Mr Woodman, on the call, replied “yeah” and called an Indigenous leader a “galah”. They were "desperate", he said, "if you know what I mean ... for money.” He described his dealings with one Indigenous man: “I’ll take along a thousand and I'll tell him that you know I value his time so much that it’s a thousand dollars an hour,” Mr Woodman said on the recording, intercepted by IBAC. “They’re not interested in the land ... they couldn’t give a rat’s arse about their ancestors. That’s just the greatest load of horse shit I’ve heard.” “They know where the most valuable land is and all of a sudden they find artefacts or whatever they want to find.”

In a separate recording Mr Woodman described paying Indigenous people $800 a day “to go away”. Appearing at the inquiry, Mr Woodman, a veteran developer and property consultant, claimed there were only a few examples of him making payments such as this to Indigenous people. He said “I had been able to negotiate with an Aboriginal group or groups [at a development at Martha Cove] whereby they were more keen to bolster their bank balance then they were in finding artefacts.” Earlier on Thursday Mr Woodman claimed he had been naive after being confronted with evidence that he entered into a fraudulent "sham" contract with a local councillor. Mr Woodman was forced to defend questions from counsel assisting Michael Tovey, QC, over contracts he signed with City of Casey councillor Sam Aziz.

Mr Tovey said the contracts related to a $600,000 payment in cash from Cr Aziz to Mr Woodman. A revised second “sham” contract hid the amount provided to Mr Woodman and said the deal was worth only $370,000. Mr Tovey said the only reason for the two documents was to “perpetrate” fraud. Mr Woodman agreed that if the information provided to him by Mr Tovey was correct it was a fraud. “If it’s the reasons you have just stated, yes, correct,” Mr Woodman said. Later he blamed "poor judgment" for not asking more questions. “Maybe my naivety, sir,” Mr Woodman said.

Casey councillor Sam Aziz (L) and developer John Woodman (R) meet at a Subway restaurant in April 2018. It also emerged that Cr Aziz and Mr Woodman had been under IBAC surveillance for at least 18 months with photos of them meeting at a Subway in Skye in April 2018. At that meeting, the inquiry was told, IBAC investigators overheard them discussing the financial arrangements. IBAC commissioner Robert Redlich also said that Cr Aziz had given sworn evidence to the commission that Mr Woodman had only ever been paid $370,000, not $600,000, but Mr Woodman disputed this. “I say that’s incorrect, sir.”

Mr Woodman said that after Cr Aziz gave him $600,000 in cash, and then wanted to revise the document, he said it wasn’t something “I should go into great detail" over. Loading Mr Woodman also disputed whether he signed the document but when pressed on what Mr Tovey called a “sham” contract, Mr Woodman blamed Cr Aziz. “Mr Aziz instructed my people, yes sir.” On Thursday afternoon Mr Woodman was also grilled about his behind-the-scenes string-pulling at Casey council in 2018, where he was known as the "blood donor" by some councillors close to him.

At the time a Woodman-linked company developing a neighbouring estate wanted to accelerate construction of an intersection to allow speedier release of housing lots. It also wanted to offload their costs onto a neighbouring developer and the Casey council. Telephone intercepts and emails tended to the hearing revealed how Mr Woodman and his close business associate, planner and lawyer Megan Schutz, organised councillors Aziz and Geoff Ablett to gather numbers for a motion to be put to the council drafted by Ms Schutz. The intercepts reveal Ms Schutz later complaining that Cr Aziz had not followed his “script”. The former Brompton Lodge farmland now under development in Cranbourne South. Credit:Joe Armao