Internal Liberal party documents leaked to a New South Wales parliamentary inquiry have detailed how a local council in Sydney’s north-west became ground zero for a years-long power struggle between competing factions.
The documents, tabled by an upper house probe examining allegations of impropriety between Liberal party councillors and property developers in the Hills shire, reveal an unlikely alliance between the moderate and rightwing factions of the party to freeze out federal MP Alex Hawke’s centre-right faction’s power base in Sydney’s north-west.
Supplied to the committee through an anonymous third party, the documents also detail the role a brother of the NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet, played in the factional power move.
As far back as July 2019, key factional figures – including Charles Perrottet, according to party records – proposed changes to the Liberal party constitution to allow branches to be moved into different local government areas at their request.
More than a year later, three branches controlled by the right – Glenorie, West Pennant Hills and Cherrybrook – all asked to be moved into the Hills local government district.
The move was recommended by the recently sacked upper house MP Peter Poulos, then-head of the party’s local government oversight committee and a key moderate.
Voting records from the party’s state executive show that right and moderate faction members aligned to approve the move at state executive, despite objections from the local party.
The dossier also alleges key members of the moderate and right faction helped secure the suspension of another branch in the Hills – Baulkham Hills – over allegations that records were doctored at a meeting in October 2018.
Baulkham Hills was the local branch of centre-right powerbrokers including Hawke and outgoing NSW transport minister David Elliott. Guardian Australia does not suggest either was aware of or implicated in the allegations.
The dossier was provided via an encrypted email address to the controversial upper house inquiry examining explosive allegations made by the Liberal Party MP Ray Williams in parliament last year, in which he claimed senior members of the party had been “paid significant funds” to install new councillors in order to support development applications by a company called Toplace, owned by Sydney developer Jean Nassif.
Nassif has repeatedly denied the allegations.
At the centre of the dossier are new details on how former Hills Shire mayor Michelle Byrne and most of her Liberal colleagues sensationally missed out on endorsement for party preselection ahead of the 2021 council elections.
The dossier’s author alleges an alliance between the moderate and rightwing factions helped push out Byrne and her other allies, who were from the rival centre-right.
It details a series of delays to preselections in the Hills shire until local preselections were bypassed and a new team of councillors was suggested and endorsed by the party’s state executive.
The tranche of documents shows that, after delays to opening preselections caused in part by Covid-19, it was Charles Perrottet – then part of the local government oversight committee – who put forward a list of alternate candidates agreed to by the committee.
Again, details of the vote on state executive show that they were largely approved by moderate and rightwing faction members.
The Victoria-based Charles Perrottet has refused to appear, labelling the inquiry a “Labor-Greens circus”.
Meanwhile, the inquiry has taken the extraordinary step of hiring a private company to locate his younger brother Jean-Claude Perrottet, after he failed to respond to a summons to give evidence.
Christian Ellis and his mother, Virginia Ellis, a Hills shire councillor, have also been the subject of a summons to appear before the probe but have not been able to be located despite an extensive 1,900km search across NSW.
The inquiry previously heard evidence from Byrne that she believed she had been targeted by party insiders because of a perception that she was “anti-development”.
“[To] get the pain-in-the-butt mayor out of the way who is perceived as [being] anti-development and have a better chance of getting things through without me in the way and jacking up,” she said.
