Senior New South Wales Labor MP Tania Mihailuk has sensationally quit less than five months out from the March election, saying the decision to preselect her factional rival shows the party has “not cleaned up its act” and is “not ready to govern”.
Mihailuk was sacked from Labor’s shadow frontbench last month, after a late-night speech in which she linked the Canterbury mayor, Khal Asfour, with corrupt former minister Eddie Obeid, and accused party leaders of ignoring the “horrific influence” of property developers.
She told parliament on Thursday she had been left with “no choice” but to resign from the party.
“I’m disappointed that Labor has not learned from [former Labor premier] Nathan Rees’s past warning, and I quote, that ‘NSW Labor must never again allow the circumstances to develop in which a small cabal of self-interested individuals could control the fate of a great party’,” she told parliament.
“Clearly, the NSW Labor party has not cleaned up its act, it’s not ready to govern, and as a consequence I will now be resigning from the Labor party. I’m left with no other choice.”
During her speech last month, Mihailuk, the MP for Bankstown, launched a series of accusations against Asfour, who is running on the party’s upper house ticket, about the redevelopment of land in the area, including alleged links to Obeid.
Asfour denied the allegations.
But she was sacked by the Labor leader, Chris Minns, who said she had refused to accept his request not to raise further allegations without proof in parliament.
In a statement released late Thursday, Asfour said Mihailuk had “repeated the same baseless claims without producing one shred of evidence”.
“Again I challenge her to come forward with any information she has and present it to the relevant judicial bodies,” he said.
On Thursday, Mihailuk said she had learned of her sacking after receiving a phone call from a producer from radio station 2GB asking her to comment on it.
“I will not sit idly by and in silence while the NSW Labor machine at Sussex Street are actively endorsing a candidate for the 2023 state election of the ilk of Khal Asfour,” she said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Minns said he had told Mihailuk she could have stayed in shadow cabinet “provided she took allegations of impropriety to the police or the Icac with any evidence that she had, rather than further using parliamentary privilege to launch unsubstantiated attacks on Labor colleagues”.
“In the end Ms Mihailuk was not prepared to do that.”
