August 10, 2025 • 11 mins
On Friday morning, NSW MP Gareth Ward resigned from State Parliament just moments before he was due to be expelled by his fellow MPs. Ward was found guilty of sexual assault offences last month and is currently in jail awaiting sentencing.
Today we're breaking down what happened, why it took so long to get to this point, and what happens next.
Hosts: Sam Koslowski and Emma Gillespie
Producer: Orla Maher
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Already and this is the Daily This is the Daily OS.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh, now it makes sense.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Monday,
the eleventh of August. I'm Sam Kazlowski.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm Emma Gillespie.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
On Friday morning, New South Wales MP Gareth Ward resigned
from state parliament just moments before he was due to
be expelled by his fellow MPs. Ward was found guilty
of sexual assault defenses last month and is currently in
jail awaiting sentencing. On today's podcast, we're going to break
down what happened here, why it took so long to
(00:41):
get to this point, and what happens next.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Sam, we are talking today about jailed now former MP
Gareth Ward, a New South Wales politician. This has been
quite the political drama. It's stretched over months and years
and we finally have a resolution. But let's start with
who Gareth Ward is, especially for listeners outside of New
South Wales, and how we got to this situation.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
So Gareth Ward was first elected to New South Wales
Parliament back in twenty eleven. He was representing the seat
of Kayama on the New South Wales South Coast. He
was a minister in the previous coalition government, but left
the party four years ago when historic sexual abuse allegations
against him first surfaced.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Okay So elected as a Liberal MP to the new
South Wales Parliament and then later ran as an independent
and was re elected.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Yeah, and despite these allegations against him, Ward was re
elected as an independent for Kiyama in twenty twenty three.
Now fast forward to this year and on the twenty
fifth of July, after a nine week trial in the
Downing Center District Court in Sydney, he was found guilty
of three counts of indecent assault and one count of
(01:56):
sexual intercourse without consent against two men who were a
eighteen and twenty four at the time of the offenses.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
So Gareth Ward has been convicted. He is in prison
as we speak. And I think there are a lot
of people who would assume that those convictions automatically disqualified
him from the Parliament, that would sort of mean the
end of his political career. And I think this really
speaks to why this case has sparked such national interest,
because that's not actually how it works, is it.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
No, And it's an interesting quirk in how our parliamentary
system works. MPs aren't automatically dismissed if criminal charges are
laid against them, or even if they're convicted. So Parliament
can pass what's called a motion to expel a member,
but only if their behavior would bring the House into disrepute.
And this kind of expulsion is super rare, so it
(02:45):
hasn't been done since nineteen sixty nine, and up until Friday,
both Labor and the Coalition were urging Ward to resign
on his own terms rather than force Parliament to take
what they consider an extraordinary step.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, and it is such a rare step. We should
clarify that this kind of expulsion is so rare in
New South Wales. It hasn't happened for one hundred and
seven years. So there have been other expulsions at other
levels of government, but incredibly rare set of circumstances for
the state. But as you mentioned, Ward didn't resign voluntarily
(03:19):
despite that pressure from MPs for him to step aside
rather than be forced out. What was his strategy? Why
didn't he resign after he was convicted?
Speaker 1 (03:29):
It took a little bit of time, didn't it for
him to actually come around to that decision. So Ward
is currently in custody. He instructed his lawyers to apply
to the New South Wales Supreme Court to delay the
vote in New South Wales Parliament on his expulsion. And
there were kind of two key arguments that he wanted
his legal team to mount. And so the first one
was that Parliament couldn't remove him while he was still
(03:51):
awaiting his sentencing and while he was planning to appeal
his conviction. And the second argument was that Ward wouldn't
have the opportunit unity to respond to the motion in
parliament because clearly he's in jail. And I guess from
that respect it's a fair point. Procedurally he's literally in
a jail cell and can't actually physically appear at the
(04:13):
Parliament to give a speech in his own defense, okay.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
But also he's in jail because he has been found
guilty of sex offenses. But it is a fascinating legal
argument to unpack. How did the courts respond?
Speaker 1 (04:26):
So initially the court granted a temporary order to prevent
New South Wales Parliament from having this expulsion vote from
going ahead. The government said it had chosen to respect
the will of the court, even though there's this really
interesting battle between the Supreme Court and the way that
the Parliament is run. It's kind of that church versus state, okay,
(04:47):
idea coming into it. But the government then appealed to
that decision in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court allowed
for an urgent hearing on Thursday afternoon and then ultimately
rejected Wards lawyer's arguments and ruled that the exp bulsion
vote could go ahead, and that was set for around
ten o'clock on Friday morning.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Okay, so we have this vote scheduled to happen in
the Lower House of New South Wales Parliament to expel
Gareth Ward, but that didn't end up going ahead because
after all of these calls for his resignation, after months
of that push, he finally did just that.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Yeah, so the vote was unnecessary because he sent a
letter to the Lower House speaker, a man called Greg Piper,
and Gareth Ward confirmed he had submitted a resignation. It
was effective immediately. So essentially it was kind of almost
half an hour or maybe even generously an hour before
this vote that Ward voluntarily resigned and his fellow MPs
(05:44):
were no longer needed to gather in the chamber to
vote to kick him out.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
And we know that the vote would have ultimately ended
in his expulsion because we had heard from the Labor
government and the Liberal opposition who said they were all
in favor of removing him from the house.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Exactly, it was really a done deal.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
So what was the reaction from Parliament then? They'd been
gearing up for this vote and at the eleventh hour,
essentially Ward chooses to step down. What did Parliament say?
