By Stephen Brook and Kishor Napier-Raman
The three-bedroom brick house at 74 National Circuit, Deakin, in Canberra is not one of Australia’s most famous addresses.
But it is right opposite one. The house is the closest residential home to the prime minister’s official residence of The Lodge in Canberra, and it’s now up for auction. Yes readers, you can become neighbour to Albo and Jodie.
The closest house to The Lodge is for sale.
“You can’t get any closer. The corner of the block is directly opposite the rear gate,” says retired anaesthetist Arne Schimmelfeder, who has owned the home since 2011 but has lived in the neighbourhood since 1999.
He has occasionally encountered our elected leaders coming and going from The Lodge, which is across the road from his front garden and now inhabited by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
“John Howard used to get up very early to do his little walk … before 6am,” Schimmelfeder told CBD. “I didn’t see a lot of him.”
In 2011, then-president Barack Obama visited Australia and then-PM Julia Gillard.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Then-US president George W. Bush’s visit in 2003 and then-president Barack Obama’s visit in 2011 had the biggest impact in the neighbourhood.
“They blocked off the whole area. When Obama came, there was even more security. They airfreight the security cars in. For Bush, there was about six or eight; for Obama, about a dozen.”
Agent Peter Walker, of Ray White, said the guide price for the 1948 house was above $3.5 million.
Lodge neighbour Arne Schimmelfeder
“I think it is important to point out that it’s not heritage-listed so it’s a blank canvas for people if they want to build their own home,” Walker said.
Never one to miss a trick, the real estate agent has stuck a slogan on his sign: “If you buy this home, you can’t get voted out of the neighbourhood!” The auction is scheduled for November 16.
Schimmelfeder said The Lodge’s rear entrance opposite his home, rather than the more famous entrance on Adelaide Avenue, was always busier.
“When Kevin Rudd was prime minister, the Commonwealth car basically roared down the street at a great rate of knots because he was always in a hurry. When Julia [Gillard] took over, the Commonwealth cars were considerably slower.”
Return lap
“It is a great time to get involved in sport,” Olympian Nicole Livingstone told this masthead back in October last year as part of a careers feature.
Nicole Livingstone at the AFLW awards night in 2023.Credit: AFL Photos via Getty Images
“There are more opportunities on offer for women to have a career in footy, which is exciting,” Livingstone said. But not, as it turned out, for her.
Just the following month, Livingstone, a three-time Olympic medallist in backstroke, announced she was leaving her role as the AFL’s general manager of women’s sport after seven seasons in the role.
Now Livingstone is the new chief executive at the Victorian Institute of Sport, replacing Anne Marie Harrison who has left after 18 years.
The VIS sent 122 Victorian athletes to the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris, bringing home 23 medals; five gold, four silver and 14 bronze.
The VIS gig is a back-to-the-future move for Livingstone. When the institute was established in 1990, one of the first recipients granted a scholarship for swimming was ... Nicole Livingstone.
But she still hasn’t achieved her childhood career ambition, which was to become a mounted officer in the Victoria Police.
Renovation rescue
Women’s media mogul Mia Freedman is quite the striver. Last year, she was played by Asher Keddie in Strife, a small-screen adaptation of her memoir, Work, Strife, Balance, that aired on Foxtel-owned streamer Binge.
To a couple of cynics like us, nothing screams “strife” quite like a $12.75 million mansion in Sydney’s Point Piper, where Freedman happens to live with her husband, Jason Lavigne.
Bellevue Hill’s Fintry was previously home to online publisher Mia Freedman and husband Jason Lavigne before it sold for $16.1 million to Andrew Charlton.Credit:
But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for the Mamamia founder. Freedman and Lavigne bought the Point Piper abode after getting evicted from their $12 million Bellevue Hill trophy home, Fintry.
The couple had moved into the home five years earlier, with an option to buy the property, but settlement negotiations fell apart, leading to a dispute before the NSW Supreme Court, which ruled against the Lavigne-Friedmans.
Fintry was subsequently bought for $16 million by management consultant Andrew Charlton, who soon decided he was actually a westie, and traded the sweeping harbour views for Parramatta, where Labor parachuted him in as the party’s new MP for the seat.
Friedman and Lavigne’s plans for a $3.9 million renovation of the Point Piper home were rejected by Woollahra Council.
But strivers never quit, and last week, the pair lodged another $3.9 million development application to demolish and rebuild the property.
If at first you don’t succeed, strive, strive again.
Qantas delay on lounge delivery for senator
As more politicians performatively tear up their Qantas Chairman’s Lounge memberships to protest against the sickening culture of corporate largesse, some of their colleagues have only just gotten a foot in the door.
Spare a thought for Malcolm Roberts, the One Nation senator from Queensland with a soft spot for just about conspiracy theory under the sun. Just this month, Roberts declared receiving access to the Chairman’s Lounge.
When Roberts was first elected to the Senate in 2016, he was a member. But then, a year later, the High Court ruled Roberts hadn’t effectively renounced his British citizenship, and disqualified him.
But while Roberts was returned to the upper house after the 2019 election, his golden lounge ticket only mysteriously arrived recently.
Nobody can figure out why he was made to wait, although sources close to Roberts speculated on whether his forceful criticism of former Qantas boss Alan Joyce led to the senator being frozen out, before a new management regime extended an olive branch. This, of course, sounds nothing like the Joyce we know and love.
Qantas declined to comment on this theory – the airline’s first rule of the Chairman’s Lounge is it does not talk about the Chairman’s Lounge. But according to a Qantas source, Roberts’ snub was an administrative oversight, which was rectified once the airline realised, and it re-invited him.
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