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A former top prosecutor has swung his support behind the Director of Public Prosecutions after a controversial NSW upper house inquiry found she gave false evidence in parliament and approved her office giving a negative story about a sitting judge to the media.
Nicholas Cowdery, KC, who served as DPP in NSW for 16 years, said the report, released on Tuesday, was outrageous and damning findings made about Sally Dowling, SC, by a 4-3 majority of MPs were unsupported by the evidence.
“To accuse somebody like the DPP of lying to a parliamentary committee requires very strong evidence and support,” he said.
In this case, there was evidence to the contrary, he said. Cowdery said the dissenting opinions of three of the seven MPs on the committee were strong.
The majority of the committee recommended the state government consider establishing a new parliamentary oversight committee for the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Cowdery said this was “a proposal that has been discredited completely in the past” when he was DPP in 2001 and the idea was floated by the Coalition opposition.
“That ugly head has been raised before and knocked down, and it’s quite inappropriate that it be raised now,” he said.
During her evidence before the upper house justice and communities committee last year, Dowling admitted her office effectively gave a story about District Court Penelope Wass to 2GB in October 2024.
Dowling vehemently denied she authorised the ODPP’s media manager providing the information to 2GB, and said she only became aware that her office was the source of the story days before the parliamentary hearing in December 2025. The majority did not accept her denial.
The 2GB story followed a wave of negative publicity for the ODPP.
‘They were not entitled to find that on the evidence before them.’
Attorney-General Michael Daley
Some District Court judges, including Wass, had delivered decisions criticising the office’s handling of sexual assault cases, prompting The Australian to report on an alleged “#MeToo overkill”. The judges had expressed the view the ODPP was running unmeritorious prosecutions.
“The committee is satisfied the story was pitched in retaliation for Judge Wass’ previous criticisms of the [ODPP],” the majority said.
Evidence ‘conjured up’: Daley
Attorney-General Michael Daley doubled down on his earlier claims that the inquiry was a “stitch-up” and told ABC radio on Wednesday that it was “bordering on the abuse of the processes of the parliament”.
“It’s quite obvious to me now that they had a preconceived idea about what happened and they created this entire committee, this farcical committee, just to get Sally Dowling,” Daley said.
“That is reprehensible in the extreme.”
Daley said the majority’s findings that Dowling authorised her office pitching a story about Wass to 2GB and falsely denied doing so in her evidence before the committee were “a creation of certain members of the committee”.
“They were not entitled to find that on the evidence before them,” Daley said. “I don’t know what evidence they might have conjured up in their own minds.”
The majority recommended Daley “consider establishing a formal inquiry with compulsory powers” to examine the 2GB incident, “with a view to determining whether there are grounds to remove” Dowling from office.
“That won’t be happening,” Daley said. “Even if I wanted to get rid of the director, which I most certainly don’t, I’d have to take that report to the governor and recommend her removal, and the governor, being a [former NSW Court of Appeal judge] … would laugh me out of her office if I was to try and use this report to remove the director.
“I wouldn’t be able to do it, because it’s so farcical.”
He said on Tuesday that in light of his “serious concerns about the recommendations and findings made in this report, I will instruct the Crown Solicitor’s Office to brief senior counsel to review it”.
‘Buck always stops at the top’
Shadow attorney-general Susan Carter, who was one of two Liberal MPs on the inquiry who endorsed the majority’s findings, told ABC radio that Daley’s comments were “extraordinary”.
It was a “real shame that he’s come straight out of the gates with those comments without apparently having read the report itself”, Carter said.
Asked whether it made a difference whether Dowling authorised information being given to 2GB or a staff member acted alone, Carter said: “I think the buck always stops at the top.
“I think it just doesn’t pass the pub test to say a junior made that decision and I therefore have no responsibility for what happened.”
She said Daley needed to “step up” and consider these issues rather than dismissing them out of hand.
“This matter isn’t going away,” Carter said. “There is, I think, an issue about public confidence in the DPP.”
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