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Well, New South Wales's Lower House leader Ron Honig said
this afterwards resignation.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Not in one hundred and seven years has this House
been required to expel a member and the fact that
we were about to make such a determination is a
pretty shameful exercise and should have been done following the
verdict by the jury.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
On the other side of the aisle, Liberal leader Mark
Speakman has said the opposition was ready to have Gareth
Ward expelled from Parliament after Thursday's court ruling. So, as
you said, it was a done deal and then it
kind of took another path to the same results just
before the vote.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah, I thought it was really interesting hearing from Ron Honig,
the Lower House leader you mentioned, after all of this happened.
He spoke about the people of Kayama. So this is
the electorate that Gareth Ward represented, saying that they as
an electorate had put their faith in him, that they
had re elected him presuming his innocence after he was charged,
(07:14):
that he had said he was innocent and that they
respected that that. Ultimately, you know, not only had he
let down the parliament by dragging the process out, but
that he had also let down those voters too. So, Sam,
what will happen now he's no longer the member for Kayama.
So does that trigger a by election?
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Exactly? So the people of Kayama will have to go
back to the polls and vote for their new representative
in the new South Wales Parliament. No date has been
set yet for that by election. Ward will remain in custody.
He's been remanded since that guilty verdict and has a
sentencing hearing scheduled for the nineteenth of September. His legal
team says he still does plan to appeal the conviction,
(07:55):
but no formal appeal has been lodged yet.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Okay, Sam, before we wrap this up, I do want
to zoom out a little bit and ask you about
this whole idea of automatically suspending a parliamentarian or that
not being the case. You know, not just in New
South Wales, but this is the process in other states
and territories, and even in a federal context. If someone's
charged with a serious offense, that doesn't automatically discount them.
(08:20):
And I think this has really been the center of
the conversation.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Totally, and it's such a tough question to answer because
you kind of have two competing ideas here. You've got
the idea of protecting our democratic institutions and making sure
that there's people in those positions of power that are
respected and have i mean physically freedom of movement and
arn't in the jail cell yep. But also then you
(08:42):
have this idea of due process, so the idea that
somebody should be eligible to have a fair trial and
they're innocent until proven guilty. And I guess in Gareth
Ward's case, if he's planning an appeal, then this is
an ongoing legal process. And so on one hand, MP's
convicted of serious crimes clearly undermine public trust. Most people
(09:04):
would say it's totally untenable to have someone representing them
from a jail cell. And as we saw in Ward's case,
courts are generally going to accept that parliaments can actually
kick out members who damage the institution's reputation. But if
you're talking about automatically suspending a parliamentarian just based on
charges being laid, that's a much trickier situation, and that
(09:27):
legal experts say could threaten the presumption of innocence.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, you do have to wonder, you know, for the
people of an electorate, whether or not a person is
accused of something, and whether or not that means they're guilty,
the time that it takes for them to either fight
those charges or appear in court go to lengthy hearings,
you know, whether the distraction of what that could place
on them or the burden of those proceedings, you know,
(09:53):
whether that's the right thing for an electorate to have
their member be so preoccupied, I think is also a
worthy equal.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Question, And that kind of leads into something I was
thinking about a lot, which is that the people of
Kayama and whatever electorate we talk about with a story
like this, they're entitled to a representative in parliament, and
they deserve a voice in parliament, as we all do
in part of a democracy. And if you have somebody
who is facing charges going through a jury system. You know,
(10:22):
whether they are found guilty or innocent at the end,
You're right, they're not able to do their job for
the people of their electorate in that time. And in
some ways, the expulsion of Gareth Ward, or the resignation
just before the expulsion, actually means that the people of
Kayama can now actually get a voice back through this
by election process. It was much harder for the people
(10:42):
of Kayama when there was a suspension because he technically
was still the member, but he couldn't in all honesty
do the job that he needed to exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Really fascinating, Sam. Thank you so much for taking us
through that one. Thanks Sam, Thank you so much for
listening to today's deep Dive. That's all from us for
now that we will be back this evening with your
news headlines. And just a quick reminder if this episode
has raised any issues for you, help is available through
one eight hundred respect We'll pop some resources in the
episode description.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda
Bungelung Calcottin woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges
that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the
Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the
first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Already and this is the Daily This is the Daily OS.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh, now it makes sense.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Monday,
the eleventh of August. I'm Sam Kazlowski.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm Emma Gillespie.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
On Friday morning, New South Wales MP Gareth Ward resigned
from state parliament just moments before he was due to
