With all eyes on ICAC, both sides of NSW politics are taking out the trash

John Ruddick isn’t a name many people outside the insular world of NSW politics have heard of. But since the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s Operation Rosny inquiry began last week, Ruddick, a Libertarian Party upper house MP elected with 3.5 per cent of the statewide vote in 2023, has been on a lonely crusade to convince anyone credulous enough to listen that the anti-corruption watchdog is leaking to The Sydney Morning Herald.

Last week, he went on Ben Fordham’s 2GB show to opine that, because the Herald keeps breaking stories about the inquiry, they must be coming from ICAC itself.

The evidence seemed a little thin, beyond the fact we sometimes cite anonymous sources. But what he lacks in proof, Ruddick makes up for in conviction. On Tuesday, he was up in parliament asking Special Minister of State John Graham about it. This time he came with a smoking gun: printouts of six articles he’d read on the Herald’s website.

I can’t speak for my colleagues, but, as the co-author of some of the articles Ruddick cited, all I can say is: “I wish.”

It is a reminder that crisis breeds opportunity, and no one in NSW politics is letting Rosny go to waste.

While right-faction Liberal figures such as Damien Tudehope have sweated through their turn in the ICAC witness box, the denizens of Macquarie Street and their associates have been hard at work.

Former Liberal bomb-thrower turned branch-stacking victim David Elliott has been helping the party’s new leader, Kellie Sloane, by publicly predicting which of her MPs might be called next to the ICAC. In an interview – also with 2GB – Elliott opined that some of the party’s current MPs might be there thanks to tainted preselections, while his factional ally, former boss and current Liberal Party president Peter Collins, has also been out singing Elliott’s praises.

Elliott has good reason to be salty. He was squeezed out of parliament in 2022 after it became clear he would not win preselection for the right-dominated seat of Castle Hill, after his own electorate of Baulkham Hills was abolished. One of the ICAC’s chief allegations is that the NSW Reformers at the centre of Rosny accepted illegal donations from the fugitive property developer Jean Nassif in exchange, partly, for damaging Elliott’s career.

But Elliott would surely have to be a key suspect in any investigation into who damaged his career. This is the MP who, among a succession of controversies, an ABC journalist complained had acted without her consent when he used parliamentary privilege to accuse then-opposition leader Luke Foley of inappropriately touching her.

Whether he is plotting an unlikely return to politics, or simply enjoying his retribution, the Martyrdom of David is a little tough for some of his former colleagues to swallow.

This is not to downplay the significance of what the ICAC has uncovered, or to suggest, as Liberal Party president Tony Abbott did, that the ICAC has erred by wandering into a factional fight.

The shocking allegations Rosny is surfacing show yet again the damaging influence of money in NSW’s politics. As if we needed another example. Rather, the point is that everyone has an angle.

Premier Chris Minns has been careful to strike a magnanimous tone when asked about the ICAC during the past week or so. Labor has its own unpleasant history with corruption, he concedes – but that doesn’t mean his government isn’t also using Rosny to its advantage.

On Tuesday, with everyone in NSW politics glued to Tudehope’s evidence, the government released a special inquiry into hate speech laws that it commissioned from former judge John Sackar, KC. The timing was … curious. The Sackar report has been the subject of intense debate in parliament for several months. Despite having it since November last year, Labor had point-blank refused to release it, claiming it was a cabinet document. It ignored multiple parliamentary orders demanding its production, leading to the deputy leader in the upper house, John Graham, being censured and booted from the chamber in June.

Then, in the middle of Tuesday afternoon, it popped up with no warning from the government. No wonder.

Sackar’s report was damning of Labor’s changes to hate speech laws rushed through parliament last year in response to concerns about antisemitism. The laws elevated the legal consequences for racial hatred above other vulnerable groups, such as the LGBTQ community or religious people. It means, Sackar’s review notes, that there are now arbitrary differences in how the law treats different sorts of discrimination.

Hate towards Sikhs, as a racial group, becomes more pernicious than hatred of Hindus for their religion. That, Sackar found, had the consequence of potentially increasing social disharmony.

The report was accompanied by a statement from Attorney-General Michael Daley saying, basically, that despite the findings the government would not do anything about it because it was too tricky. That, by the way, is precisely what the NSW Law Reform Commission said when it warned Labor not to touch the laws in the first place.

The government can’t spend eight weeks standing still while Rosny rumbles on, but this was a pretty obvious example of taking out the trash.

All this while, Sloane tries to keep her head above water. Last week, I questioned the Liberals’ apparent strategy of posting through the Rosny crisis enveloping them. This week, as parliament resumed from the winter recess, Sloane held a series of press conferences in which she was upfront about the challenges she faced, conceding she couldn’t be sure that there would not be more resignations from her shadow ministry after Tudehope. And she refused to back Abbott’s criticisms of the ICAC.

“This is what everyone hates about politics, right?” she said on Tuesday. “The idea that politicians are in it for themselves.”