Schools boss signed off on $67,000 ‘fungus bench' that was flagged as biosecurity hazard
Manning conceded that 'it would have been better' if other bidders had been aware Jones had written the brief when competing for the tender, but disagreed her company should have been excluded from the tender.
'At that point in time I didn't see an issue with it, no, I didn't see an issue with it. If I did it again I would do it differently, yes,' he said.
Jones' involvement pre-dated just the writing of the scope of services. The ICAC heard on Tuesday that she had a contract with the agency extended three times in six months leading up to the tender, and had another of her employees, Amreetha Kariyawasam, embedded with School Infrastructure on a three-month contract worth $108,000 plus GST.
On March 27, 2018, Jones complained directly to Manning that other School Infrastructure staff were 'keeping Amreetha out' of developing a new strategy because 'they say she has a conflict of interest which I don't agree with'.
That email came at the end of a longer trail discussing the release of the new 'engagement' strategy for the agency which pre-dated the tender. It was not clear how Jones was included because she was not a party to the original emails.
However, on Wednesday it became clear that Manning had blind copied her into correspondence in which he had instructed another executive to delay progress on the strategy until he returned from an overseas trip.
Manning could not say why he blind copied her, saying it 'could have been an accident' or 'could have been deliberate'.
The commission then saw an email Manning sent to a human resources employee about two staff members. It was sent on the same day as Jones' complaint.
Manning wrote in the email that 'continued poor behaviour by a couple of the team may need to be dealt with by asking them to leave the organisation'.
But Manning said there had been problems with the two employees. One of them had 'lied' about a separate issue, he said, and had caused 'continual issues' such as running 'tick-a-box' community engagement which caused 'downstream issues' for the agency.
'When they [held information booths] in shopping centre [they would] find spaces right at the back so it was less prominent, that was the feedback I was getting from the team,' he said.
Manning has previously told the inquiry he only began to consider Jones a friend in 2023, after she helped him with problems he was having with the new Labor government. He also invited her to his 50th birthday in 2021.
He denied a suggestion from counsel assisting Jamie Darams SC that he had been 'favourable' to Jones.
'I don't think so, no,' he said. 'I don't know whether I had a view or not at the time.'
Later, the ICAC heard Manning organised a contract for Elena Bondareva, a US-based consultant he had worked with in the past but hadn't seen for 'a number of years', as a sustainability adviser.
Bondareva was hired as a direct appointment via another 'reverse brief', which she wrote. The initial appointment was for a daily fee of $2250. The brief, signed in 2020, noted an 'approximate upper limit' of $90,000 for two months. But the contract was repeatedly extended, and she was paid $676,730 over four years.
Bondareva was working on 'engineered living materials', Manning told the ICAC, including algae and fungus to create materials including pavers, bricks and outdoor furniture.
The agency conducted an expression of interest tender for 'engineered living materials', which Manning said 'got a lot of traction' but struggled because of the difficulty in procuring fungus-based materials in Australia.
Manning said the idea was to procure 'very normal' fungus-based items including bricks, 'rather than trying to do something too clever', but there were 'biosecurity risks' because of the need to import the materials.
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In 2023, after plans for a 'grafted' tree canopy fell over because School Infrastructure could not find an engineer to declare it was safe, the agency bought a bench made from mycelium. The commissioner of the inquiry, Paul Lakatos SC, labelled it a 'fungus bench'.
The inquiry saw various briefs which showed the cost of the bench between $67,000 and $79,000, but the bench was stopped at customs after it was flagged as a 'biosecurity hazard' by Border Force.
'Unfortunately, it is not good news in relation to the delivery of the mycelium bench,' an employee wrote to Manning in July 2023.
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