Canberra’s chi-chi Paperchain bookstore in Manuka was bursting at its elegant seams on Tuesday night for the very Canberra launch of Niki Savva’s book Earthquake. Political living legend and long-time friend Laurie Oakes did the honours, lauding Savva’s importance to political discourse.

Attendees included ex-Insiders host Barrie Cassidy, his ABC presenter wife Heather Ewart, savvy pollsters Kos Samaras and Tony Barry, ex-speaker Tony Smith (who, along with Savva, was a former staffer for Peter Costello), CBD favourite author Lech Blaine, and ALP national secretary and two-time election winner Paul Erickson.

Not present: Sean Kelly – like Savva, a columnist for this masthead, who was off holding his own launch at the ANU for his Quarterly Essay, which presented a diabolical social conundrum for Canberra’s political glitterati.

Savva had long sworn there would be no fourth book in her unofficial political leadership series, but the 2025 election made a return irresistible. So, what about a fifth? Savva riffed off Mick Jagger: “This could be the last time. Maybe the last time. I don’t know.”

Sitting pollies were absent from the launch due to it being a sitting week, but plenty fronted a private reception later at the Commonwealth Club, where Treasurer Jim Chalmers, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and teal independent Allegra Spender joined plenty of other FedPol groupies.

The bookshop staff are not without a sense of humour. Next to Savva’s book in the front window display was Tony Abbott’s Australia: A History.

Launching pad

When Alan Joyce abruptly departed Qantas in 2023, he kept a low profile, seeking shelter from the storm of public opprobrium that had battered his final years as the airline’s chief executive.

In fact, Joyce was a hard man to find for many months, quietly stepping down as chair of the Sydney Theatre Company as it was engulfed by debate over the war in Gaza.

Now, Joyce is slowly inching back into the public glare. On Wednesday morning, he spoke at the launch of Sydney Seaplanes: Honouring Heritage, Embracing the Future written by Carolen Barripp, on the Rose Bay foreshore.

The wealthy harbourside enclave hosted Australia’s first international airport in the 1930s, a fact that clearly thrilled Joyce, a keen student of aviation history, who wrote the foreword to the book, and who addressed the small crowd gathered at the Sydney Seaplanes lounge.

That included folksy entrepreneur Dick Smith, who chewed Joyce’s ear off after the formalities, and multimillionaire hotelier-cum-suspended cosmetic surgeon Jerry Schwartz, who took over Sydney Seaplanes this year. He’s promising to turn the club into a long-lunch hotspot to rival neighbouring Catalina. Justin Hemmes is giving the nearby RSL the Merivale facelift, so it’ll be a competitive strip.

Despite learning plenty of delightful facts about the history of seaplanes, CBD was more interested in another upcoming tome – Joyce’s own tell-all memoir, to be published by Hardie Grant next year, in which the former high-flying CEO promises to set the record straight.

Details are still scant, although Schwartz let slip that Joyce’s book – title TBD – is set for a September 2026 release.

And while CBD has been getting enthused by the prospect of former Australian Financial Review scribe Joe Aston burying the hatchet and helping out as ghostwriter after haranguing Joyce into an early retirement, we hear Alan is writing the whole thing himself.

Penny for her thoughts

Spotted: News Corp’s Penny Fowler on Tuesday at Parliament House, Canberra. Why? Well, the vastly connected chair of The Herald and Weekly Times wears many hats. Apart from the HWT gig, Fowler is also chair of Tourism Australia, the Royal Children’s Hospital Good Friday Appeal, and the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria.

Plus, she is a board member of the National Gallery of Australia and of digital firm Tech Mahindra, and is on the advisory board of Visy/Pratt USA. Not to mention, Rupert Murdoch’s niece.

As one comms exec told us: “There is no room that Penny walks into in Melbourne that people don’t know her.”

Now she has an extra gig: Fowler, who was appointed an AM last year for her work with artistic and charitable organisations, has signed to be a director on the advisory board of marketing and communications agency Bastion. But did this mean Bastion, founded by ex-AFL Watts brothers more than 15 years ago, has gone all in on News Corp? A clear conflict of interest, we hear you cry.

“It couldn’t be further from the truth,” explains Bastion co-founder Fergus Watts. “It is not even close to the point of working with Penny. Penny has been very clear … she does a lot of things. It is not in our thought process.”

And the Parliament House caper? Fowler, as News Corp Australia community ambassador, was accompanying the winners of the fifth Prime Minister’s Spelling Bee to meet Anthony Albanese. Which we found out about by reading page 11 of The Daily Telegraph.

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