pursuit of commercial opportunities in China or involving Chinese associates through G8wayInternational; a “cash for visas” scheme; whether he had used diplomatic connections and his position as chair of the NSW Parliament Asia Pacific Friendship Group to further commercial interests; and his involvement in “door openings” and “lobby work” for developers.
“It appears from the evidence available to the Commission that, while he was a Member of Parliament, Mr Maguire pursued a number of commercial opportunities between 2012 and 2018, although not always successfully. Commonly those interests involved at least some level of association with China,” counsel assisting the commission Scott Robertson said in his opening statement. (One of G8wayInternational’s few successes involved the sale of some Borambola wines to an associate of the Australian Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China, an organisation that a recent Lowy Institute report found had well publicised ties to the Chinese Communist Party.)
Weeks later came an even bigger twist. To the shock of almost everyone, the premier announced she had been in a secret, long-term relationship with the disgraced Maguire – even as she had publicly admonished him. On October 12 last year, Berejiklian entered the witness box at ICAC and made some excruciating revelations. She and Maguire had been together since 2015 (he later claimed it could have been as early as 2013). She referred to him as her “numero uno”, although she never introduced him to her family, and described him as “a big talker. A lot of the time I would have ignored or disregarded what he said as fanciful.” In one of their many recorded conversations, when he talked about a side deal with a developer from which he could have potentially cleared a sizeable portion of his $1.5 million debt, she replied: “I don’t need to know about that bit.” She also revealed their relationship had ended only in recent months, and only after she had been called to give private evidence to ICAC that August.
Days later, in his first minutes in the witness box, Maguire provided rapid-fire concessions. Between 2012 and 2018 he had attempted to monetise his position as an MP, using his status to make money for himself and his associates. To pursue his own business interests he had used his Parliament House office – where, several times, he had also received thousands of dollars in cash. It was a morning of spectacular capitulations. But it didn’t end there.
On October 1 this year, ICAC announced that Operation Keppel had been expanded to include an investigation into the Premier and whether, because of her secret relationship with Maguire, she had breached public trust. As counsel assisting the commission Scott Robertson said in his opening address: “We also expect the evidence to demonstrate that Ms Berejiklian made or participated in the making of decisions and took other steps that advanced the building projects advocated for by Mr Maguire without disclosing to anyone within government that she was in a close personal relationship with Mr Maguire.”
Before Robertson could utter those words, however, Berejiklian resigned, insisting she had always acted with the utmost integrity. Evidence soon emerged that she had expressed an “inclination to support” a multimillion-dollar grant for the Australian Clay Target Association, for which Maguire had been lobbying and which was ultimately approved, contrary to the recommendations of some treasury officials and to the concern of at least one seasoned bureaucrat who was worried the approvals process was rushed. And then there was a May 2018 phone recording during which Maguire mentioned his “money projects” for Wagga Wagga. The premier said “we ticked off your conservatorium the other day so that’s a done deal now” but Maguire argued the $10 million would only cover the first stage of the planned construction. During another conversation that month, Berejiklian claimed to have secured $170 million for Wagga Wagga Base Hospital “in five minutes” after being badgered by Maguire.
Then the premier was gone. And while many insisted her political life could endure, no amount of political spin could change the one irrevocable feature of this most unlikely political pairing. Their secret and costly relationship may be over but, courtesy of ICAC and its ongoing inquiry, the popular premier and the frenetic regional MP remain interminably intertwined.
As Daryl Maguire awaits ICAC’s final report, tobe delivered some time after February, he has become an elusive figure around Wagga Wagga, where he runs an agistment business from his property on the outskirts of town. When he was spotted at a local petrol station in early spring, it was the first local sighting of him in a year, says RSL boss Andrew Bell. One who claims to still be in regular contact is his close friend and executor of his will, Joe Alha. “Every day I check up on him. I make sure he’s all right… This is what mates do,” says Alha. (When The Weekend Australian Magazine called Maguire for an interview, a man who sounded just like him claimed to be the manager of his agistment business, not Maguire, and then hung up.)
After a long time in office followed by an ignominious demise, how is Maguire remembered? Former federal MP Kay Hull thinks his legacy as a cajoler for his community remains significant. “We’ve been left out of the market as a strong, safe seat for decades. We have got by with an unacceptable court house, police station. Wagga Base Hospital was falling down around our ears. We have all of these things now. You can’t take that away.”
But if civic markers are any indication, Maguire is not viewed so generously. His predecessor, Joe Schipp, had the freedom of the city bestowed on him, while Hull has a conference room and a veterinary teaching hospital named after her. And Maguire? As former Wagga councillor Paul Funnell says: “He’s there 20 years, there’s not even a pothole named after him.”