NSW Labor upper house leader banned from parliament over refusal to produce documents
The Minns government has been dealt a blow after the most senior member of the upper house was suspended from parliament for seven days for failing to produce documents relating to a decade-old sexual harassment allegation against former NSW Labor Party general secretary Jamie Clements.
In an extraordinary development on Tuesday, Energy Minister and Labor leader in the upper house, Penny Sharpe, was escorted out of parliament by the Black Rod Bailiff after being banned from entering parliament for a week.
This suspension is the longest in history and comes after Sharpe was twice previously held in contempt by parliament over the same issue.
The suspension comes after a decade-long allegation was made against Prime Minister Chris Minns’ best friend Clements by upper house MP Mark Latham.
In August last year Latham successfully passed a motion in parliament demanding documents held by NSW Police and the government relating to allegations made against Clements by former Labor Party staffer Stefanie Jones over an alleged incident at Campbelltown MP Greg Warren’s office. The move occurred in the context of a long-running feud between Minns and Latham.
Allegations against Clements first emerged in June 2015 after Jones accused the then party boss of trying to kiss her. Clements denied the allegations and signed an out-of-court agreement not to approach Jones for 12 months without any admission. He was briefly AVOed but was never charged.
Latham’s motion, which was unanimously supported in the upper house, called for the government to release a number of documents at the time, including Minns’ statement to police.
But the government has refused to hand over the documents due to advice from the NSW Crown Solicitor and NSW Police that they relate to “significant contacts relating to or relating to court proceedings and the police investigation”.
On Tuesday Sharpe told parliament that the Crown Counsel had advised that “there was a strong relationship between the statement and the transcript of the arrest violence order hearing, as the subject matter of the documents formed the central issue in the AVO hearing”.
This recommendation was also not presented to parliament.
Sharpe’s seven-day suspension is significant. The last leader of the upper house to be sacked for contempt was during the Berejiklian government, when Don Harwin was suspended for failing to produce documents relating to a controversial $250 million council grant scheme. His sentence was suspended for one day.
Before this, the last time a motion was held to convene a government was on 27 November 1998, when the then Labor treasurer Michael Egan was suspended from parliament.
This is the third time Sharpe has been insulted and suspended by the agency. He was suspended twice in March, once for three days. This will leave the government with a vote in the upper house for a week, and Sharpe accused Latham, the opposition and the Greens of risking delaying “critical bills”, including changes to hate speech laws.
Damien Tudehope, the Liberal Party’s upper house leader, acknowledged Sharpe’s one-week suspension was an “important step”.
“We took this step because we were left with no other option and this is the only mechanism we have,” he said.
“This is a government so anti-transparency that it refuses to release documents containing the prime minister’s own remarks. What could the prime minister have to hide that he would prefer his minister be suspended from parliament rather than handing over these documents?”
At the budget estimates hearing in March, Minns confirmed he had made a statement to police “at their request” during the investigation into the incident. When asked if he remembered the content of the statement, he said: “Not really, no. It was 11 years ago or 10 years ago.”
Minns was not present at the time of the alleged incident. There was no suggestion that he was the subject of any investigation.
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