Not in Writing

......... features of an institution where the distinction between the CEO’s personal interests and the institution’s interests has become blurred.

A witness at Operation Navarra described Friday the 13th, a printout of messages, and a deed of release she was told to sign before she left the room. The most revealing moment came when she quoted the CEO back to the Commission.

By Steve Prothero · Eye on Shoalhaven Council · 3 June 2026

This article is a fair report of evidence given in the public hearings of the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption’s Operation Navarra (Reference E24/2269), and in particular the public-hearing transcript of Wednesday 3 June 2026, pages 01629–01656 (the public portion). Pages 01657–01688 were heard in private session and are not reported here. This article is published in reliance on the fair-report and qualified-privilege defences available under the Defamation Act 2005 (NSW). The Operation Navarra evidence has not yet been tested by findings of the Chief Commissioner. No adverse finding has been made against any person named. Aspects of the evidence are contested through counsel. References to Shoalhaven City Council, its current Chief Executive Officer The Hon. Andrew Constance, Mayor Patricia White and named councillors are drawn from documents on the public record. No allegation of corrupt conduct, dishonesty or bad faith is made against any of those persons.

It was a Friday. That was the first thing Shannon Kliendienst noticed. Most people worked from home on Fridays. Being called in person, at short notice, with no indication of what the meeting was for — that was unusual. She told the ICAC hearing on 3 June 2026 that by the time the invitation appeared in her diary she had already worked out what was coming.

She had watched others exit the City of Parramatta at short notice over the preceding months. She had seen a change in her supervisor’s demeanour toward her. And she had received, a day or two before the meeting, what she described as an invitation that felt like what it was.

When she sat down opposite Gail Connolly, the CEO, on 15 December 2023, Ms Connolly ‘had quite an officious demeanour.’ She presented a printout. It was a thread of Teams messages between Kliendienst and colleagues, some of which contained nicknames used about another executive, and messages about the Parramatta Eels sponsorship. Some of the messages were highlighted.

Ms Connolly said to her, to the best of Kliendienst’s recollection: ‘It’s come to my attention that there’s been a series of conversations or messages of which you’re on the thread that don’t support Ms Jones-Blayney.’ She said it was a breach of the Code of Conduct or a loss of confidence and trust. The choice, Kliendienst understood, was between resigning and being terminated.

She was shown a deed of release. She was told she needed to sign it to receive her entitlements and final pay, ‘otherwise further steps would be taken.’ There was a People and Culture staff member available — but only after the meeting, not before. She was not told she could bring a support person. She was not given time to seek advice.

“So would it be fair to say you felt pressure to sign the deed?” “Yes.” — Shannon Kliendienst, ICAC Operation Navarra, public hearing transcript, 3 June 2026, p.01652

She signed it. She handed in her phone. She never returned to the City of Parramatta.

Before this moment, Kliendienst had tried to say something to Ms Connolly about the cultural tone that had been set in the meetings and one-on-ones she had attended. She told Connolly that the messages she had been shown were ‘relatively innocuous’ — that she had heard Ms Connolly say ‘far worse things about people.’

The Chief Commissioner, the Honourable John Hatzistergos AM, intervened to ask the witness to repeat what Ms Connolly had said in response.

“Not in fucking writing I haven’t.” — Gail Connolly, CEO, City of Parramatta Council, as quoted by Shannon Kliendienst, ICAC Operation Navarra, public hearing transcript, 3 June 2026, p.01650

The Chief Commissioner asked the witness to repeat it once more to ensure the transcript had it correctly.

It is, in five words, the clearest available window into how this kind of conduct is managed. The problem with conduct that would cause professional embarrassment is not the conduct itself. It is the written record. Verbal communication — the conversation called instead of the email replied to, the meeting instead of the memo — leaves nothing for a Tribunal to read.

Kliendienst’s evidence, taken across the full morning session of the 3 June hearing, built a picture of how things worked at the City of Parramatta in the period following the appointment of new CEO Connolly and a new executive director, Angela Jones-Blayney.

When Jones-Blayney started in August 2023, Kliendienst told the Commission, she arrived with pre-formed views about specific staff members — named in the testimony as Ms Brunetta, Ms Gover and Ms Na — before she had had any meaningful opportunity to form those views through her own observation.

