From ICAC witness to courtroom stoush over north shore sewer main

At CBD, we’ve never met an Independent Commission Against Corruption probe we didn’t love. Ditto legal disputes over waterfront property in Sydney’s posher postcodes.

So imagine our excitement to find those two worlds colliding in the Land and Environment Court last week, when Sydney Water won an injunction to stop a northern beaches couple from conducting any renovations on a Seaforth property without their consent, owing to concerns about the impact on a sewer main.

The harbourside residence in question is owned by Erik Maranik, who purchased it in 2017 for $3.5 million and lodged an application for a $1.6 million knock-down rebuild three years later.

Maranik, a senior public servant, was more recently a witness in an ICAC investigation into the conduct of former Schools Infrastructure NSW boss Anthony Manning, who is alleged to have subverted recruitment processes and improperly awarded contracts to benefit his mates. That inquiry brought us the tale of Manning’s “communications fairy godmother” Kathy Jones, whose firms raked in about $9 million in contracts over seven years, and who appears to have been in London since.

Meanwhile, Maranik, a former senior executive at the Department of Education (who is not the subject of ICAC’s investigation) discussed his relationship with Stuart Suthern-Brunt, a yoga and cycling buddy of Manning’s who’d received $1.7 million in contracts from the agency in two and a half years. While Maranik signed off on some of Suthern-Brunt’s contracts, he later told the hearing he was unhappy with the service provided.

The commission heard Maranik also signed off on a $500,000 contract with Heathwest Advisory, owned by a bloke called Martin Berry, whose buck’s party and wedding Manning attended.

Suthern-Brunt would himself later describe the agency as a “clown show” in emails to a business partner revealed at this year’s hearings, which he later clarified were a reference to his own perception of Maranik’s capability. None of the beneficiaries of Manning’s contracts are under investigation by the ICAC.

Meanwhile, across the harbour, the Maraniks have been at loggerheads with Sydney Water over the impact of their development plan on a sewer main. Last Friday, Sydney Water filed an application for an interim injunction, stopping the owners from conducting further work without their consent.

While the owners’ legal representatives did not appear at the hearing, the court heard construction could “significantly increase the risk of the sewer main failing and causing a pollution event in Middle Harbour”.

A stinky proposition indeed. No surprises, then, that Sydney Water’s injunction was granted until a more substantive hearing this week.

Lobby land

December 10 is D-Day for Big Tech giants, when the Albanese government’s teenage social media ban is slated to come into force.

This week, representatives from TikTok, Meta, Google and Snapchat will descend on Canberra for meetings with Communications Minister Anika Wells and eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant.

With details still fuzzy on exactly which platforms will be banned, and the threat of retaliatory tariffs from the Trump administration looming, we expect Big Tech’s lobbying blitz to continue right down to the buzzer.

Representatives from some of those platforms might feel a bit miffed at last week’s Senate estimates revelation that 4Chan, the internet’s filthiest sewer, has managed to escape the naughty list.

Especially since 4Chan doesn’t have any smooth-talking former staffers pleading its case in the Canberra bubble – unlike the other tech giants, who hire their share of former ministerial apparatchiks.

Take Google, which despite having three different firms registered as lobbyists, is now, as of this month, also being represented by Premier National, run by Liberal moderate powerbroker Michael Photios.

One might expect Anthony Albanese’s sweeping election victory in May to have been a kind of extinction-level event for Liberal-aligned lobbying firms.

But business isn’t going too badly for Premier National, which has added 11 clients since the federal election. It looks like Photios, a former NSW minister, saw the writing on the wall earlier than most, moving his firm toward a more bipartisan footing in January by promoting Tom Kenny, fresh out of Albanese’s office, and ex-Kevin Rudd staffer Kathryn Conroy to partners.

More recently, the firm has become, as far as we can tell, the first major lobbying shop to land someone from the Greens, with the party’s former ACT MP Amanda Bresnan joining in July.

The message to Liberals is pretty clear: evolve or die.

AHHA moment

Until this week, the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association operated as the national peak body for public hospitals. But no longer. This week, news filtered out that the association had been put into voluntary administration and would no longer be operating as the national peak body.

There had been no communication from AHHA itself, beyond a statement from administrators McGrath Nicol confirming that they’d taken over.

“Due to the financial position of AHHA, we regret to advise that the administrators are unable to trade the business and have no alternative other than to undertake an orderly wind-down of operations,” McGrath Nicol said.

Our calls to AHHA’s chief executive Tony Farley also went unanswered, although he later referred us back to the administrators at McGrath Nicol. Farley was appointed interim CEO in May on a short-term contract to “steer this national peak body through a critical period”. That, it certainly was.

Before being hired by the AHHA’s chair, who happens to be former NSW health minister Jillian Skinner, Farley last popped up on CBD’s radar when, in his last job as executive director of Sydney Catholic Schools, he put noses out of joint with a ritzy Christmas cocktail soiree.

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