When Eddie Obeid delivered his maiden speech to the New South Wales parliament 25 years ago, he recounted what now seems a prescient passage from Lebanon’s famed poet, Khalil Gibran.
“Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you, or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country?” Obeid asked, translating Gibran’s question to the chamber.
Sitting in the NSW supreme court on Thursday, finally sentenced for wilful misconduct in public office, it is unlikely Obeid cast his mind back to the start of his parliamentary career all those years ago.
The moment was another step forward in Obeid’s inexorable rise to power. Thursday’s sentencing was the final plunge in his tumbling fall from grace.
Obeid came to Australia from Lebanon as a six-year-old, after leaving his small village of Matrit in the country’s north and crossing to Alexandria in Egypt in a small boat.
Once in Sydney, his life was that of a “typical migrant” among a community of new Australians, he said, and he retained nostalgia about growing up in a terrace home in Redfern.
“There was a sense of belonging to a community, a sense of mutual self-support and helping each other out,” Obeid recalled in his maiden speech. “We had respect for law and order: the man in blue was a friend who only gave us a clip behind the ear or a roasting when we deserved it, and we did not fear him.”
Obeid joined the Labor party in his late 20s and achieved significant success as a businessman, coming to jointly own the Arabic-language newspaper El Telegraph.
He spent years developing close relationships with senior NSW Labor figures, throwing lucrative fundraisers for the party and forming a friendship with the powerbroker Graham Richardson.
Obeid was eventually installed in the Legislative Council, NSW’s upper house, in 1991. He and a fellow Labor right faction heavyweight, Joe Tripodi, began to wield significant influence over the caucus and cabinet, while Obeid and his family continued to build a network of business interests.
Their political subfaction became known as “the Terrigals”, named after the central coast town where Obeid’s holiday home was used for invite-only meetings of politicians and union officials.
Obeid, still a backbencher, was notorious for being able to make or break premiers and cabinet ministers. The federal Labor stalwart John Faulkner summed up the nature of Obeid’s power on Four Corners in 2013.
“I’ve been a pretty senior figure, really, in the New South Wales branch of the Labor party,” Faulkner said. “I’ve never met him, never spoken to him and I’ve never heard him make a public speech.
“But regardless of all that, he ran the New South Wales Labor party and ran Labor governments in New South Wales.”
In 1999, eight years after his maiden speech, Obeid was appointed to cabinet as mining and fisheries minister. Several years later he was hauled before the pecuniary interests committee to explain a series of undeclared conflicts of interest but blamed the failures on his accountant.
The parliamentary privileges committee declared him unfit to serve as a minister, and the premier Bob Carr dumped him from his cabinet after winning the 2003 election. But Obeid survived Carr and continued to wield influence under the next premier, Morris Iemma.
It was a court case involving Obeid’s son, Moses Obeid, that proved the beginning of the end. Moses was in court battling the City of Sydney council, which was arguing he owed it $12m for breaching a contract over multifunction streetpoles. Documents tendered in the case showed the true extent of the family’s business interests.
A 2012 Fairfax Media investigation showed that the family controlled prime harbourside cafes in Circular Quay through a series of opaque trust accounts. Obeid had concealed those interests while lobbying a senior bureaucrat from the state maritime authority, Steve Dunn.
Obeid was seeking to have the leases renewed without a competitive tender, but Dunn had believed the politician was acting for constituents – not his family’s interests.
The leasing policy was changed to allow Circular Quay leases to be renewed one time without a tender, although Dunn said he was not involved in the decision and was not influenced by Obeid. Dunn has never been accused of wrongdoing.
The revelations prompted a hearing in the Independent Commission Against Corruption, which made adverse findings against Obeid. At the time he famously remarked there was a 1% chance that he would be charged.
Obeid remained implacable when he was in fact charged, saying: “I have no concern whatsoever that, in a court of law, we’ll be able to fight the evidence, and I’m very confident.”
A jury took less than a day to find him guilty of misconduct in public office during his supreme court trial in June.
His sentencing, an exercise with few precedents, was repeatedly pushed back, largely so the court could consider a significant volume of medical evidence, which Obeid used to argue that he was too old and ill to spend considerable time in custody.
But the end was inevitable. Obeid was on Thursday sentenced to five years in jail, with a three-year non-parole period.
Gilbran, the poet Obeid quoted in his 1991 maiden speech, was writing to Lebanese MPs in 1925 after the fall of the Ottoman empire, urging them to be strong and act for the country, not for themselves.
Obeid didn’t include the next line of Gibran’s letter during his speech to parliament. But, after Thursday’s sentencing, he will have plenty of time to reflect on the force of its conclusion.
Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country?
If you are the first, then you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in the desert.
