As the votes started trickling in on Friday evening for the NSW Liberal Party’s new state president, the moderates were getting antsy. The faction’s candidate, former arts minister Don Harwin, was meant to cruise home. Instead, he was trailing the right’s pick, party treasurer Mark Bailie, throughout the afternoon.
Harwin managed to claw things back, and when state director Richard Shields signed off on the results on Saturday, he had 369 votes to Bailie’s 368. But with three or four votes in dispute because delegates used ticks and crosses instead of numbers, there’s already chatter about appealing, although at the time of writing it was just that.
While all eyes were on the big vote, Harwin’s factional comrades struggled further in the race for the two vice-presidential spots. Corrs Chambers Westgarth lawyer James Wallace, who does numbers for former NSW treasurer Matt Kean, finished behind the right’s candidate Peter O’Hanlon, a relative nobody involved in anti-trans keyboard warrior Katherine Deves’ failed 2022 campaign for Warringah. It’s the first time since 2011 that a moderate hasn’t come first in the veep vote. It also meant the only female candidate, Hawkesbury mayor Sarah McMahon, lost out. Make of that what you will.
There’s little chance anyone will stop Harwin taking the presidency, but his wafer-thin win makes the weekend’s victory a pyrrhic one. It’s a sign that, after a decade or so of being the dominant faction within the NSW Liberal Party, the moderates’ power is starting to wane, thanks in part to a more conservative base that has warmed to Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s leadership style.
It’s certainly put senior factional figures such as Kean and lobbying supremo Michael Photios on notice, and got any moderates up for preselection ahead of next year’s election feeling a little antsy.
MONTAGUES AND CAPULETS
West End hit & Juliet scored a tepid review in The Herald, but the all-star crowd that packed out Sydney’s Lyric Theatre for opening night last Thursday seemed swept off their feet.
The musical reimagines Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet if the female protagonist lived, with a soundtrack of cookie-cutter pop by that master of the genre Max Martin, also known as Taylor Swift and Katy Perry’s ghostwriter.
On Thursday night, CBD spotted more warring clans alike in dignity than the Bard’s Verona. Top defamation silk Sue Chrysanthou and her frequent collaborator Rebekah Giles took a break from attacking this masthead’s journalism to spend a night out with two favourite clients – Olympic boxer Harry Garside and former commando turned one-time OnlyFans model-cum-motivational speaker Heston Russell.
Last year, Russell won over $400,000 in damages from the ABC over defamatory reports suggesting he was involved in killing an Afghan prisoner. If that caused any awkwardness from the ABC’s managing director David Anderson, and stars including Leigh Sales and Hamish McDonald, they were all smart enough not to show it.
Nine CEO Mike Sneesby.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Other media types included News Corp Australia boss Michael Miller, Daily Telegraph editor Ben English and from Nine (owner of this masthead), chief executive Mike Sneesby.
Among the political set, we spotted former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and his wife Lucy Turnbull, federal Arts Minister Tony Burke and his state counterpart John Graham, plus shadow health minister and former treasurer Matt Kean.
No sign of John Barilaro, who therefore couldn’t tend the Bara Bar, which the Lyric Theatre impresario Stephen Found named in the ex-deputy premier’s honour.
From the music world, Guy Sebastian and Amy Shark were spotted at the Star Casino venue. But the biggest sighting of the night was former Qantas boss Alan Joyce, who’s kept an awfully low profile since his uncharacteristically early departure from the airline last year.
TOWER OF POWER
This masthead reported on Sunday that despite simmering factional schisms, Victoria’s freemasons had amassed quite the property development portfolio, including cutting a deal with Mirvac to develop a luxury apartment complex in East Melbourne.
While Freemasons were given first dibs at buying apartments in the salubrious address, known in their ranks as Melbourne’s “Tower of Power”, CBD’s curious eye was drawn to some of the complex’s other tenants.
Former prime minister Paul Keating bought an apartment in the complex for a little over $1 million in May 2016. That same month, Tony Abbott’s ex-chief of staff turned Sky News firebreather Peta Credlin and her husband Brian Loughnane (a former Liberal Party federal director) also picked up a $5 million pad in the building.
Former Victorian Court of Appeal judge Joseph Santamaria, son of infamous Labor Party splitter BA Santamaria, bought a $4.5 million apartment in 2016. Past owners in the building have also included Liberty Sanger, the Victorian County Court judge married to former Labor MP David Feeney.
With all that political diversity among the building’s well-heeled inhabitants, CBD was desperate to get word of any interesting corridor interactions. Unfortunately, Keating, the Bankstown boy now well ensconced in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, appears to be using the Melbourne residence as an investment property. We’d expect no less from the man who once described anyone living outside Sydney as “just camping out”.
Neither he nor Credlin wanted to discuss things further.
Credlin, meanwhile, chairs the building’s body corporate, and apparently brings her trademark pugilistic style, honed from years of putting Abbott’s frontbench in their place, to negotiations with Mirvac over building defects. Or perhaps when a former PM doesn’t like the upkeep in the lift wells.
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