Catholic schools CEO set for two days of evidence at ICAC hearing
Old Liberal feuds with Fierravanti-Wells surface
Thursday is the day Operation Rosny has been building to: Dallas McInerney, chief executive of Catholic Schools NSW, takes the stand.
McInerney, who has stood aside for the inquiry’s duration, is scheduled to spend at least two days giving evidence. It is alleged the organisation made undeclared political donations exceeding legal caps under a scheme he authorised.
It follows a feisty day in which fellow person of interest Jeremy Greenwood told ICAC he paid for another inquiry person-of-interest, Jean-Claude Perrottet, to fly to Fiji in 2023 to dodge a summons, and that he’d arranged for a security guard to camp outside his own house to frustrate attempts to serve him.
Greenwood also told the inquiry that when McInerney messaged him about receiving a letter from a parliamentary inquiry, he replied “Wtf. Go to Brisbane” - though he told counsel assisting he might have been joking. That came after Greenwood was earlier asked to show some respect, having told an unidentified person in the hearing room “don’t give me that look” following a testy exchange with counsel assisting Dr Peggy Dwyer.
The full day devoted to Greenwood’s business dealings has only sharpened the focus on what comes next.
An old grievance resurfaces
McInerney's appearance also revives a fight that's been on the public record since 2022. Former Wollongong-based Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells used her valedictory speech not to bow out quietly but to unload: a lengthy, on-the-record account of what she called the NSW Liberal Party's factional rot, delivered under parliamentary privilege.
The broad allegations were that Scott Morrison ran the state division as a "protection bracket," engineering captain's picks and stacking branches to sideline rivals; that his numbers man, Alex Hawke, was implicated in a falsified branch meeting at Baulkham Hills that was later referred to state executive and became the subject of legal proceedings; and that Morrison's own rise - via the 2007 preselection for Cook, in which she says he lost the primary ballot to Michael Towke before a "dossier" of Towke's history in the Labor Party was leaked to the press - set the template for everything that followed.
Her assessment of the men involved was blunt. Morrison, Senator Fierravanti-Wells said, was "adept at running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds, lacking the moral compass and having no conscience." Of the two: "Morrison tops the list, followed closely by Hawke."
‘A marked woman’
It's in this section of that final speech that the Senator mentioned Dallas McInerney by name as one of the figures she says was "encouraged to run" against her in her own preselection. Years of criticising Morrison had made her, in her words, "a marked woman".
Dallas’ brother, Wade McInerney, provides a more direct and personal thread. The senator she says he worked in her office for five years before she discovered conduct she considered serious enough to refer him to the Australian Federal Police, the Department of Finance and the Australian Government Vetting and Security Agency.
He then left, on her account, to work for Robert Assaf at Greyhound Racing NSW - the same Assaf who gave evidence in week one about running Liberal Party recruitment out of his employer's paid hours, and whose Reformers database is alleged to have grown out of Fierravanti-Wells' own Wollongong electorate office files.
ICAC has made no findings in Operation Rosny. All individuals named are the subject of allegations being examined at a public inquiry.
The ICAC is investigating allegations concerning people associated with the Liberal Party of Australia (NSW Division), the CEO of Catholic Schools NSW Dallas McInerney, property developer Jean Nassif, hotelier Michael O’Hara, certain Strathfield councillors and others. To read the allegations in full, go to the dedicated ICAC Operation Rosny page
