NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey has declined to attend a hearing on Thursday for the NSW parliamentary inquiry into the Mater mould and maintenance scandal.
Mr Mookhey and Treasury staff were asked to attend, but they were able to avoid it through a legal loophole.
The NSW Upper House health committee running the inquiry sought to ask Mr Mookhey and his staff about financial details of the Mater hospital's public-private partnership (PPP).
The PPP is between the Sydney-based Novacare Health and NSW Health.
Novacare offered the private arm of the PPP to the NSW government for $2, saying it was headed for voluntary administration.
Inquiry chair Amanda Cohn said "it's disappointing that the Treasurer and treasury officials have declined to participate in the hearing".
"The committee and the community are keen to understand any work they've done to assess the $2 buy-back offer, and any other options to return the hospital to public hands," Dr Cohn said.
The Newcastle Herald contacted Mr Mookhey's office for comment about his latest thinking on the future of the PPP.
In response, a spokesperson said "the government has full faith in the health officials who are leading the engagement on this issue".
"This is a complex PPP. We're not happy with it," the spokesperson said.
"But what we won't be doing is letting the private provider off the hook or accepting tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars of liabilities and risk on behalf of the taxpayer."
The Herald reported on Tuesday that Novacare Health dodged more than $170 million in financial penalties over alleged failures at the Mater.
NSW Health conceded it did not make Novacare pay these penalties because it wanted to maintain relationships under the Mater's PPP.
Whistleblowers have accused the private arm of the PPP of corruption, falsified records, missing documents and maintenance failures.
Novacare and Honeywell have denied the allegations.
Under the PPP, Novacare subcontracts the hospital's maintenance to Honeywell, which is an American corporate giant.
HSU NSW secretary Gerard Hayes said the Mater case had provided "clear evidence, as if we needed more, of the rotten nature of these public-private partnerships".
"You can either serve public health or shareholders, but you can't serve two masters," said Mr Hayes, a key powerbroker in the state's Labor movement.
"There is no place for corporate greed in public health."
The Herald reported on Wednesday that the NSW government knew two years ago that the Mater's heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system had to be fixed.
The flawed HVAC system was pinpointed as a key cause of deadly mould contamination at the hospital.
A NSW Health-commissioned engineering report, dated June 2024, confirmed that the HVAC system had "no dehumidification".
"The Mater's HVAC system is not up to task as it cannot control relative humidity, and this has led to poor outcomes for hospital staff and patients," the report said.
Mr Hayes was stunned by the "absence of something as basic as dehumidification equipment in a hospital's air-conditioning system".
Whistleblowers told the inquiry that Honeywell failed to maintain the HVAC system properly, which the company denied.
Mr Hayes said this showed "the sort of short cuts that get taken when executive pay packets and corporate profits take precedence".
While the Treasurer and his staff are working on the final stages of preparing the NSW budget, committee members hoped he would have attended Thursday's hearing.
The Treasurer is not the only person to have avoided appearing at the Mater inquiry.
Honeywell's facilities director and maintenance manager at the Mater, James O'Brien, also avoided attending.
Before the last hearing in May, Mr O'Brien's lawyer said the Cullen case meant he "cannot be compelled to attend the hearing".
In October last year, James Cullen - chief of staff to NSW Premier Chris Minns - took legal action to avoid attending a hearing into the leaking of confidential minutes about Rosehill Racecourse.
