Peter Allen sounds surprisingly positive for a chief executive who’s just announced his Westfield shopping centres recorded a statutory loss of $3.7 billion last year.

That was largely due to the massive $4.2 billion write-down in the estimated worth of the assets as assessed by external valuers. But even Scentre Group’s operating profit nearly halved to $766 million in 2020 thanks to the immediate impact of COVID-19 reducing the level of rent collected and the number of customers out and about.