The New South Wales transport secretary sought two “urgent” meetings with David Elliott in the week before the shutdown of the Sydney rail system to warn him about the possible closure of the network, but the requests were ignored, a parliamentary hearing has been told.
Rob Sharp, the head of the state’s transport network, told a budget estimates hearing on Friday that after the Rail, Tram and Bus Union first notified the department of its planned protected action on 9 February, he sent an email to Elliott’s chief of staff two days later seeking an “urgent” meeting.
But Sharp said he never received a response to the email. He told the hearing that on 14 February he sent another email in which he “chased up” the request, but again no response was received.
“In the week leading up to the shutdown you asked the minister’s office twice to meet with the minister, and the minister’s office never got back to you?” Labor’s shadow treasurer, Daniel Mookhey, asked Sharp on Friday.
“Correct,” he responded.
In the week before the shutdown of the rail network, the NSW government launched a case in the Fair Work Commission seeking to block the RTBU’s industrial action. In the days before it lodged the dispute on Friday 18 February, the department prepared a series of documents including affidavits stating the network would need to close if the RTBU’s planned industrial action went ahead.
Sharp told the hearing on Friday that he would have told Elliott about the possibility of a shutdown if his request for a meeting had been granted.
“Was it your intent at the urgent meeting you had requested to disclose to the minister that one of the possibilities was that the network would have to close?” Mookhey asked.
“Yes,” Sharp responded.
Sharp was eventually granted a meeting with Elliott on 17 February. Despite requesting an hour-long meeting, he was only given half an hour during which, he said, the prospect of the shutdown was not raised because he had to prioritise lodging the Fair Work dispute.
“It wasn’t a detailed meeting [and] we were at a point where we need to submit to Fair Work,” he said.
“The timeframe didn’t allow for detailed discussions of risk assessments.”
Sharp said if he had been granted a longer meeting, it “would have been a more fulsome conversation around the nuances of the risk assessments and implications” of the protected action.
While Sharp has produced a dossier of documents which he claims shows staff in the minister’s office were fully briefed about the shutdown, the minister has insisted his chief of staff was only told about “significant” or “massive” disruption on the Sunday before the closure.
On Friday Elliott told the hearing that he “disputes” the version of events provided by Sharp.
But the hearing also learned that at 10.51pm on the night before the shutdown, Elliott was forwarded a text message from a senior transport official warning that there was likely to be “massive disruption” on the Monday morning.
Elliott said he did not make further inquiries about the “massive disruption” because industrial action had been common during his time as minister.
He had instead chosen “to get up at four in the morning to find out what the massive disruption would look like”, he said.
The strained relationship between Elliott and his transport chief has been well-known in Macquarie Street for some time, and Sharp revealed he had made at least one other request for an urgent meeting with the minister in late January after an item appeared in the Daily Telegraph criticising him.
The article cited sources saying Elliott had been complaining to colleagues that Sharp had yet to arrange a meeting with him, and stating the secretary “has not so much as even sent a text to the new minister”.
But Sharp told the hearing that despite requesting it, he had not been given Elliott’s phone number by that point, and had been told to direct all communication through the minister’s chief of staff.
Afterwards Sharp requested a meeting to discuss the article, saying the criticism had “surprised” him because he had not received any negative feedback.
“I requested a meeting to discuss it as one would and no meeting was forthcoming,” he said.
Sharp told the committee that he subsequently obtained Elliott’s phone number and sent him a text message on 24 January.
“I didn’t get a response,” he said.
