The inquiry opened last week with the shocking claim that the party's NSW head office had covered up a $100,000 cash donation from Chinese billionaire and banned donor Huang Xiangmo. "The party is in a diabolical situation, this behaviour is completely unacceptable to me," Mr Albanese said. Speaking at a Marrickville Park in his Grayndler electorate, Mr Albanese denied claims he had stayed quiet and distanced himself from the ICAC revelations this week, saying he was in Indonesia until late on Saturday. He had been in Jakarta and East Timor, where he had been been part of the 20th anniversary celebrations of its independence, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison. "The average ALP member if you walk down Livingstone Road here knew nothing about this, I knew nothing about this," he said. He said it was "appropriate" that Kaila Murnain was suspended as the party's general secretary last week after she told the inquiry she had first learned of the potentially illegal donation in 2016, but decided to keep quiet on the advice of the party's lawyers.

'The Labor party hasn't changed' NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian seized on the allegations to accuse Labor of failing to learn from the mistakes of the recent past, while defending the state's donation laws as the "strictest in the nation". "What we're seeing that's concerning is that no matter what the laws are, and our laws are the strictest in the nation, some people in the Labor Party aren't blinking twice about breaking them," Ms Berejiklian said on Sunday. The revelations by ICAC come just five years after a similar investigation, called Operation Spicer, exposed a NSW Liberal Party slush fund "Eight By Five", which was used to "wash" donations from property developers. The fallout from the 2015 investigation saw 10 NSW Liberal MPs resign or go to the crossbench.

Ms Berejiklian declared her party had "learned our lessons" from its encounter with the state's corruption watchdog. Premier Gladys Berejiklian speaks on Sunday. Credit:AAP "We learned from the past, we made sure we didn't repeat those mistakes. I'm proud to say my party has strictly adhered to them, but the same can't be said for the Labor Party," Ms Berejiklian said. "I think the takeout for all of us is the Labor Party hasn't changed." However, the Premier stopped shortly of guaranteeing that her party would never again stand accused of circumventing the state's donation laws.

"I can never say that," she said. Federal Labor frontbencher Tanya Plibersek, speaking earlier on Sunday, sad she does not believe political donations should be banned as a result of the ICAC revelations. The Member for Sydney told the ABC’s Insiders program that this was "completely unacceptable behaviour" and there needs to be a culture change. She said there was a more important discussion to have around limits on what was spent in advertising or during campaigning. ‘‘That’s where the pressure comes,’’ she said. ‘‘There’s an arm’s race to raise more money. You saw the sort of spending from Clive Palmer in the last election campaign. While you’ve got pressure to combat that sort of advertising spend, you’ll have pressure to raise money.’’ While she is a strong supporter of the NSW ICAC, she wants to see a federal ICAC with ‘‘real teeth’’ and donation limits reduced $1000 from $14,000 with a faster real-time disclosure.