Top silk called in as fate of Minns staff threatened with arrest remains undecided
NSW Legislative Council President Ben Franklin will meet with top barrister Bret Walker SC on Tuesday morning as he contemplates inquiry chair and independent MP Rod Roberts' request to seek arrest warrants for the staffers, including NSW Premier Chris Minns' chief of staff.
Police allege the incident, which Minns described at the time as an act of terror that could have caused mass casualties, was the work of organised crime figures who allegedly orchestrated several antisemitic attacks across Sydney in a plot to gain leverage over police.
Minns later revealed he had been briefed of the possible involvement of organised crime. The upper house inquiry is probing who knew what and when, and if the government raced to push the hate-laws through under false pretences.
Minns and Police Minister Yasmin Catley were asked to appear before the inquiry, but because they are lower house MPs, they are not obliged and cannot be compelled to front the upper house.
The committee then called the five staffers, which include Minns and Catley's chiefs of staff and senior advisers. When the staffers refused to appear at the inquiry, Roberts asked Franklin late on Friday to seek an arrest warrant.
Esteemed constitutional expert Anne Twomey AO has posted a YouTube video about the subject, saying compelling lower house staffers to appear at an upper house inquiry and threatening them with arrest could be interpreted as breaching the legal principle that the two houses of parliament should respect each other and not 'act coercively against each other'.
Her opinions drew the ire of MP Mark Latham, a long-time critic of the hate-laws in question, who used two YouTube accounts to criticise Twomey for her 'jaundiced and ill-informed contribution' in a spate of angry comments.
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