Ellis was the public servant in charge of the initial stage of negotiating the land swap between the ACT and Labor's union friends at the Tradies, a deal Auditor-General Maxine Cooper found ultimately was not transparent, not open and contestable, and likely to have cost the ACT as much as $2.65 million more than it should have.

First, Ellis's decision to come forward can be seen in the context of the ACT's integrity commission finally drawing near. With the likelihood that the government's land deals will be a target of the commission – Andrew Barr's attempts to give it only limited ability to focus on past events notwithstanding – there is likely to be anxiety among individuals to ensure the record reflects their view of history.

In short, Ellis doesn't like the Auditor-General's strong criticism of the negotiations for which he was initially responsible and wants to ensure the spotlight rests where it should: in his view, on whoever made big concessions to the Tradies club after he left, and on his political masters.

Perhaps we will see other bureaucrats emerging from the woodwork to defend their positions; they are almost certainly ensuring their stories are shipshape in the background.

Second, the political import of Ellis's story. Cooper has released three reports on land deals, all of them scathing, but none that specifically implicate Barr as Treasurer and Chief Minister or other politicians. The deficiencies she uncovered were in the public service: lack of process, lack of documents, lack of justification, lack of probity.

Ellis insists this is unfair in the case of the Tradies land swap – he says cabinet rushed the block to market in 2012, deliberately advertising it before the election to give the union its best shot at buying the land in the that the Liberals won government – and this was a key reason the best price wasn't achieved. Barr denies the rush, saying cabinet never raised a concern about time frames.

Ellis says he negotiated straight and without any favouritism to the Tradies. But he nevertheless had his superiors in the bureaucracy keeping a close eye on progress, and Barr's office calling him every week or two to ensure the block was advertised in time. And he knew – they all knew – that the Tradies is the government's friend. The CFMEU is a big donor, a big influencer in the party, commands a voting block and can sway preselections, as the effective dumping of deputy chief minister Simon Corbell in 2015 showed so dramatically.

Cooper found no evidence to support Ellis's claim that the government wanted the Tradies to win the tender and buy the block. Ellis says he was given no specific instruction to that effect but he says to imagine there would be an instruction is silly: everyone wants to operate within the law. And to Ellis, the government's preference is so blindingly obvious as to make the need for concrete "evidence" almost moot.

The public might find the implications of Ellis's statement that negotiators were well aware of the government's preference for the Tradies troubling, especially in light of the very good deal eventually achieved by the Tradies (in Cooper's estimation). But Ellis finds the statement unremarkable; it's just the way things are. He says a Woolworths win – Woolworths was the other bidder – was entirely possible if Woolworths had bid the higher price initially, although it would have been "awkward". Awkward because Woollies is no friend of a government that had been trying, under Jon Stanhope, to break its monopoly; awkward because Labor would have grievously angered its ally, donor and preselector; and awkward because whoever built on that car park would have been right next door to the Tradies club, affecting the club's amenity and so complicating any development there.

For Canberrans, it's much harder to accept as unremarkable the idea that the government has friends and enemies. Ellis says public servants do their job professionally within this context. But the public can be forgiven for looking at outcomes and saying that, when deals are done with friends, when friends broker deals, when connections and associates are involved in negotiating, and in the context of a small development community where connections are rife, that is all the more reason for stringent documentation and strict procedures – for the government not just to simply claim, but to demonstrate, that its deals are done with the strictest of probity, the most robust guards on conflict of interest, as much public scrutiny as possible, and with the taxpayer front and centre.

The Tradies got the good deal. In other deals, the Glebe Park businessmen got their price. Pat Seears got his $1 million for a lease judged worth significantly less. The farmers got millions of dollars for land of which they were supposed to be custodians until it was needed. Each of these deals might or might not have been the right outcome for the taxpayer, but given the web of connections in some cases, the lack of justification in others, and the lack of documentation and transparency in all of them, there really is no telling.

Ellis has produced screeds of information to back his contention that the deal he hammered out with the CFMEU in 2013 was good for the taxpayer – it was much better than the club had bid in the 2012 tender, and it got the price the government wanted, albeit with the quid pro quo that the government would buy the Tradies land up the road for more than the Tradies paid for the Dickson block, and at the expense of giving the union more than three years of rent-free tenancy. The upshot of the deal, according to the auditor, is that the government pays the Tradies about $414,000. The Tradies get a Dickson car park to develop for apartments, accommodation, retail and the like, the union saves a motza in rent, and the government gets land near the Dickson playing fields to develop, including for affordable housing.

