Convicted rapist Gareth Ward resigns moments before parliament expels him

Convicted rapist Gareth Ward has resigned from NSW parliament, losing his taxpayer-funded salary and triggering a byelection in Kiama.

Parliament was set to vote on his expulsion at 10.30 on Friday morning. Speaker Greg Piper received his letter of resignation at 9.08am.

Ward was last month found guilty of one count of sexual intercourse without consent and three counts of indecent assault against two young men he had met through his role as an MP.

The now former MP attempted this week to block the parliament from voting to expel him, taking his fight on Monday to the Supreme Court where he was granted an interim injunction barring the lower house from holding the vote.

On Thursday night he lost his final chance at hanging onto his job when the NSW Court of Appeal rejected Ward’s legal team’s arguments that the expulsion would be punitive, and that citing criminal convictions weren’t enough to demonstrate behaviour unworthy of parliament.

“The electorate of Kiama would be re-enfranchised by the holding of a byelection,” Chief Justice Andrew Bell said.

Until Friday, Ward had ignored pleas from Labor and his former Liberal colleagues to resign as he waits his September sentencing hearing from his prison cell in Cessnock.

The fact that parliament had to threaten to expel Ward before he resigned was a “shameful exercise”, Labor’s leader of the lower house Ron Hoenig told the parliament.

“I would have thought being a convicted rapist is enough infamy without going down in history as both a convicted rapist as well as the first person in more than a century to be expelled from the house,” Hoenig said.

Hoenig later said Ward’s legal challenge this week came at a cost to taxpayers, and wasted the time of the government on what he argued was a baseless argument.

“To try to engage the court in vexatious litigation … it’s been since 1689 that courts have no jurisdiction over the workings of the parliamentary process,” he said.

Premier Chris Minns said the Labor Party isn’t going into a Kiama byelection with any arrogance, and said it would be a “tough contest”. He welcomed Ward’s resignation, but said it should have come much sooner.

“All the time, effort and energy was spent in the NSW Supreme Court proving what most people who live in this state would have known instinctively, and that is that if you’re convicted of some of the most serious charges, sexual assault in NSW, you can’t sit as a serving member of parliament,” he said.

Liberal leader Mark Speakman said on Friday: “Gareth Ward has done what he should have done long ago, but it should never have come to this.

“The people of Kiama have been left without a voice for too long, and taxpayers have been forced to foot the bill while this circus dragged on. Public office is a privilege, not a personal fiefdom, and when that trust is broken the right thing is to go immediately.”

Earlier on Friday, when asked by Ben Fordham on radio 2GB who the Liberals would run in the Kiama byelection, Speakman said it would be first discussed by their management committee.

“We’ve also got to discuss it with the Nationals. We’ve got a coalition agreement that where a vacant seat comes up like this, we have a discussion with our coalition partners first,” he said.

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