be expelled by his fellow MPs. Ward was found guilty
of sexual assault defenses last month and is currently in
jail awaiting sentencing. On today's podcast, we're going to break
down what happened here, why it took so long to
(00:41):
get to this point, and what happens next.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Sam, we are talking today about jailed now former MP
Gareth Ward, a New South Wales politician. This has been
quite the political drama. It's stretched over months and years
and we finally have a resolution. But let's start with
who Gareth Ward is, especially for listeners outside of New
South Wales, and how we got to this situation.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
So Gareth Ward was first elected to New South Wales
Parliament back in twenty eleven. He was representing the seat
of Kayama on the New South Wales South Coast. He
was a minister in the previous coalition government, but left
the party four years ago when historic sexual abuse allegations
against him first surfaced.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Okay So elected as a Liberal MP to the new
South Wales Parliament and then later ran as an independent
and was re elected.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Yeah, and despite these allegations against him, Ward was re
elected as an independent for Kiyama in twenty twenty three.
Now fast forward to this year and on the twenty
fifth of July, after a nine week trial in the
Downing Center District Court in Sydney, he was found guilty
of three counts of indecent assault and one count of
(01:56):
sexual intercourse without consent against two men who were a
eighteen and twenty four at the time of the offenses.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
So Gareth Ward has been convicted. He is in prison
as we speak. And I think there are a lot
of people who would assume that those convictions automatically disqualified
him from the Parliament, that would sort of mean the
end of his political career. And I think this really
speaks to why this case has sparked such national interest,
because that's not actually how it works, is it.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
No, And it's an interesting quirk in how our parliamentary
system works. MPs aren't automatically dismissed if criminal charges are
laid against them, or even if they're convicted. So Parliament
can pass what's called a motion to expel a member,
but only if their behavior would bring the House into disrepute.
And this kind of expulsion is super rare, so it
(02:45):
hasn't been done since nineteen sixty nine, and up until Friday,
both Labor and the Coalition were urging Ward to resign
on his own terms rather than force Parliament to take
what they consider an extraordinary step.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, and it is such a rare step. We should
clarify that this kind of expulsion is so rare in
New South Wales. It hasn't happened for one hundred and
seven years. So there have been other expulsions at other
levels of government, but incredibly rare set of circumstances for
the state. But as you mentioned, Ward didn't resign voluntarily
(03:19):
despite that pressure from MPs for him to step aside
rather than be forced out. What was his strategy? Why
didn't he resign after he was convicted?
Speaker 1 (03:29):
It took a little bit of time, didn't it for
him to actually come around to that decision. So Ward
is currently in custody. He instructed his lawyers to apply
to the New South Wales Supreme Court to delay the
vote in New South Wales Parliament on his expulsion. And
there were kind of two key arguments that he wanted
his legal team to mount. And so the first one
was that Parliament couldn't remove him while he was still
(03:51):
awaiting his sentencing and while he was planning to appeal
his conviction. And the second argument was that Ward wouldn't
have the opportunit unity to respond to the motion in
parliament because clearly he's in jail. And I guess from
that respect it's a fair point. Procedurally he's literally in
a jail cell and can't actually physically appear at the
(04:13):
Parliament to give a speech in his own defense, okay.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
But also he's in jail because he has been found
guilty of sex offenses. But it is a fascinating legal
argument to unpack. How did the courts respond?
Speaker 1 (04:26):
So initially the court granted a temporary order to prevent
New South Wales Parliament from having this expulsion vote from
going ahead. The government said it had chosen to respect
the will of the court, even though there's this really
interesting battle between the Supreme Court and the way that
the Parliament is run. It's kind of that church versus state, okay,
(04:47):
idea coming into it. But the government then appealed to
that decision in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court allowed
for an urgent hearing on Thursday afternoon and then ultimately
rejected Wards lawyer's arguments and ruled that the exp bulsion
vote could go ahead, and that was set for around
ten o'clock on Friday morning.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Okay, so we have this vote scheduled to happen in
the Lower House of New South Wales Parliament to expel
Gareth Ward, but that didn't end up going ahead because
after all of these calls for his resignation, after months
of that push, he finally did just that.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Yeah, so the vote was unnecessary because he sent a
letter to the Lower House speaker, a man called Greg Piper,
and Gareth Ward confirmed he had submitted a resignation. It
was effective immediately. So essentially it was kind of almost
half an hour or maybe even generously an hour before
this vote that Ward voluntarily resigned and his fellow MPs
(05:44):
were no longer needed to gather in the chamber to
vote to kick him out.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
And we know that the vote would have ultimately ended
in his expulsion because we had heard from the Labor
government and the Liberal opposition who said they were all
in favor of removing him from the house.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Exactly, it was really a done deal.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
So what was the reaction from Parliament then? They'd been
gearing up for this vote and at the eleventh hour,
essentially Ward chooses to step down. What did Parliament say?
