3 weeks ago
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February 5, 2026 — 5:00am
Sacked City of Parramatta council boss Gail Connolly was accused of disadvantaging the city’s lord mayor by failing to fill job vacancies in his office, an email exchange between the pair reveals.
The emails, obtained by the Herald through a freedom of information request, reveal a breakdown in relations between the two most powerful people at the city’s council in the eight months before councillors voted to remove Connolly from her position in a rowdy late-night council meeting.
The conversation preceded a Supreme Court judgment that found Connolly had improperly withheld documents from councillors about the censuring of a fellow councillor, as well as a string of investigations in the Herald about the council’s internal culture and secret payouts to staff.
Martin Zaiter, a Liberal councillor who was elected lord mayor in October 2024, emailed Connolly in February last year demanding to know why his office was not fully staffed despite being entitled and budgeted to have four full-time-equivalent staff.
“I am extremely concerned at the speed of filling in the vacant spots in my office,” he wrote. “It appears I have been disadvantaged in my role as Lord Mayor from a staffing perspective.”
He asked whether the council had begun the recruitment process for a senior adviser (“I have been asking for this since [a former staff member’s] contract expired in October/November 2024”) and for a full-time personal assistant.
“It has now been months, and I still don’t have a full-time PA,” he said. “I believe that my term of office should be respected in the same manner that the 3 previous lord mayors were when they had the pleasure of 4 full time staff. As this is not a funding issue due to the 4 full-time positions being budgeted for, why do we have a delay?”
In a response to Zaiter just over 12 hours later, sent at 12.01am, Connolly said she was “concerned that you consider there have been delays by the Manager, Office of the Lord Mayor [redacted name] in recruiting the two vacant positions”.
She explained that the PA position description was being amended at Zaiter’s request to include admin and correspondence duties “to free up [a full-time position] for social media/comms activities”.
“At all times the roles of PA and Correspondence and Admin Officer in [redacted] team have been temporarily backfilled,” she wrote, providing a detailed timeline of events, including the allegation that a staff member, after a prolonged period of absence, refused to return to work in the mayor’s office, and was redeployed to another department.
The email thread was forwarded to Connolly’s personal email address by a staff member in the fortnight after Connolly was sacked.
Employment and litigation lawyer Rosemary Marando, acting for Connolly, declined to answer questions about the contents of the email.
Zaiter declined to comment. A council spokesperson said: “The City of Parramatta currently has four full-time staff allocated to the Office of the Lord Mayor. In February 2025, there were three staff members in the office and recruitment was under way for one vacant position.”
The Sydney Morning Herald has opened a bureau in the heart of Parramatta. Email [email protected] with news tips.
