Thread by @Voice4Victoria

IBAC again today, assuming same start as yesterday of 10.30am.
Link to watch live here:
ibac.vic.gov.au/investigating-…

Off to a thrilling start.

15 minutes

Cross examination kicks off with perjury reminders 👀

Just about spat coffee.
Opening line of text that cross examination is forced to read aloud due to technical limits, *very emphatic* "fuck Michaelson..".
At last counsel is entertaining.
Oh & it's accusing Byrne of actually being involved in the Dandenong council elections.

Yikes these texts Somyurek has put up that he's claimed are from Byrne aren't pleasant or subtle.

"Luke is my political son who I put into Parliament". WHEW these texts from Byrne.

The short version of this is Somyurek has put up texts that basically reverse accuse him of actually being the power broker related to Dande council.

Somyurek counsel reminded questions must be linked to previous days questions not just open.

Thrilled this is public.

Byrne "I don't recall that specific texts as I don't keep texts".
What a non-answer to asking if you recall discussing via text destroying someone.

THESE TEXTS 💀.
"I want to humiliate him".

Debating if convener is the same as being in control of moderate Labor. They're really focusing on this sub-set concept a little too much..

Counsel reading text supposedly from Byrne "I really do want to kill him, this is personal for me now".

Byrne "I think what's missing in this is the context".

Excuse me 😂

"Watch her she's a ratfucker". That was one that came out last year.

Counsel being forced to read these aloud is pretty entertaining but making Byrne's responses harder given he can't actually see anything.

They're discussing Turkish newspapers getting money in 1998. The legacy dirt this is dragging up is just absolutely mindblowing.

We're hearing branch stacking evidence from the mid 90s. Be interesting how their micro-faction arguments stack up that many decades ago and over the last 3 decades in their attempts to try and make this only about 'moderate Labor' stacking..

Dammit. Back to not public.

We're back, basically in the middle of a sentence. Discussing people of various ethnic backgrounds getting employed (aka used) by Labor depending on factional alliances. This has been a smashcut of who employed who, why and what benefits may have come of it.

Oops. Somyurek whispering instructions is getting picked up on the mic and everyone can hear it 😂

Byrne admits he's been involved in breaking party rules since mid 90s, right up until last year.

Carr SC "these were party-wide issues?"
Byrne "they were".

That's the money shot.

Omg Carr is asking what other factions were involved in branch stacking in SE regions.

Byrne just said the socialist left.
That's Dan + co.

Ohhhhh here we go.

Carr asks how this level of systematic corruption could possibly be addressed or fixed.
Byrne suggests criminalising the falsification of membership ballots.

(Uh, fairly certain this is already the case under the Electoral Act?).

Oh. Redshirts questions are back. If that topic gets pushed, that may scalp some more Labor MPs..

IBAC Commissioner commends Byrne for being so open in his evidence as he concludes his examination & releases him from summons. This means we've finished with Byrne & the transcripts will be available later today. Brief break on livestream while they line up the next witness.

Next witness is up.
Interested in this one. Good EAs usually know quite a lot in relation to their executives and Schreiber appears to have had the role alongside being an electoral officer.

Asks Schreiber if she was ever a member of a political party while working in the public service, she says no. Carr asks if she did make the statement previously that she "couldn't tell the difference between Lab/Lib & if that represents her political involvement". Lol. Says yes.

Schreiber's relevance to IBAC at this point appears to be the fact she was seconded (this means temporarily working in a different area to the one mainly employed) to help set up Somyurek's Ministerial office in 2019.

She's just said that the Premier's Chief of Staff signed off on new recruits onto payroll in the Min Office..
Might be wrong but procurement process-wise, this sounds slightly off. If the budgets stems from a Minister, they should be signing it off? Not DPC..

Schreiber saying she didn't initially want to take the job with Somyurek's office given his reputation but felt it was a step up in terms of reputational position and when she first got there it wasn't as bad as she expected.

Carr "how did you end up being tasked with working in his electoral office?".

Ellen - I basically cracked the shits & did it myself when nobody in the office was doing their job, which was affecting mine & Adem just told me to do it myself.

Very standard govt.

OHHH Campaign Central is on the table. Which she accessed through someone elses log in, in order to cross reference new Labor memberships.
Bless, she is just singing like a canary.

Schreiber really is an ideal witness for inappropriate role crossover. Incredible smashcut of where she started in the dept vs what she ended up doing on committees like MAC (Labor member committee), with a solid sprinkling of unhinged behavioural stories of Somyurek & others.

Enjoying the entertainment of brutal honesty mixed with young energy, while she just fully drops Labor in the 💩 for the work she undertook. Clearly she's a bit nervous and happy to cooperate and explain.

