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Upper house Labor MP Stephen Lawrence, a Sydney barrister, is not afraid to make waves in his own party.
He was the sole government MP to back a controversial 4-3 majority report, issued by a NSW upper house committee on Tuesday, that made damning findings about the state’s top prosecutor, raising the ire of NSW Attorney-General Michael Daley.
He has also emerged as a thorn in Premier Chris Minns’ side, clashing with the Labor leader on protest laws and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Lawrence declined to comment on the committee report and the Director of Public Prosecutions Sally Dowling, SC, on Wednesday. But when asked about prior differences of opinion with the government and Minns, he was forthright.
“Look, I don’t think on my deathbed I’ll be worrying if I annoyed the premier too often because, ultimately, he is popular because he is a person of conviction who stands up for what he believes,” Lawrence said.
“One can’t actually do that in politics without sometimes encountering and dealing with different internal views.”
On Wednesday, Daley launched a blistering attack on the four upper house MPs, including Lawrence, who concluded that Dowling authorised her office to give a negative story in 2024 about District Court Judge Penelope Wass to Sydney radio station 2GB.
The story was aired amid an apparent rift between some District Court judges, including Wass, and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions about the merits of some sexual assault prosecutions.
The majority – Lawrence, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party’s Robert Borsak, and Liberals Susan Carter and Natasha Maclaren-Jones – found Dowling gave false evidence in parliament when she denied authorising the information being given to 2GB.
“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.
“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.”
On Tuesday, Daley had branded the inquiry a “stitch-up”.
Lawrence, a former Dubbo mayor and member of Labor’s right faction along with Minns and Daley, agreed with the majority’s findings but went further in a dissenting statement.
He noted Dowling told the committee she was present at a meeting with the ODPP media manager and an external media adviser a day before the 2GB story aired in October 2024.
Dowling said in her evidence that she did not dispute that the office’s media manager “had a mistaken understanding” after that meeting that they were authorised to raise the story with 2GB. But Dowling said she “did not, and would not have, approved this occurring”.
Dowling said that she “was, as is my usual practice, also reading emails and texts concerning various prosecutions and other ODPP business” during that meeting and deeply regretted she did not give it her “complete attention”.
Lawrence said in the report that the “inherent plausibility of this … is highly doubtful, even in the modern age of smartphone addiction”.
But two other Labor MPs, Cameron Murphy and Bob Nanva, did not back the majority’s findings and said that the evidence for them was “staggeringly absent”.
‘[It would be] a sad day for the Labor Party if there were not strong differences of opinion expressed.’
Labor MP Stephen Lawrence
Greens MP Sue Higginson said in a separate dissent that the majority’s “unfounded and biased findings … are both irresponsible and incredible”.
Lawrence, once touted as a future attorney-general, is now accustomed to being at loggerheads with other members of the government.
He has known Minns for a decade and acted for the premier’s best friend Jamie Clements, a former general secretary of the NSW Labor Party, at an Independent Commission Against Corruption inquiry.
The ICAC did not make findings against Clements. Lawrence also backed Minns in the 2021 leadership vote.
Speaking generally, Lawrence said it would be “a sad day for the Labor Party if there were not strong differences of opinion expressed”.
“In fact, it would suggest the party’s imminent end as a vehicle for real change. I try and express mine respectfully and sensibly and when it has really mattered.”
When asked if he was concerned these differences might impact his prospects of promotion, Lawrence said: “I try and engage on significant policy issues on their merits. Being in public office at all is a massive privilege.”
A member of the high-profile Wigs legal podcasting team, Lawrence last year described the premier’s laws restricting protests near places of worship as “draconian” in a fiery party room meeting.
Lawrence was one of four Labor MPs who defied the premier to attend the chaotic rally against Israeli President Isaac Herzog at Sydney’s Town Hall that descended into violence, with multiple arrests and allegations of police heavy-handedness.
Lawrence said at the time that a “a dysfunctional political culture in NSW created possibly the most draconian anti-protest laws in the Western world and an almost inevitable riot, that I openly predicted in parliament late last year”.
In 2023, he used a late-night speech in parliament to accuse Israel of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and in 1967, and claimed political and media elites were perpetuating an alternative reality by blindly supporting Israel while ignoring alleged war crimes. That prompted a stern caution from the premier, who urged his MPs to “speak with one voice” and avoid “incendiary language”.
As a barrister, Lawrence acted in a NSW District Court trial in 2023 for a man accused, and ultimately acquitted, of sexual offences, and drew on some of the language used by Wass in a separate sexual assault trial.
He said the case appeared to be “yet another example of a glaringly improbable allegation … being shepherded through the criminal justice system by police and prosecutors”.
The judge in that case said that Lawrence’s “florid language is unnecessarily confrontational and simply not helpful”, but added his own criticism of recent sexual assault trials.
“[Having] presided over a number of sexual assault trials … which to my mind were in fact doomed to failure from the outset, one can well understand the frustration of counsel that led to that florid language,” Judge Gordon Lerve said.
Wass had said in a 2022 case: “A prosecutor is required to do more than shepherd incredible and dishonest allegations of sexual assault through the criminal justice system.”
The judge said that she made “no criticism of the particular prosecutor” in that case, and they had conducted themselves impeccably.
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Jessica McSweeney is a reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald covering state politics and urban affairs.Connect via email.From our partners
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