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The Minns government has been dealt a severe blow after its most senior upper house member was suspended from parliament for seven days for failing to produce documents relating to a decade-old allegation of sexual harassment against the former NSW Labor general secretary Jamie Clements which he denied.
In an extraordinary development on Tuesday, Penny Sharpe, the minister for energy and Labor’s leader in the upper house, was removed from the chamber by the Usher of the Black Rod after being banned from the parliament for a week.
The suspension is the longest in living memory, and comes after Sharpe had previously been held in contempt by the parliament on two occasions over the same issue.
The suspension followed the rehashing of a decade-old allegation against Clements, who is Premier Chris Minns’ best friend, by the upper house MP Mark Latham.
In August last year Latham successfully passed a motion in parliament calling for documents held by the NSW Police and government regarding allegations made by a former Labor staffer Stefanie Jones against Clements, which allegedly occurred at parliament in the office of the Campbelltown MP Greg Warren. The motion occurred in the context of a long-running feud between Minns and Latham.
The allegations against Clements first arose in June 2015, after Jones accused the then party boss of trying to kiss her. Clements denied the allegations and, without admissions, signed an out-of-court agreement not to approach Jones for 12 months. He was briefly the subject of an AVO, but was never charged.
Latham’s motion, which was supported unanimously in the upper house, called for the government to release a tranche of documents including a statement Minns made to police at the time.
But the government has refused to hand over the documents because of advice from the NSW Crown Solicitor and NSW Police that they relate to “material touching on or concerning court proceedings and a police investigation”.
On Tuesday, Sharpe told parliament the Crown Solicitor had advised “there is a strong relationship between the statement and transcript of the apprehended violence order proceedings, as the subject matter of the documents goes to the central issue in the AVO proceedings”.
That advice has also not been released to the parliament.
The decision to suspend Sharpe for seven days is significant. The last leader of the upper house to be suspended after being found in contempt was during the Berejiklian government, when Don Harwin was suspended for failing to produce documents relating to a controversial $250 million council grants program. His suspension was for one day.
Before that, a motion to hold a government in contempt last occurred on November 27, 1998, when then-Labor treasurer Michael Egan was suspended from the chamber.
It marks the third time Sharpe has been found in contempt by the chamber and suspended over the issue. She was suspended twice in March, including once for three days. It will leave the government a vote short in the upper house for the week, and Sharpe accused Latham, the opposition and the Greens of risking the delay of “critical bills” including changes to hate speech laws.
Damien Tudehope, the Liberal Party leader in the upper house, acknowledged suspending Sharpe for a week was a “significant step”.
“We have taken that step because we have been left with no choice and this is the only mechanism at our disposal,” he said.
“This is a government so opposed to transparency that it refuses to release documents containing the premier’s own words. What has the premier got to hide that he would rather his minister be suspended from parliament rather than hand over these documents?”
During a budget estimates hearing in March, Minns confirmed he gave a statement to police “at their request” during their investigation into the incident. Asked whether he remembered the contents of the statement, he said: “Not really, no. It was 11 years ago or 10 years ago.”
Minns was not present during the alleged incident. There has never been any suggestion he was the subject of any investigation himself.
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