It is not often the Herald finds itself in agreement with 2GB broadcaster Ray Hadley, but the performance of Police Minister Yasmin Catley is so bad that it has united strange bedfellows around a clear conclusion: that the minister is not up to the job.

Hadley, who holds plenty of sway on Macquarie Street and within the NSW Police Force itself, summed up the situation well when he recently made the case for why the former librarian, councillor and political staffer should be axed from cabinet.

“Chris Minns has a number of problems, he’s got a number of ministers who should be moved on and Yasmin Catley heads that list,” Hadley said. “She is not up to the ministerial role she has been given.” He went further on Monday, saying Catley was well ahead in a race for the title of NSW’s worst police minister.

The Herald agrees it is time for the error-prone Catley to be shown the door. Having mishandled the fallout over the police Tasering of great-grandmother Clare Nowland and the nasty protest outside the Sydney Opera House following the October 7 massacre in Israel, Catley has now turned her trademark incompetence to the staffing arrangements inside the office of embattled NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb.

It was Catley’s chief-of-staff, Ross Neilson, who recommended veteran journalist Steve Jackson as a candidate to lead the influential police media unit – a controversial appointment that has gone down like a lead balloon within the force and most Sydney media outlets. Jackson was hired for a six-month contract and no other people were interviewed for the role. One of the many reasons the appointment has raised eyebrows is because Neilson is a personal acquaintance of Jackson. This is, at the very least, not a great look for a government that has spent much of its first year in office fending off claims of “jobs for the boys” appointments.

Following a series of scandals and self-inflicted damage, the commissioner needed a circuit breaker and sacked her media chief, Liz Deegan, earlier this month. For Webb, selecting a new senior executive to help restore her reputation and with it the public’s confidence in NSW Police top brass required an appointment that was nothing short of a masterstroke.

The decision to hire Jackson falls far short of that benchmark. He was a senior producer on one of Australian journalism’s grubbiest products, Seven’s Spotlight, and was intimately involved in the program’s interview with former political staffer Bruce Lehrmann. The program repeatedly claimed Lehrmann was not paid for the interview, but it later emerged in court that Seven was paying his rent for a year at a total value of more than $100,000. It also emerged last week that nearly $3000 was charged to a Seven corporate card for the services of two Thai masseuses as Spotlight attempted to secure the exclusive interview with Lehrmann. Lehrmann has denied using the services. Jackson, who was not present on the night, reportedly suggested the employee who incurred the charges, who has since left Seven, ask the masseuse to reverse the transactions and pay cash instead.

Jackson’s NSW Police appointment has also triggered the distribution of photographs of him with a naked woman he had just interviewed. The photographs were taken at the woman’s apartment on December 24, 2019.