“My observation was that Ms Jones-Blayney had made her mind up quite early on about Ms Gover, and then subsequent actions and interactions supported that.” — Shannon Kliendienst, p.01643

When Kliendienst asked where those views had come from, she had no answer. In her first week, Jones-Blayney said she had ‘come in to fix up the mess.’ Kliendienst’s own assessment of the team she was handing over was starkly different: ‘a very competent, in general a very competent committed group of individuals who were working in a complex system... with resourcing challenges, political challenges’ — not a mess.

In November 2023, Connolly told Kliendienst directly that she needed to ‘increase her level of support’ for Jones-Blayney. She mentioned that Kliendienst and Ms Gover ‘seemed very close’ and that there were concerns about Gover’s conduct and her interactions with Jones-Blayney. Kliendienst told the Commission she found it ‘odd’ — because at that point, she believed she and Jones-Blayney were ‘working quite well together.’

She also told Connolly, in that November meeting, that she felt Gover was ‘being treated unfairly.’ She raised concerns about the management style she was observing. The extension of her contract to February 2024 was confirmed in the same meeting — with the explicit condition that she increase her support.

A further detail emerged late in the hearing. Kliendienst had previously been on the interview panel that rejected Michelle Carter for a role in the Events team in March or April 2023. Several months later, Carter was placed in the Events team without any expression of interest process, without any communication to the existing team, and reporting directly to Jones-Blayney — in a parallel structure that sat beside Kliendienst’s own role managing a $7 million budget and 20 to 30 staff. Carter’s role had no direct reports and no known budget.

And when the panel process that rejected Carter had been completed — but before the panel had submitted the paperwork — Ms Connolly’s EA called Kliendienst to ask for an account of the outcome. Kliendienst told the Commission she found this confusing: ‘it was clear prior to the paperwork even being submitted that Ms Connolly was aware of the outcome of the process.’

After the public session ended at p.01656, the Commission moved into private session to consider a cross-examination application by Ms Connolly’s lawyers, Wotton Kearney. Pages 01657 to 01688 of the transcript are fully redacted. What was canvassed in that session has not been published. No findings have been made. The hearing continues.

There is a reason this newsletter has reported on Operation Navarra in detail, and it is not prurient interest in another council’s affairs.

The Shoalhaven’s own CEO appointment process — which led to the appointment of the Hon. Andrew Constance as CEO in September 2025 — is the subject of a formal investigation by the Office of Local Government under section 430 of the Local Government Act 1993. That investigation has not reported. No findings have been made.

What Operation Navarra is revealing — methodically, witness by witness, through the mechanisms of public examination — is what certain patterns of conduct look like from the inside, as described under oath by the people who experienced them.

• Pre-formed views about staff before day one.

• A new executive inserted into a team by a process nobody can justify.

• Loyalty demands tethered to contract extensions.

• Informal conversations preferred to written communication.

• A deed of release presented in a closed room with no notice and no time to take advice.

These are not exotic features of Parramatta’s local culture. They are described in the governance literature as features of an institution where the distinction between the CEO’s personal interests and the institution’s interests has become blurred.

The ICAC Act exists precisely because the ordinary mechanisms of institutional accountability — internal complaints, HR processes, oversight by elected representatives — have failed to prevent or detect that blurring.

The Shoalhaven is under a Performance Improvement Order. It is under a section 430 investigation. Its previous CEO left under circumstances that are the subject of an active GIPA application, including a request for the deed of release that accompanied her departure. Those documents are being contested.

The community is entitled to watch Operation Navarra carefully — not to borrow its conclusions, which belong to the Chief Commissioner — but to understand the vocabulary that ICAC is building, witness by witness, about how these things work.

The most clarifying sentence in today’s testimony cost Ms Connolly five words. She has not denied saying them.

Source: ICAC Operation Navarra (Reference E24/2269), public hearing transcript 03/06/2026, pages 01629–01656. Presiding: The Honourable John Hatzistergos AM, Chief Commissioner. Counsel Assisting: Ms Davidson. Witness: Shannon June Kliendienst. The full public-session transcript is available through the ICAC website at icac.nsw.gov.au. Pages 01657–01688 were heard in private session and are not publicly available at the time of publication.

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