For the weeks leading up to the budget estimates period in Macquarie Street, anxious staff spent hours putting their equally anxious ministers through their paces. Practice sessions in preparation for gotcha questions, folders full of background reading, budget quizzes. Some especially nervous ministers even rewatched previous estimate hearings for tips.
Premier Chris Minns is resisting pressure to move against Transport Minister Jo Haylen, who he regards as being among the brightest of his inner circle.Credit: Oscar Colman
Much was riding on the hearings, which can spectacularly expose a minister who is not across his or her brief. Pressure was especially high for this session because other than Attorney-General Michael Daley, who was a minister in the dying days of the last Labor administration, no one in the Minns government had been subjected to hours of relentless scrutiny.
Ministers mostly passed the test. Even the two who were most at risk emerged relatively unscathed. All eyes, within Labor and beyond, were on Police Minister Yasmin Catley and Transport Minister Jo Haylen. Solid performances would not have been enough for either minister to shake the question marks over their capabilities, but a disastrous performance would have been ample to end them.
There is no doubt that Catley has had a torrid time in her portfolio, which began with the police Tasering death of a great-grandmother in her Cooma nursing home; that was followed by the minister’s handling of the pro-Palestinian protest on the night that the Sydney Opera House was illuminated in the Israeli colours after the October 7 Hamas attacks.
Before Catley’s estimates appearance, many within the Minns government expected her to falter in the hearing, as she had done in the aftermath of 92-year-old Clare Nowland’s death in Cooma and in the days following the lighting of the Opera House. But Catley had already been bombarded with weeks of criticism from the opposition, and it had largely run out of ammunition.
Haylen, meanwhile, entered her estimates showdown mid-scandal. Only days earlier, she had been forced to ask her most senior transport bureaucrat, Josh Murray, to initiate an investigation into a low-ranking public servant who had been on secondment to Haylen’s office. That public servant, Kieren Ash, who is deeply embedded in the Labor Party in Haylen’s stomping ground of the inner west, had strayed outside his remit. Instead of being an apolitical public servant, he embarked on Labor work.
Haylen’s chief of staff, Scott Gartrell, who she had worked with in Anthony Albanese’s office when he was federal transport minister, took the fall for the staffing scandal and was gone the same day. But that was not enough to take the heat off Haylen, who had already spent weeks defending the appointment of Murray, a former Labor member and one-time donor to her election campaign.
Haylen was often evasive in her answers during her estimates hearing, but when her time before the upper house committee ended there would have been a collective sigh of relief from the government. She had survived. Haylen, nevertheless, remains extremely vulnerable.
Why Minns won’t abandon his ministers on thin ice, Haylen and Catley
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08.11.2023
For the weeks leading up to the budget estimates period in Macquarie Street, anxious staff spent hours putting their equally anxious ministers through their paces. Practice sessions in preparation for gotcha questions, folders full of background reading, budget quizzes. Some especially nervous ministers even rewatched previous estimate hearings for tips.
Premier Chris Minns is resisting pressure to move against Transport Minister Jo Haylen, who he regards as being among the brightest of his inner circle.Credit: Oscar Colman
Much was riding on the hearings, which can spectacularly expose a minister who is not across his or her brief. Pressure was especially high for this session because other than Attorney-General Michael Daley, who was a minister in the dying days of the last........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
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