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Well, New South Wales's Lower House leader Ron Honig said
this afterwards resignation.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Not in one hundred and seven years has this House
been required to expel a member and the fact that
we were about to make such a determination is a
pretty shameful exercise and should have been done following the
verdict by the jury.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
On the other side of the aisle, Liberal leader Mark
Speakman has said the opposition was ready to have Gareth
Ward expelled from Parliament after Thursday's court ruling. So, as
you said, it was a done deal and then it
kind of took another path to the same results just
before the vote.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah, I thought it was really interesting hearing from Ron Honig,
the Lower House leader you mentioned, after all of this happened.
He spoke about the people of Kayama. So this is
the electorate that Gareth Ward represented, saying that they as
an electorate had put their faith in him, that they
had re elected him presuming his innocence after he was charged,
(07:14):
that he had said he was innocent and that they
respected that that. Ultimately, you know, not only had he
let down the parliament by dragging the process out, but
that he had also let down those voters too. So, Sam,
what will happen now he's no longer the member for Kayama.
So does that trigger a by election?
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Exactly? So the people of Kayama will have to go
back to the polls and vote for their new representative
in the new South Wales Parliament. No date has been
set yet for that by election. Ward will remain in custody.
He's been remanded since that guilty verdict and has a
sentencing hearing scheduled for the nineteenth of September. His legal
team says he still does plan to appeal the conviction,
(07:55):
but no formal appeal has been lodged yet.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Okay, Sam, before we wrap this up, I do want
to zoom out a little bit and ask you about
this whole idea of automatically suspending a parliamentarian or that
not being the case. You know, not just in New
South Wales, but this is the process in other states
and territories, and even in a federal context. If someone's
charged with a serious offense, that doesn't automatically discount them.
(08:20):
And I think this has really been the center of
the conversation.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Totally, and it's such a tough question to answer because
you kind of have two competing ideas here. You've got
the idea of protecting our democratic institutions and making sure
that there's people in those positions of power that are
respected and have i mean physically freedom of movement and
arn't in the jail cell yep. But also then you
(08:42):
have this idea of due process, so the idea that
somebody should be eligible to have a fair trial and
they're innocent until proven guilty. And I guess in Gareth
Ward's case, if he's planning an appeal, then this is
an ongoing legal process. And so on one hand, MP's
convicted of serious crimes clearly undermine public trust. Most people
(09:04):
would say it's totally untenable to have someone representing them
from a jail cell. And as we saw in Ward's case,
courts are generally going to accept that parliaments can actually
kick out members who damage the institution's reputation. But if
you're talking about automatically suspending a parliamentarian just based on
charges being laid, that's a much trickier situation, and that
(09:27):
legal experts say could threaten the presumption of innocence.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, you do have to wonder, you know, for the
people of an electorate, whether or not a person is
accused of something, and whether or not that means they're guilty,
the time that it takes for them to either fight
those charges or appear in court go to lengthy hearings,
you know, whether the distraction of what that could place
on them or the burden of those proceedings, you know,
(09:53):
whether that's the right thing for an electorate to have
their member be so preoccupied, I think is also a
worthy equal.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Question, And that kind of leads into something I was
thinking about a lot, which is that the people of
Kayama and whatever electorate we talk about with a story
like this, they're entitled to a representative in parliament, and
they deserve a voice in parliament, as we all do
in part of a democracy. And if you have somebody
who is facing charges going through a jury system. You know,
(10:22):
whether they are found guilty or innocent at the end,
You're right, they're not able to do their job for
the people of their electorate in that time. And in
some ways, the expulsion of Gareth Ward, or the resignation
just before the expulsion, actually means that the people of
Kayama can now actually get a voice back through this
by election process. It was much harder for the people
(10:42):
of Kayama when there was a suspension because he technically
was still the member, but he couldn't in all honesty
do the job that he needed to exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Really fascinating, Sam. Thank you so much for taking us
through that one. Thanks Sam, Thank you so much for
listening to today's deep Dive. That's all from us for
now that we will be back this evening with your
news headlines. And just a quick reminder if this episode
has raised any issues for you, help is available through
one eight hundred respect We'll pop some resources in the
episode description.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda
Bungelung Calcottin woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges
that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the
Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the
first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
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