Inside the invisible rebellion that’s shaking NSW

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On Tuesday morning, the government’s leader in the upper house, Penny Sharpe, was frog-marched out of the chamber in an unprecedented seven-day suspension after being held in contempt over the failure to produce documents relating to a decade-old sexual harassment allegation against former NSW Labor general secretary Jamie Clements. Your first question might be: what? Your second question might be: why?

The Legislative Council is a strange, unknowable place, a sort of wormhole you slip through, where what happens often bears very little resemblance to anything happening outside. People sink into the plush red benches and settle in for years, and years. Some are never heard from again.

But it is also, in this term of government, where most of the action happens, and crucially where, depending on your perspective, Labor’s agenda is either most unfairly stymied or the government is most effectively held to account. And it is where months of tension and grievance are boiling over into personal attacks and vitriol.

Sharpe’s suspension was just the latest escalation in a war that was bubbling along quietly for the past several months. Indeed, she has been suspended twice before over the same issue. To really understand why, you have to take a few steps back. The chief protagonists in this saga are not Sharpe, or even the opposition,........

© The Sydney Morning Herald