He Who Must Be Obeid by Kate McClymont

Author:Kate McClymont
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2014-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Hostilities over the leases resumed once Carl Scully departed the portfolio and was replaced by Michael Costa, another Obeid loyalist, and a former boss of the state’s top union body. Maritime officials sent pro-forma letters to the quay lessees, reminding them that their terms would soon expire, and they should prepare to face a public tender for their properties. Even though there was no option written into their leases, and they were warned at the time they bid for their renewed leases that there would be a transparent tender in 2005, they cried foul.

The Obeids immediately mounted an assault, with Abood and Jabour appointing a former barrister turned self-styled ‘commercial mediator’ to represent their interests. Paul Scanlan began a campaign of polite, insistent and well-argued correspondence to Maritime. And behind the scenes, Eddie Obeid continued to complain to whoever would listen about the treatment of lessees down by the water.

Years later, when called to account for his backroom activities, Obeid would insist he was merely lobbying for reforms to the Retail Tenancies Act, which had application across the state. In any case, Obeid pulled Costa aside for a chat about the issue of Circular Quay. Costa later described Obeid’s lobbying as low-intensity compared to some of the arm-twisting he had experienced in government. Despite this, he said the public should be disquieted about it: ‘Look, if Eddie Obeid had leases or a financial interest in any leases at Circular Quay … he had an obligation – both a political, I would argue, and an ethical obligation – to advise anybody that he was lobbying about that. In addition, I mean there was a responsibility to have it on his pecuniary interest [register]. I don’t think there’s any question about that and I don’t think there should be any debate about that and not doing that I think is deplorable.’10

Of course, Obeid had declared nothing at all about the leases on the statement of interests registered with the New South Wales parliament, and he certainly had not told Costa anything of his family’s hidden interest in the area. This is despite the fact that his son Damian was transporting bundles of cash from the cafes on most days back to a safe in the family’s business headquarters in Birkenhead Point. From the tens of thousands of dollars that filled that safe each week, Eddie’s wife, Judy, was receiving a weekly ‘housekeeping’ stipend of $1000. Later, Obeid would repeatedly make the remarkable claim that he never told anybody because he didn’t want to compromise his colleagues, and because he believed issues should be dealt with on their ‘merits’ not the identities of those affected.11

Eric Roozendaal, at least, seemed to agree with the first of these arguments. ‘To be honest,’ he told investigators, ‘if it was that situation where he was urging his own interests I would have been worried [about] my own conflicts and I wouldn’t want to be comprised [sic] into those circumstances.’12

Obeid would repeatedly defy the logic of a parliamentarian

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