Rebecca Connor says she was pushed out of planning department after making corruption complaints

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A government whistleblower says she witnessed “extraordinary” payments from the mining industry to a public servant’s personal credit card, but says she was treated as a “leper” and pushed out of her department after making a series of corruption complaints.

The New South Wales department of planning whistleblower Rebecca Connor has made damning allegations of corruption involving the approval of mining licences, first published by Fairfax Media on Tuesday.

Connor managed the department’s titles operations unit for two years, between 2015 and 2017. She told Guardian Australia one of the most shocking things she witnessed was mining industry payments made to help cover the costs of a staff farewell party. The payments, she said, were made to a personal credit card belonging to a contractor working for the department.

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“It was extraordinary,” she said. “It was during the change management process … when there were several staff members who didn’t get their jobs, as they thought.

“They organised a bit of a farewell dinner at a restaurant at the Hunter Valley and sent out invitations to mining industry representatives of major companies, and also mining agents, and they had to buy tickets to the event and give some money towards gifts.

“I raised it several times, because it just didn’t get any traction. The typical line was ‘there’s no appetite to deal with it’, or ‘if you keep raising these things, that’s a career-ending move’.

“I thought, ‘I’m still going to raise it, because it’s just wrong’. Any way you look at it, it’s wrong. You can’t be doing that.”

Connor said the incident was one of many showing serious conflicts of interests and the close relationship between department and industry. She said that relationship had become normalised and was distorting the department’s consideration of the public interest.

Connor said she had examples brought to her of staff modifying mining documents prepared by other staff, without consequence. The department, she said, allowed anyone to access the department’s electronic management system freely and without reason.

“There was no integrity in the system, at all. The lack of systems meant there was just no integrity, more to the point,” she said. “It was always this is how we’ve always done things – very much resistant to any change. And blinkers on, whether it was mal-intent or maladministration, the result was the same: corruption occurred.”

The allegations have prompted the NSW opposition to call for a “full and external inquiry” to be conducted with urgency.

“I am very concerned about this,” the shadow resources minister, Adam Searle, said. “There appears to be real probity risks in the agency. This is corrosive of public confidence in the administration of mining titles. It cannot be allowed to continue. There must be a full and external inquiry.”

The planning minister, Anthony Roberts, has so far stopped short of announcing such an inquiry. But he said the matter was being taken seriously.

“The allegations being made are serious so I have asked the secretary of the department to brief me on the matter,” Roberts said.

Last November, Connor said she told her superiors she planned to use whistleblower protections to make disclosures about a mining licence approval. She said the licence was granted unlawfully and that a departmental officer had held back information deliberately from the process.

“We issued a title, a staff member has withheld information deliberately, and then brought it out once the title was issued,” she said. “We need to revoke the title, because we are the department.”

Connor said she was threatened by her superiors. She was suspended the next day. Connor said the process was “far-fetched” and a “circus”.

“Allegedly I had made threats to a woman in this meeting. The woman wasn’t even present in the meeting,” she said. “It took six months for investigators to interview the other attendees at the meeting, that were managers and senior members of staff.

“None of them could confirm that that occurred in the meeting.”

Connor was sacked in May for allegedly making threatening statements and failing to report a naked photo emailed by a male friend.

“I saw a couple of solicitors and one of them said to me ‘look Rebecca, you could have Jesus himself write you a response. They are still going to ignore it and sack you. They are obviously hell-bent on sacking you’.”

Connor lodged an unfair dismissal claim in the Industrial Relations Commission of NSW that was settled in June.

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She has raised the corruption issues with the independent Commission Against Corruption (Icac) and the commonwealth ombudsman.

The approval of mining licences has been identified repeatedly as an area of high corruption risk.

Transparency International published a report on mining approvals last year, which found integrity failings, undue industry influence on government, a lack of transparency and a failure to conduct due diligence.

The report found examples of senior officials soliciting “speed-money or facilitation payments” to process a licence application more quickly. It found a member of a tender bid review panel favoured an applicant due to personal connections, and companies pledged to meet licence conditions that they had not intention or ability to uphold.

The report found governments were failing to properly investigate the background and ownership structures of companies applying for mining licences.

“Corruption risks are not just a developing country paradigm,” the Transparency International Australia chief executive, Serena Lillywhite, said in the report. “This research confirms even mature mining jurisdictions, such as Australia, have vulnerabilities in the mining approvals process that could result in corruption and compromised decision making.”

Earlier this year, the Grattan Institute found heavily regulated sectors, including the resources sector, were most likely to make large donations or engage commercial lobbyists to influence government. In Queensland, for example, the mining and energy sector recorded twice the amount of lobbying activity as any other. It was also one of the largest donors to political parties.

“Businesses in highly regulated industries, such as transport, mining, energy, and property construction, all actively seek to influence politicians, although the channels of influence vary by industry,” the institute found.

“Property developers donate more, whereas mining and energy companies use commercial lobbyists more.”

The NSW Department of Planning and Environment said it only recently received the allegations.

“As we only received these allegations yesterday, we are in the process of reviewing them and can only comment on them after obtaining the facts,” a spokesman said.

• This reporting is supported by the Susan McKinnon Foundation through the Guardian Civic Journalism Trust