Who exactly was pushing NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro to try and blow up the government over koala protection policy? Turns out, it wasn’t concerned citizens or rogue farmers pushing the Nats to defend their right to kill koalas.
Instead, as The Sydney Morning Herald revealed today, the only stakeholder to raise an objection to the koala protections was property developer Jeff McCloy. Of course McCloy is just a footnote to the great koala war, but he is a fascinating character in his own right.
The real McCloy
Before being elected Newcastle’s lord mayor in 2012, Jeff McCloy built a name for himself around the Hunter as a blustering property developer with many fingers in many pies — a kind of Novocastrian Buddy Garrity, the fictional pushy fundraiser in the American football series Friday Night Lights.
As chairman of the Hunter Mariners in the 1990s, McCloy was embroiled in the Super League war that nearly broke Australian rugby league. He then gained a measure of fame when his 41-metre superyacht “Seafaris” (winner at the 2007 World Superyacht Awards) was rented out to the stars, including Princess Mary and Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark. (McCloy threatened to move Seafaris to Europe when two other guests, Giorgio Armani and an Emirati sheikh couldn’t visit parts of the Great Barrier Reef because the yacht was too big.)
A vocal critic of environmental planning laws, he once even helped sponsor a speaking tour for British climate change denier Lord Christopher Monckton.
In 2005, he also made a series of corruption allegations to the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) against far-north Queensland mayor Mike Berwick, who had rival business interests in the region. This was helped along by Liberal MP Bob Baldwin tabling the claims under parliamentary privilege.
The CMC dropped all McCloy’s complaints. But that didn’t stop him also suing Berwick for defamation over public statements made against him, later settling out of court.
McCloy won the mayoral race in 2012, campaigning against a rail line through the centre of Newcastle. In office, he was initially best known for scrubbing off pro-LGBT rainbow footpaths. And then ICAC came into the picture.
‘A walking ATM‘
A year into McCloy’s term as lord mayor, Seafaris caught fire and sunk off Cairns. It would be an omen of what was to come.
In 2014, ICAC’s Operation Spicer revealed McCloy spent the 2011 state election driving around in his Bentley delivering wads of cash to Liberal candidates. State laws banned McCloy, as a property developer, from making political donations.
One of those candidates to get cash was vet Andrew Cornwell — he was midway through operating on a dog when McCloy arrived at his doorstep with $10,000. At the hearings, McCloy was initially unrepentant. He was just doing it all for the good of Newcastle, he said. It wasn’t his fault politicians treated him “like a walking ATM”. At a lunch break between sessions, journalists were handed a 50-page dossier by McCloy, outlining his various good deeds, and quoting from Mother Teresa.
Then the walls started to close in: candidates who received McCloy’s donations stepped down, then-premier Mike Baird called for his head. McCloy resigned as mayor.
But then, he decided to hit back by going to the High Court. He argued the NSW laws capping political donations and banning property developers were at odds with the constitution’s implied freedom of political communication. The court thought otherwise, handing down a judgment that will keep McCloy immortalised in law textbooks for years to come.
Out of politics, beaten in court, burned by ICAC, McCloy is still around — always ready to offer his takes on Newcastle politics. And koalas.
Tarring and feathering would be too good for him
So Barilaro and the Nats went to all this effort because of just one disgruntled property developer?
They carried on like they were advocating for thousands…
I then saw on the news a Merriwa beef cattle farmer suggest that because “we haven’t seen a koala on this property for 100 years”, that was a good reason for the new regulations to be tossed out.
Can someone please tell the thick oaf that because his “habitat destruction” has been so successful in eradicating native fauna like koalas for 100 years, that is actually WHY we must strengthen the regulations that preserve any native habitat that’s left.
Whenever a politician rhetorically lilts toward “various constituents” as an excuse for doing something, trying to do something, or “thinking something” – I’d love to hear, just once, a journalist ask “How many would that be?”
We need laws to protect wildlife (and us) from the likes of McCloy and their procured political cat’s paws like Barilaro (that sell themselves too cheaply).
The only puzzle is how come he is not positively thriving in this land of milk and corruption?
Also, points for the caption to the pic advising that McCloy was on the left – so hard to distinguish from the other subject.
It’s all got to do with his land developments around Newcastle/Port Stephens – prime koala habitat. The man should be gaoled for his ongoing, if not illegal, morally corrupt insurgents into state politics and Barrilaro should removed from parliament for acts contrary to the best interests of the state