The director of the Sydney institute, Gerard Henderson, has hit out at the Independent Commission Against Corruption (Icac) and accused senior Fairfax journalist Kate McClymont of being “confused” in a fiery segment on the ABC television program Lateline.



The segment on Wednesday evening came at the end of a sensational day in New South Wales politics that saw the resignation of the premier, Barry O’Farrell, after a thank you note emerged suggesting that, contrary to his earlier denials, he had received a $3,000 bottle of wine from a businessman who was lobbying at the time for a lucrative water contract.

Henderson, who recruited O’Farrell to the former prime minister John Howard’s office in 1985, said the corruption watchdog did not have “a great record of achievement”.

“They've had two big victims in 25 years. One was an honest reforming premier in Nick Greiner and the other was an honest reforming premier in Barry O'Farrell,” he said.

The felling of the premier over a bottle of wine – which O’Farrell had failed to declare in his pecuniary interests register and had repeatedly denied ever receiving before the note emerged – was “not the idea of campaigning against corruption when the Icac was set up about a quarter of a century ago”, Henderson said.

McClymont, whose reports exposed many of the corruption allegations that Icac has been called to investigate, said O’Farrell had resigned not because he was accused of corruption, but because he had given evidence under oath which later proved to be incorrect.

“I think that you're missing the point as to what actually brought him down and that was the fact that he gave unequivocal evidence under oath before Icac that he did not receive this bottle of wine,” she said.

She added that examining gifts from Nick Di Girolamo, the former chief executive of Australian Water Holdings, to a premier whom he was lobbying for a lucrative contract, was entirely within the scope of the inquiry.

“If you are receiving a $3,000 bottle of wine when somebody has a billion-dollar project in front of you and you did not declare it, it is the purvey of a corruption inquiry to look at those things,” she said.

But Henderson defended O’Farrell’s claim that he’d suffered a “memory fail” and didn’t remember receiving the wine, even after being given the thankyou note he had sent Di Girolamo and his wife.

“You're suggesting the former premier may have given misleading evidence. There's no evidence to support that,” he said.

“You're pretty confused about this,” he told McClymont at one point.

Asked why he had not raised his criticism of Icac when it was investigating the former Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid and former state Labor mining minister Ian MacDonald, Henderson, a strident critic of the ABC, claimed Lateline had not invited him on the program in years.

“Well, I'll tell you one thing, Kate: I haven't been asked on the program for six years. If someone had asked me, I may have said it,” he said.

The inquiry concluded on Thursday, and is expected to issue a report soon on AWH and its attempts to secure a public-private partnership to deliver water infrastructure to Sydney’s north-west.

Over the past five weeks, it has heard that AWH charged exorbitant costs to the taxpayer via Sydney Water and that ministers in the former state Labor government fudged departmental minutes to help the company secure the PPP. Icac has the power to recommend charges.