Ive no idea what youre saying Somyureks tortured day at IBAC

It was deep into a long and grinding afternoon at Tuesday’s IBAC hearings before the state’s top corruption buster Robert Redlich, QC, and his counsel assisting Chris Carr, SC, finally started getting somewhere with former cabinet minister Adem Somyurek.

The Labor Party’s fallen faction man, confronted with strong documentary evidence, conceded it was a corrupt misuse of public office to have a bloke working in an electorate office who shows up somewhere else to toil away for a party faction.

Oh, and it appears Somyurek is writing a book!

Adem Somyurek’s appearance at IBAC was yet again punctuated by Commissioner Robert Redlich warning him to answer the questions. Credit:

The commissioner and his counsel assisting began the second day of Somyurek’s hotly anticipated testimony by making it clear they were not thrilled with the answers they got on Monday from the former minister and factional powerbroker.

Less than 40 minutes into Tuesday’s session, Somyurek’s evidence had pondered some big questions â€" what is corruption, really, and is conduct really corrupt if someone else is doing more of it? â€" before Carr had had enough.

“The way this process works,” the barrister warned, “is that I ask you questions and your responsibility is to answer those questions, rather than for you to pose additional questions. OK?”

But it wasn’t really OK. The former minister didn’t want to stray far from his established approach to his evidence so far: concede that, sure, he stacked branches â€" a lot â€" but everyone else in the Labor Party did that and any abuse of public money that went on in his office, or those of his allies, paled into nothing, really, compared with the red shirts affair, in which Labor misused $388,000 in public funds to pay campaign staff working on the 2014 election campaign.

We heard a lot from Somyurek about red shirts and more than enough, for Redlich’s liking, about the alleged sins of his hated factional rivals, the Socialist Left, whose provocations â€" a war, no less â€" were said to have driven most of the former local government minister’s stacking operations.

Proceedings were under way less than two hours â€" and deep into the weeds of what Somyurek did, did not or might have known about some potentially dodgy money coming into the party â€" when the commissioner, who later described parts of Somyurek’s evidence as “tortured”, could take no more.

“I have had great difficulty in following your answers because they are so lengthy, convoluted and around the point that at the end of an answer, I’ve no idea what you’re actually saying,” Redlich told Somyurek.

But the witness didn’t want to be corralled into “yes or no” territory. These things were complicated, after all.

“Life is not that simple, it’s complex, it’s not just binary opposites, Commissioner,” Somyurek patiently explained. “There are grey areas, so at times you need to not give a yes or no because that actually might not be accurate.”

But Carr and Redlich’s labours looked to have worn down their man, with counsel assisting finally getting close to that troubling question of what constitutes corruption and managing to extract one of the day’s few straight answers, over timesheets signed for a casual staffer.

“Misuse of taxpayer resources, that’s what it is ... What about that is not corruption, Mr Somyurek?” Mr Carr demanded.

The response: “Yes, OK.”

Not long after, observers sat bolt upright when the MP, who still represents the South-East Metro District in the State Parliament, let the commission in on the secret of his remarkable recall of the Byzantine factional dealings: “I wrote it all down in my book.”

The hearings continue on Thursday.

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