Ellis concedes he mistakenly overstated the value of the deal when he set it out in a minute to then Land Development Agency head David Dawes in December 2013 before he left the job, but he maintains the real damage was done by others: by the politicians, when they insisted the land was sold at the wrong time for the market and in too much of a rush, severely limiting the amount that could be made from it; and by whoever made further concessions to the Tradies once he was gone in 2014, changes which limit the ability of the government to hold the club to account for what's built on the site and when. More of that later.

Ellis is more than a public servant aware of Labor's internal structure. He is a former Labor man. He was active in the NSW party in his early years and became chief of staff to Labor deputy chief minister David Lamont in the early 1990s.

In crossing from Labor staffer to bureaucrat, Ellis is not unusual. The public service – and especially, perhaps, the economic development, chief minister's and land agencies – has been full of people who have worked for Labor ministers in government. Given Labor has been in charge for 17 years, this is perhaps an occupational hazard, albeit an unhealthy one.

Ellis says he hasn't been a member of the party for many years and is not the Labor man people might imagine. He says he is a career public servant and part of a public service that was well aware of the rules and worked to apply them properly. The government might have wanted the Tradies to win, but what he wanted was to get the Tradies to pay the top price; if they refused, the deal would fall. And that would be awkward but entirely possible.

When asked in 2016 about a separate issue – his involvement in negotiating the ANU Exchange land agreement, where Ellis was in the public service and Lamont negotiating on the other side of the deal for the university – Ellis said: "I knew how to conduct myself professionally and with probity. I know The Canberra Times doesn't like the 'Canberra is a small pool' argument, but really? I can't do my job because someone employed by the other side of a deal was someone I worked for nearly a decade earlier? That kind of stricture could stifle a lot of activity."

This is the small-city argument in a nutshell. For Ellis, and no doubt many others, there is no issue.

The man at the vortex, Dawes, does not have party connections. He was appointed by Jon Stanhope for his real-world savvy. He was not a political insider but an industry insider, from the world of real estate and business. He had contacts and knew how to get deals done – and that is the job he did for his political masters. He sold land and did hard-nose deals, carrying out the government's wishes, and he would no doubt say he tried to get the best he could for the taxpayer within the constraints of his political masters.

Ellis says he had no explicit instruction to do a deal with the Tradies. Barr says he gave no such instruction, formal or informal. The auditor says she found no evidence of Ellis's assertion that the government wanted the Tradies to win, and Barr denied it when she asked.

But Ellis says it is ridiculous to imagine that Barr wasn't kept well informed of progress in all the land deals – Dawes's job was to ensure Barr was briefed, and the pair met weekly or more. This, of course, is normal government, but it is also where the grey area lies.

As for Dawes, the auditor lists concessions to which Dawes agreed after Ellis thought he already had a deal agreed in 2013. Dawes agreed in May 2014 that the Tradies would no longer have to enter a project delivery agreement and provide a $1 million security bond. In September, the Tradies asked for more freedom over what they built on the land. Dawes rejected the request. The Tradies argued the point and, in November 2014, Dawes agreed to "almost all" of the requests. In December, the Tradies wanted more concessions still, including removing a restriction on shop uses and a pedestrian easement. Dawes agreed on the easement. And on December 15, 2014, contracts were exchanged.

The auditor found that while cabinet and the minister "reacted to early agency briefs", there was "no evidence that they were advised by executive management of the departures from the process cabinet approved, or asked to review and approve the final outcome".

When asked whether he had ever sought or received permission from cabinet or the minister for the concessions, Dawes told the auditor under oath that "I would never have, in those cases, gone to cabinet. They wouldn't have made any commentary on that. They would have let the process go through."

So it appears Dawes has taken responsibility. While Ellis wants the question of political pressure explored further, he has no specific evidence and the auditor has had no reason to look further given Dawes's evidence and separate denials from Barr. Ellis's decision to go public begins to unravel the silence from the public service. But Dawes so far maintains his silence publicly. Barr answers this newspaper's questions only in writing. The story, meanwhile, only gets messier.