How jailed rapist Ward is making thousands from his cell

After being convicted last month of sex offences against two young men, former NSW MP Gareth Ward fought tooth and nail to stay on representing the voters of Kiama from inside his jail cell.

Ward eventually resigned hours before parliament was set to vote to expel him, after the NSW Court of Appeal rejected his attempt to stop the Legislative Assembly exercising that power.

But Ward, who is remanded in custody until a sentencing hearing next month, still has other passive income streams. He owns two inner Sydney apartments, both of which remain listed on short-term rental platform Airbnb.

One of those is an art deco Potts Point apartment, bought in 2017 for just $640,000, which Ward locked himself out of last year, prompting the then-MP to show up at parliament at 4am dressed in his underwear. The other property is a two-bedroom unit in neighbouring Woolloomooloo, bought for $790,000 in 2017.

Both properties, managed by a third-party provider which arranges bookings and cleaning, are reserved for much of September. According to nightly prices, Ward can make up to $4000 per week while imprisoned.

The Potts Point apartment boasts a prime location, and a few accoutrements referencing the owner’s previous occupation, red leather-bound copies of parliamentary Hansard that adorn a bookshelf in the living room.

But guests haven’t always had the most pleasant experience. The unit has a 4.35 rating on Airbnb, which the platform notes puts it in the bottom 10 per cent of eligible listings.

“Unfortunately, the lack of cleanliness made the experience not good,” was the feedback left in a one-star review from 2022.

“There was an issue with damp, mould and also a pest issue which was mentioned and hopefully will be resolved before more guests,” another guest wrote.

A lack of cleanliness was a recurring theme across reviews for Ward’s properties. Make of that what you will.

Heydon’s heroes

Disgraced former High Court judge Dyson Heydon’s re-embrace by the higher echelons of the legal fraternity continued with an address at the Samuel Griffith Society’s annual conference in Perth on the weekend.

Heydon, found by an independent High Court-commissioned investigation to have sexually harassed six female associates, has been feted by top judges since the release of a self-published book on contract law this year.

His controversial appearance at the Perth conference, hosted by a prominent conservative legal pressure group and among his first public forays since a dramatic fall from grace in 2020, involved a speech titled A Homage to Justice [Ian] Callinan, one of many tributes to Heydon’s fellow John Howard-appointed High Court colleague delivered at the conference.

Heydon’s attendance was slammed in an opinion article in The West Australian by Women Lawyers Association of Western Australia president Catriona Macleod, who called the whole thing “laughably out of sync with the legal profession I know”.

Except the conference drew quite a well-connected crowd, including two sitting High Court judges (Simon Steward and James Edelman), former Commonwealth attorney-general Christian Porter, ex-Coalition frontbencher turned Queensland MP Amanda Stoker and NSW Liberal leadership aspirant and arch-NIMBY Alister Henskens.

Australia’s richest barrister, ex-University of Melbourne chancellor Allan Myers, KC, who is the society’s chair, also spoke, as did former finance minister Nick Minchin, currently stuck with the unenviable task of figuring out what went wrong for the Liberals in their May election disaster.

This time, the Liberals can’t even blame the party’s flirtation with anti-trans keyboard warrior Katherine Deves, who ran unsuccessfully in Warringah in 2022, and whose nasty tweets helped drive moderate voters away from Scott Morrison’s government.

What is Deves up to now? Well, on the weekend, she, too, was among the speakers at the Samuel Griffith Society’s conference.

Revenge of the landlords

During the last term of parliament, the Greens made themselves the party of renters, and they didn’t care whose noses they put out of joint. Here’s looking at you, prime minister.

But this is Australia, where landlords always win, and win they did in the May election. Max Chandler-Mather, the party’s landlord hater-in-chief, lost his Brisbane seat of Griffith to Labor’s Renee Coffey, whose bestie Jessica Rudd is the daughter of that electorate’s most famous MP, Mr Kevin 07 himself.

Notably, Coffey is also a landlord, owning a Brisbane investment property with her husband Jason McKenzie on top of their residence (McKenzie has another investment property in Melbourne).

Meanwhile, Sarah Witty, the Labor MP who turfed out former Greens leader Adam Bandt, is a bona fide property mogul, owning three Melbourne investment properties, in the suburbs of Richmond, Point Cook and East Brighton, as well as a home in Richmond.

That makes Witty one of federal parliament’s number one landlords, behind Labor colleague Andrew Charlton, who owns five homes in a circa $42 million property portfolio.

They are the party of the working class, after all.

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