Eddie Obeid trial: Anthony Albanese gives evidence about friendship with former minister Ian Macdonald
Federal Labor leader Anthony Albanese has given evidence to the trial of Eddie Obeid, Moses Obeid and Ian Macdonald, detailing his once-friendly relationship with Macdonald and recounting a meeting of party powerbrokers to discuss the then-resource minister’s preselection.
Eddie Obeid, 76, his son Moses Obeid, 50, and former New South Wales Labor minister Macdonald are facing trial for an alleged conspiracy to secure a coalmining licence for an area covering the Obeid family farm in the Bylong valley between 2007 and 2009.
It is alleged the Obeid family stood to gain $60m if the licence was secured, because they could sell their farm for a vastly higher sum. It is also alleged they would profit through a secret financial interest in the mining company.
The accused are fighting the charges, and Maurice Neil QC, representing Moses Obeid, has described the allegations as “fiction” and speculation, while Macdonald’s barrister, John Martin, says the Crown is rewriting history.
The defence has criticised the way the independent commission against corruption (Icac), which inquired into the matter in 2013, interpreted the facts of the case to construct a narrative of illegality.
The trial, in the NSW supreme court, has heard from a string of high-profile political witnesses, including former premier Morris Iemma and former NSW Labor leader Luke Foley.
On Thursday, Albanese was called to give evidence about a 2006 meeting of NSW Labor powerbrokers at the now-closed Noble House restaurant in Sydney. The meeting took place the year before the alleged criminal conspiracy is said to have occurred.
In attendance were Foley, Albanese, Macdonald, NSW Labor senator Doug Cameron and senior Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union officials, including Paul Bastian. The meeting was to decide whether Macdonald should be preselected for the 2007 ticket. Macdonald had been in NSW parliament since the late 1980s, but Albanese said it was party convention that ministers were automatically preselected.
Albanese said Macdonald had argued that he should be preselected again because he liked being a minister and wanted to attend the coming Beijing Olympics.
“He enjoyed being a minister and he thought he was a good minister,” Albanese said. “On a personal level he wanted to attend the Beijing Olympics as a minister, from recollection they would have been sometime in 2008. Also his daughter or step-daughter was doing her HSC, I think it was that year ... he wanted to see that through as a matter of family stability before he moved on.”
Albanese said he did not count wanting to attend the Beijing Olympics as a reason for Macdonald to be preselected. He said a general agreement was reached that Macdonald would be preselected but leave halfway through the normal, four-year parliamentary term.
“That would have been sometime in 2009,” he said. “There was also a bit of discussion that if we lost the election in 2007 then that circumstance would change.”
In cross-examination, Albanese said he and Macdonald met in the 1980s and knew each other personally. They went to sport games together, to each other’s homes, and confided personal matters with one another.
Their families knew each other and Albanese said his cousin once called him “hard Macca”. Macdonald had met his mother, Albanese said.
He said he “consciously had less involvement” with state politics when his wife was elected to state parliament in the 1990s.
The trial continues before justice Elizabeth Fullerton.
