Daryl Maguire

[Black Orchid]

[/quote]Disgraced Wagga Wagga MP Daryl Maguire hosted a press conference inside NSW Parliament with a key United Front official from China to promote propaganda on Tibet.

Mr Maguire has refused to resign from Parliament, but has left the NSW Liberal party, after an ICAC hearing exposed his attempts to broker property deals for a major Chinese property developer and seek commissions.

Mr Maguire told ICAC he was first approached by Chinese property developer Country Garden for help with "opportunities" at an event held by a Chinese charitable organisation, adding, “Whenever you went to a function there were always conversations.”

But he cited to ICAC the example of the Eyes on China program, which was run by the Australia Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China. The ACPPRC has been embroiled in the debate over Chinese Communist Party influence in Australia and is believed to be a United Front body.

Mr Maguire was an advisor to the ACPPRC, and as chairman of the NSW Parliament Asia Pacific Friendship Group, appeared to become a link to the NSW Parliament for United Front, a powerful Chinese Communist Party organisation that oversees minority religions and tries to harness support among overseas Chinese.

On May 30, 2013, Mr Maguire hosted a press conference inside NSW Parliament for a visiting United Front Work Department official, Wang Pijun, to promote a propaganda exhibition of paintings about Tibet.

Mr Wang was the director of the United Front information centre from 2009 to 2017.

Mr Maguire launched the Beauty of Tibet exhibition a day later at Darling Harbour, a fortnight before the Dalai Lama was due to hold an event at Darling Harbour. The Chinese exhibition upset Tibetan exiles living in Australia.

Mr Maguire’s support for the exhibition was covered by media outlets in China, after he gave an interview to People’s Daily saying “I believe the paintings and photos will surely help Australians to have a quick understanding of Tibetan culture.”

Questioned by Fairfax Media at the time, Mr Maguire said NSW Parliament didn’t get involved in foreign policy and likened the Tibet situation to the civil war in Syria. “We don’t side with one side or another,” he said in 2013.

Mr Wang was responsible for briefing foreign military attaches in Beijing on the March 2008 riots in Lhasa, which he blamed on the Dalai Lama, according to Xinhua.

Mr Wang later masterminded a 100-episode television series about Tibet directed at foreigners, that was screened at the 2013 exhibition. He told China Tibet Online, of which he was a director, that foreigners had deep-rooted prejudice on the Tibet issue.

Lin Jun, the chairman of the All China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, and a prominent figure in China’s push to harness the ethnic Chinese diaspora, also travelled to Australia to speak at the 2013 exhibition opening and urged Australians to see the “real Tibet” not the “hearsay Tibet”.

In 2013, Mr Maguire travelled to Qinghai, a Tibetan area in China, as part of the Eyes on China program.

Eyes on China regularly took groups of NSW politicians to Tibet or Tibetan regions and raised money to support cataract surgery for Tibetans in Chinese hospitals.

In August 2017, the "human rights department" of the Chinese government's State Council Information Office took a Tibetan cultural exchange delegation to meet Mr Maguire in Sydney.

Mr Maguire declined to comment for this story.

There is no suggestion that Country Garden was involved in the United Front program[/quote]

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/dar ... 4zrxo.html

What a disgusting, self serving bunch of greedy aholes we are stuck with on both sides. All they do is sell us out to line their own pockets.

[Black Orchid]

Meanwhile we are still paying this jerk his 6 figure salary

[cods]

Meanwhile we are still paying this jerk his 6 figure salary

exactly he decides if he stays or goes.... what a joke why would he go??????....

I tell you if we dont start demanding they get some rules whereby these guys sell us short they are gone on the spot??...

imagine if he did this in the private sector and sold out the people paying his salary .. I get so mad...

[Black Orchid]

There are several reasons Australians hate politicians.

They can't stand it when pollies put political wins ahead of the best interests of the voter, or politicians who blatantly lie.

They also hate politicians who use their position for financial or personal gain, and that's where the NSW Liberal member for Wagga Wagga Daryl Maguire comes in.

It was last week revealed in a corruption inquiry that Mr Maguire sought payment of a "dividend" over a property deal.

Despite mounting pressure to resign from the Parliament, he yesterday revealed plans to stick it out until the NSW election in March, 2019.

For that decision, one senior Government minister described Mr Maguire as "just a stubborn prick".

Mr Maguire made the admission during an extraordinary day at the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) last Friday.

The MP appeared before the corruption watchdog during an investigation into improper conduct by former Canterbury City councillors Michael Hawatt and Pierre Azzi.

He told ICAC he pursued Mr Hawatt on behalf of Chinese "friends" with "mega money" from the company Country Garden, who he was trying to help get established in Australia.

In a tapped phone call from May 2016 between Mr Maguire and Mr Hawatt, Mr Maguire said his Chinese friends wanted to invest in as many as 30 development-approved properties.

Mr Hawatt suggested a $48 million project on Canterbury Road in Canterbury.

Mr Maguire asked Mr Hawatt what his margin was on the property.

Mr Hawatt replied that his margin was 1.5 per cent.

"1.5 per cent divided by two isn't very good," Mr Maguire said.

Shortly after the inquiry, the member for Wagga Wagga apologised "unreservedly for causing distress and embarrassment" to the Liberal Party and resigned from his position to sit on the crossbench.

The Premier has asked him to "think carefully" about his future, but Daryl Maguire has said he will not resign from Parliament.

He is not going to recontest his seat at the March 2019 election, saying: "I won't put the cost to the taxpayer of having a byelection."

That means for the next nine months Mr Maguire will continue to receive his $165,000 yearly backbencher's salary.

The backlash in Mr Maguire's own Wagga Wagga electorate has been swift and now visible, with signs beginning to pop up demanding he quit.

Transport Minister Andrew Constance said: "I urge him to listen very closely to what the people of Wagga are saying, because they're saying to him very clearly: go."

The only way to force Mr Maguire to resign is to vote to expel him from Parliament, but that standing order hasn't been used since 1917 and it's normally reserved for convictions of a criminal nature.

If the party or the Opposition did use this order, it would be an extraordinary thing to remove a member put there by the voting public.

But as one Government minister said: "Does this guy have no f***ing moral compass?"

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-17/d ... s/10003844

We need to clear out the scum from all parties and replace them with people who actually care for Australia (are there any in parliament like this who aren't ridiculed for their real Aussie values?) and will tell the Chinese to take their money and take a hike.

Aholes the lot of them.