For a couple of days this week, Dominic Perrottet was riding high.
The ClubsNSW boss, Josh Landis, whose campaign against the premier’s proposed cashless gaming scheme was fuelling division within the coalition, was sacked, creating some clear air for Perrottet amid a volatile state election campaign.
That relative peace for the coalition didn’t last long. By Thursday Perrottet was facing questions about the actions of the office of the former deputy premier John Barilaro.
Despite being out of politics for more than a year, Barilaro is suddenly a focal point in the election campaign.
The former Nationals leader re-entered the spotlight after the auditor general, Margaret Crawford, released a report outlining his office created new rules for a fast-tracked grants program that saw Labor electorates miss out entirely.
Crawford found the $541.8m bushfire recovery grants scheme lacked transparency and that although there was no designated role for Barilaro in handing out the grants, his office intervened.
By Friday night the government had handed Crawford’s report to the Independent Commission Against Corruption (Icac) “for their information”, in response to Labor threatening to make a referral to the watchdog.
Redbridge’s polling director, Simon Welsh, said controversies relating to Barilaro, including this week’s revelations, were damaging the government’s chances at a fourth term despite him having retired from politics in 2021.
“The damage is done. The legacy persists,” Welsh said.
“Even though [he] isn’t there … the perception of the brand is pretty baked in.”
Welsh said the link between the government and Barilaro was entrenched after a year of headlines including the former leader’s appointment to a high-profile trade role he later rescinded amid allegations of it being a case of “jobs for the boys”.
Welsh expected the latest scandal to push “wet Liberals” into voting for teals and further discourage millennials from voting for the coalition, as well as swing voters in bushfire-affected seats where grants were denied, including the Blue Mountains.
“The hurt and the pain is still really real in those communities. This is just salt in the wound stuff and it could be brutal,” he said.
The Blue Mountains mayor, Mark Greenhill, described reading the auditor general’s report as “really shattering”.
“I felt sick because it confirmed to me that the bushfire journey of my community, surrounded on three sides by massive fires … it turns out that that journey was basically traduced,” he said.
“This government took the view that ‘your bushfire experience and the trauma of it was determined to who you had representing you in state parliament’, and that is utterly unprecedented and appalling.”
The grants were introduced to stimulate the economies in fire-ravaged regions by quickly getting funds to councils for small-scale projects such as repairing damaged infrastructure.
Labor’s Blue Mountains MP, Trish Doyle, said the local economy struggled to recover after missing out on the early funding round.
“My community was ripped off and other communities were ripped off,” she said.
“It goes to the very core of cynical political operators who punish people for how they vote and that has to change.
“This government, because of this gross misconduct, should not be returned.”
The opposition leader, Chris Minns, on Friday morning issued a warning that Barilaro had 24 hours to explain his office’s involvement or he would be referred to the Icac.
“If we don’t get answers … I do believe it needs to be referred to the Icac to determine what happened here,” Minns said on 2GB radio on Friday.
“If you’re in a disaster zone, and you need help from your own government, it will come – it doesn’t matter which party you voted for at the last election.”
Barilaro did not respond to a request for comment.
Perrottet denied the suggestions the grants were examples of pork barrelling, but insisted changes had been made since he became leader to make sure funding went where it needed to.
On Friday the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said all disaster relief needed to be distributed based on need and should not be politicised, pointing to the flooding in the northern rivers in early 2022 as another example of problematic grant allocations.
“We all have a responsibility to deliver where it’s needed, not to deliver politically,” he said.
The auditor general found the Department of Regional NSW gave the then deputy premier’s office a list of 35 projects to be funded in a fast-tracked first round in 2020, listing their electorates.
The introduced threshold effectively ruled out projects in areas held by the Labor party, the audit found.
The report said it was unclear why the department listed the electorates as they did not form part of the selection process, and that the role of Barilaro’s office’s in implementing a threshold “deviated from the guidelines”.
The former NSW Liberal minister Andrew Constance felt “incredulous” reading the damming report and called for Barilaro to explain what happened in his office.
“You’ve got to remember this is against the backdrop of issues with charity money, we had issues with business grants … and now this,” the former Bega MP said.
On Friday the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Barilaro put himself forward as the potential new head of ClubsNSW, after Landis was sacked over offensive comments about Perrottet’s “conservative Catholic gut”.
Barilaro will again be in the news on Monday, when the parliamentary inquiry into his appointment to a lucrative New York trade job is expected to hand down its report. He withdrew from the role, citing the undue media attention, and has always maintained he did nothing wrong in applying for, and being awarded, the job.
