August 6, 2026 — 5:00am
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A photo of the Perrottet family shows parents Anne and John with their brood of 12 children. Helpfully, the siblings have been assigned T-shirts with the family crest, each bearing a number matching their birth order.
“There’s a fair bit of pushing and shoving in a family the size of [ours],” Anne Perrottet was quoted as saying of her brood of children.
The extended Perrottet family. There are 12 siblings shown as one died at birth.
One of the most gripping parts of a corruption inquiry into branch stacking and illegal donations has been seeing how a small number of people from a group of large families, including the Perrottets, have become embroiled in the pushing and shoving over control of the Liberal Party.
In an interview with a New Zealand radio program in 2022, after her son Dominic (number three and not a target in the inquiry) had become NSW premier, she offered that, “strong personalities run in the family, and some don’t shy away from sharing their opinions”.
Sharing his opinions in the witness box at the ICAC on Wednesday has been their 12th child, Jean-Claude, who, along with his older brother Charles (number four), is one of the reluctant stars of a blockbuster corruption inquiry into a right-wing religious faction of the NSW Liberal Party.
Known as The Reformers, the inquiry has heard the small group of faith-based young ideologues was stacking branches with the hope of getting like-minded people elected to parliament.
Apart from the familial connections within the Perrottet family, one of the most notable elements of this inquiry is that the participants are linked by much less than six degrees of separation.
Take the evidence of baby-faced Jean-Claude, 29, who, despite his height, looked surprisingly diminutive as he sat in the witness box.
Jean-Claude Perrottet leaving the ICAC after giving evidence on Wednesday.Dominic Lorrimer
Jean-Claude was taken through his employment history, which, like several others mentioned in evidence, included a stint in the office of upper house MP Damien Tudehope.
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Unfortunately for Jean-Claude, in June he lost his most recent job as communications officer at Catholic Schools NSW, just before the looming corruption inquiry started. His father, John Perrottet, is on leave from his position on that organisation’s board.
Also on leave is the CEO of Catholic Schools NSW, Dallas McInerney, who is yet to give evidence at the ICAC.
McInerney is linked to many people named in the inquiry, including from the Perrottet, Assaf and the Tudehope families, some of whom allegedly did Reformers’ work while on the Catholic Schools NSW payroll.
The inquiry has heard McInerney funnelled school funds to a Reformers-linked lobbying group run by Christian Ellis and Jeremy Greenwood.
The inquiry also heard that before he was hired by Catholic Schools NSW, Jean-Claude complained in a text message to fellow Reformer Christian Ellis that he was doing political work without being compensated fairly, while Catholic Schools was paying “$135k for Rob [Assaf] to work for [the] faction”.
Asked on Wednesday where he got that figure, he replied impatiently: “I probably concocted it out of thin air.” After being told it was Assaf’s exact salary, Jean-Claude told the inquiry he was probably frustrated when he sent the message because he felt he was being “used”.
Key Reformer Robert Assaf continued giving evidence before the ICAC on Monday. James Brickwood
But then Jean-Claude landed a job at Catholic Schools NSW. In May this year, he was given a promotion, but only a month later he was summoned to a meeting with McInerney and “Monica”, Catholic Schools NSW’s legal officer, to be given the bad news that he was being made redundant.
Although he was told the office was being restructured, he agreed with a suggestion on Wednesday that his days were numbered because of the imminent corruption inquiry, which was announced on July 1.
It turns out that “Monica” is Monica Assaf, who is also now on leave from her job.
Monica is the sister of Robert Assaf, who was also employed at Catholic Schools NSW and is another key person of interest to the inquiry. Robert Assaf told the inquiry earlier that before establishing the Reformers, he spent a year training to be a priest.
The Assaf family – from far left, Rob, Monica, Joe and Grace (now Sister Mariam).
On Wednesday, Jean-Claude was taken to a text exchange with Assaf about Hannah Dobson not renewing her party membership. Assaf informed him Hannah was a nun and the pair then joked about that being the “only problem Reformers sign-ups would ever have”.
Dobson and Robert Assaf’s sister Grace both took vows of “poverty, chastity and obedience” with the Dominican Sisters of St Cecilia in Nashville, in the US. Grace Assaf is now known as Sister Mariam.
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Under the headline “Our Own Aussie Bride of Christ”, in August 2021, The Catholic Weekly reported that Mariam first encountered the Nashville Dominicans when they visited her high school, the Opus Dei-aligned Tangara. She said when she later attended a “Nun Run” for young women considering religious life, “her vocation really started to stir”.
Tangara’s brother school, Redfield College, has four old boys among the targets in the ICAC inquiry: Assaf, Greenwood, and brothers Jean-Claude and Charles Perrottet. Former premier Dominic Perrottet was school captain in 2000. He is not accused of any wrongdoing.
Another former Redfield student is Damien Tudehope’s son, James, who also found employment at Catholic Schools, as did Christian Ellis’s wife, Cecile Piat, who was hired as a receptionist.
Damien Tudehope was described by Robert Assaf on Monday as having “more kids than days in the week”. He wasn’t exaggerating: Tudehope has nine children.
Meanwhile, to round out the ever-shrinking degrees of separation, Ellis was employed in Tudehope’s ministerial office until mid-2019, when he was fired because of “blowback” after Ellis featured in a 2019 report by the Herald about branch stacking in north-west Sydney.
Further reading
Here are some of the highlights from the first week of our coverage.
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