Inside the invisible rebellion that’s shaking NSW

On Tuesday morning, the government’s leader in the upper house, Penny Sharpe, was frog-marched out of the chamber in an unprecedented seven-day suspension after being held in contempt over the failure to produce documents relating to a decade-old sexual harassment allegation against former NSW Labor general secretary Jamie Clements. Your first question might be: what? Your second question might be: why?

The Legislative Council is a strange, unknowable place, a sort of wormhole you slip through, where what happens often bears very little resemblance to anything happening outside. People sink into the plush red benches and settle in for years, and years. Some are never heard from again.

But it is also, in this term of government, where most of the action happens, and crucially where, depending on your perspective, Labor’s agenda is either most unfairly stymied or the government is most effectively held to account. And it is where months of tension and grievance are boiling over into personal attacks and vitriol.

Sharpe’s suspension was just the latest escalation in a war that was bubbling along quietly for the past several months. Indeed, she has been suspended twice before over the same issue. To really understand why, you have to take a few steps back. The chief protagonists in this saga are not Sharpe, or even the opposition, which moved the censure motion against her. Really, what is happening in NSW politics is about the power of the Legislative Council.

In the middle of last year, the crossbench and Coalition in the upper house teamed up to block the government’s attempts to make dramatic cuts to the state’s workers’ compensation scheme. It was long and messy and created a strange new dynamic where former political enemies – namely the Greens, Mark Latham and the Coalition – found themselves on the same side.

The government has sought to exploit this unlikely alliance ever since. After sensational allegations about Latham’s behaviour in parliament broke last year, Minns used that matter to his advantage by criticising the Liberals for working with Latham on the workers’ compensation bill (though the government had also tried to work with Latham on the same legislation).

At the same time, the lower house crossbench independent Alex Greenwich, who works closely with Labor and sided with it on the workers’ compensation cuts, has attacked the Greens. (Latham vilified Greenwich over his sexuality in a series of homophobic tweets and quotes, and was ordered last month to pay him $100,000 in compensation. Latham says he is appealing.)

On Tuesday night, after the suspension of Penny Sharpe, the government resurfaced a motion from several months earlier that condemned Latham over his Greenwich remarks. This sparked a predictable response from Latham: some valid points, laced with personal vitriol and ad hominem attacks. When the Coalition and Greens did not support the government’s motion – they say because it contained errors and out of a concern for procedural fairness because of Latham’s mooted appeal – the government and Greenwich again lined up in the lower house to whack them for it.

Since the workers’ compensation bill, the relationship between the government and the upper house has continued to deteriorate.

A few months after that upheaval, the premier’s chief of staff, James Cullen, took the extraordinary step of suing the parliament to avoid fronting an inquiry considering the leaking of confidential minutes from a report into the proposed sale of Rosehill Racecourse. How you think about that case is, again, a matter of perspective. Either way, Cullen won, and the result has been to weaken the Legislative Council and make it easier for the government and outside organisations to avoid transparency because the upper house has lost its power to compel witnesses. (The ruling is now subject to a High Court challenge.)

This week, Greens MP Sue Higginson said Brigid Glanville, a former journalist turned media consultant to the Director of Public Prosecutions, declined to appear before an inquiry probing allegations that the DPP gave information to 2GB that sparked a negative story about a judge. At the same time, the crossbench says the government has been frustrating its other main avenue of accountability, the Standing Order 52 provision that requires governments to produce documents.

The government, some MPs complain, increasingly either fails to produce documents or classifies them as “privileged”, meaning they cannot be released to the public. In that context, the Sharpe suspension is less about the specific call for papers on Clements (which, by the way, the government says it has Crown Solicitor’s advice backing its decision not to release) than a broader Legislative Council rebellion.

There have been others. During the last sitting window, the Coalition began inserting a “poison pill” amendment into government bills in a bid to restore the legislative council’s ability to compel witnesses. Those amendments have led to some legislation being delayed.

Reading all this, you might wonder what any of this has to do with running the state of NSW. Fair question. But the Legislative Council, for all its weird idiosyncrasies, plays an important, if often invisible, role in holding governments to account, and the result of this war could have long-term implications for transparency in NSW.

Michael McGowan is state political editor.

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