‘You have got to go’: former NSW minister tells Icac ‘something strange at play’ when she was sacked by Perrottet

Former NSW minister tells anti-corruption inquiry she was instrumentalised to oust building regulator

Wanderstayfinder.com – Eleni Petinos, who served as New South Wales fair trading minister under the Perrottet government, has told the Independent Commission Against Corruption that colleagues within her own party may have leveraged her ministerial position as a vehicle for removing building commissioner David Chandler from office. Speaking on Thursday, Petinos described a sustained campaign in 2022 to convince her that Chandler was behaving improperly and needed to be dismissed — a campaign she now believes was orchestrated to serve purposes beyond her own department.

“Subsequently, yes,” Petinos answered when counsel assisting Peggy Dwyer SC asked whether she had come to suspect that her office, acting through her chief of staff, was being used to try to get rid of Mr Chandler.

The testimony lands at the centre of Operation Rosny, the sprawling Icac investigation into alleged illicit payments flowing from the fugitive developer Jean Nassif to senior Liberal party figures. Petinos’s account adds a new dimension to questions about how internal party dynamics intersected with regulatory decisions in one of Australia’s most powerful building-oversight roles.

A weekend that ended a ministerial career

Petinos laid out a compressed timeline that she finds difficult to reconcile. On Friday 27 July 2022, bullying allegations against her were made public. That same day, Dominic Perrottet — then premier, travelling in India — was reportedly supportive and reassuring. By Sunday night, however, he had resolved to remove her from cabinet. The speed and tone of that decision struck Petinos as deeply anomalous.

“I thought there was something very strange at play for Dominic to take the action that he did so swiftly or so coldly and without the opportunity to even put me in front of the cameras. That seemed bizarre,” she told the commission.

In the narrow window between those two days, Chandler had already lodged his resignation with Emma Hogan, the departmental head. His letter was scathing: it alleged that property developers were exerting undue influence over the Liberal government and that Petinos and her staff had failed to back him adequately. Chandler was subsequently reinstated, a fact the commission heard without comment. The episode has sharpened scrutiny over whether elements within the government were actively working to destabilise the building regulator.

Pressure from inside the party

Petinos said that shortly after assuming the fair trading portfolio in December 2021, she began receiving informal warnings from multiple Liberal staffers about Chandler’s conduct. Around the time of her appointment, Charles Perrottet — the premier’s brother and a long-standing rightwing broker within the party — told her the commissioner was “dodgy.” Charles Perrottet is himself a person of interest in Operation Rosny, which examines alleged payments totalling $2 million from Nassif to Liberal operatives including Charles Perrottet, Christian Ellis and Jeremy Greenwood. The inquiry also probes whether other payments made to a cohort of rightwing Liberal figures known as the Reformers breached donations legislation. Jean-Claude Perrottet, Greenwood, Ellis and Robert Assaf are persons of interest in relation to that allegation.

The pressure did not stop at informal conversations. Chris Spence, a longtime friend of Petinos and former member for The Entrance, who in 2022 was serving as chief of staff to planning minister Anthony Roberts, repeatedly contacted both Petinos and her chief of staff Cassandra Lawry about Chandler. Around April that year, Spence hinted he possessed a video of the commissioner. He was initially vague about its contents, but by June he was phoning the minister’s office with increasing frequency.

“I don’t believe that he got into the detail of the video but he was insistent,” Petinos recalled.

Separately, Petinos told the commission that John Barilaro, then Nationals leader, had played her an audio recording around April of Chandler on a building site using racist language. Barilaro framed it not as evidence of corruption but as a concern about the commissioner’s conduct and language on site.

Working alongside a tough regulator

Despite the external pressure, Petinos acknowledged that her own interactions with Chandler were often heated. She conceded they held “robust conversations” in her office, that she had received complaints about his behaviour on building sites, and that on one occasion a meeting with owners corporation representatives in her office had “deteriorated into a screaming match.” Still, she characterised him as a tough regulator operating in a tough industry — a description that undercuts the narrative of a corrupt official being quietly pushed out.

Chandler has vigorously denied taking bribes or doing anything improper in connection with an informal list of building inspectors. He is expected to give evidence later in the inquiry. Charles Perrottet is anticipated before Icac in coming weeks. Jean-Claude Perrottet and Greenwood have already testified on one allegation and denied any wrongdoing relating to illegal donations; Greenwood is expected to be recalled for a separate allegation concerning payments from Nassif. Ellis, currently in London, has so far declined to cooperate with the commission.

Notably, neither Dominic Perrottet nor Petinos has been named as a person of interest in Operation Rosny. Their roles in the events of mid-2022 remain, for now, matters of political narrative rather than formal investigation — though Petinos’s testimony on Thursday suggests that line may be about to blur.