Carr clarifying that MAC is a subcommittee of the Admin board that's more easily described as 'Labor's state board'.
Essentially Schreiber was being paid with public money as a VPS employee but worked in functions related to Labor membership. Key point of this IBAC investigation.

Irregularities are shortened to "irregs" internally. Govt loves acronyms and nicknames.

According to Schreiber, when asked she understands "warehousing" as false addresses for people when joining. The purpose for which is stacking up branches.

OMG. She admits she accidentally got in the middle of warehousing at one point, just by trying to do her job, and got screamed at by Somyurek.

Schreiber describes Adem as "hitting the roof" at the time. Said she took a call from him in a car with a non-political friend who asked "how can your boss get away with talking to you like that".
Had to laugh. That's another, not uncommon, internal dept issue that's not just MPs

On a lunch break for 40 minutes.

We're back!
Kicking off with basically saying Somyurek did the bare minimum in his Ministerial portfolio, so the workload wasn't very large. Lol.

Schreiber confirms she was never instructed not to do factional work during office hours.

Lots of discussing names, associations, contact that's been had with various parties.
Sarah Connolly, current ALP MP has come up. Kaushaliya (also current MP) gets a plug in there as being notoriously difficult to deal with, as Schreiber used to seek assistance in dealing w/ her.

Kumar brothers come up. They were "always in the office". They've been publicly spoken about being linked to Adem before (decent amount on Google). They are Labor members and linked to the Subcontinent Friends of Labor group.

Carr asks if her job was to make sure the paperwork for members they wanted admitted to the party was pushed through & then for applications for rival factions, to go through them 'with a fine tooth comb' to find any issues that could block the membership going through. Says yes.

Schreiber breaks down in detail some of the things they would target to undetermine membership applications from rival factions.

We're back on Campaign Central 👀 this contains electoral roll information of citizens. Access to this information is meant to be quite highly regulated.

Insane. She's just dropped that Nick McClennens (spelling?) Campaign Central account got linked to multiple electorate datasets, including Kaushaliya and Tim Richardson. This isn't meant to happen. Admits they needed Nick every time they logged in to provide a verification code.

SCREAMING. Somyurek offered her a job at CFMEU after he replaced her with Setka's wife, who he told Schreiber not to tell her what she'd been paid.
She got offered a role by Adem as CFMEU's 'right hand man' that would essentially be about signing up CFMEU members as ALP members.

My god, nothing is spared in this investigation. Nothing.

IBAC digging into Somyurek's comments when offering the job to Schreiber is that she would 'have power' and she says he used the pain point of offering high compensation, knowing she was trying to buy a house at the time.

Schreiber turned down CFMEU job, describes Adem going off and being "mad as a cut snake". She called her manager in tears after being verbally abused on the phone for not taking the role Adem wanted her to, as he didn't get his way. That's explosive.

She says following her turning down the CFMEU role she was iced out of all meetings and treated badly. Following this is what triggered her leaving the Labor party and her roles there.

"I can confirm I did not do it out of the goodness of my heart" on doing factional work, mentions working on weekends at meetings. Hilarious 😂

Carr asks if each Labor faction was involved in branch stacking. Schreiber says yes, but not on the same scale as Somyurek was competitive. Says if they put up 30, 'the left would put up 30'. That's, again, not good for the left.

Carr asks if Schreiber ever raised any questions about being asked to do work she wasn't meant to do. She says no but also felt she couldn't. To her it was a well paying job she was good at, she didn't necessarily want to lose it by bringing up questions.

SCREAMING. Schreiber says it is ALP culture to promote females very quickly. Says look at many of their MPs, they're there mainly because they're female (inferring not because of merit).
Very hard to disagree for some of their MPs..

Says she was looked at by members of other factions at meetings as 'Somyurek's spy' and the internal division is so great they could barely have a conversation that wasn't painful.

Schreiber admits she could have said something, she thought very highly of her manager, but knew if she did she could lose her job and she openly admits she did not want to lose such a good role at the time.

Schreiber admits that staff knew that they shouldn't be doing the factional work but that there was no collective conversation about doing anything about it because they knew they'd get "put in the freezer" because of it, by Adem.

She says after she turned down CFMEU, as a result didn't get up a role on the Admin board, so threw in the towel and said she was quitting Labor & couldn't do it anymore. Discovered at state conference she had unknowingly been taken off ballot ticket entirely.

"Adem negotiated with Bill Shorten's office". Oh dear.

She's very much awarding Adem some kind of mastermind status here. Curious how much is true vs when held up against his ego wanting to ensure he'd be presented that way to staff, whether true or not. Just a thought.

Somyurek's counsel has once again requested the ability to cross examine the witness. Brief break while the Commissioner decides if he will allow that to occur (based off what the counsel puts forward as wanting to ask about).

Oh, we're done for today.
Back again tomorrow morning.