By Kishor Napier-Raman and Noel Towell
When right wing has-beens dwindle from relevance in their home countries, they can always rely on the red carpet to be rolled out for them in Australia. And more often than not, they can rely on once-bankrupt porn king Damien Costas to roll out the welcome mat.
Costas, erstwhile publisher of Penthouse Australia, is reportedly promoting Nigel “Mr Brexit” Farage’s trip down under this week, along with the conservative trolls at Turning Point Australia.
One-time Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage.Credit: Steven Siewert
And he’s exactly the kind of colourful character you’d expect to be in the orbit of Farage. Last year, he convinced a majority of his creditors to vote to annul a bankruptcy order made against him.
Not everyone was satisfied – publicist Max Markson (father of News Corp scribbler Sharri), is still chasing the $60,000 he says he’s owed by Costas over the trip of another deplorable, Milo Yiannopoulos, to Australia.
Meanwhile, another of Costas’ former business partners Sean Dolman is in jail after pleading guilty to drug charges stemming from Australia’s biggest meth bust. (Costas was “shocked”).
Farage is the missing link between that murky world and Parliament House.
He’s headed there on Wednesday, where at the invite of conservative Liberal Senator Alex Antic, he’ll address any interested fellow travellers. That’s in between speaking gigs in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane this week, the last of which One Nation Senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts are planning to attend.
Hopefully Parliament doesn’t run too late on Thursday.
Chief Missing Officer
There was a time, in the depths of the pandemic, when the nation’s Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly was a hard man to avoid, regularly helping front the many, many press conferences held by former PM Scott Morrison and his Health Minister Greg Hunt.
But that was then. These days, Kelly seems decidedly out of fashion with Anthony Albanese’s government and Health Minister Mark Butler.
Kelly hasn’t held a press conference or done any media since July. Could it be because Kelly – and some of the states’ health supremos – were less than fulsome in their support of some recent political decisions on pandemic management, particularly the national cabinet shortening the mandatory isolation period from seven days to five?
Albanese has refused to make public any health advice underpinning that move and eight days later, the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC) chaired by Kelly quietly published a statement on the Health Department website, urging people to keep isolating as long as they had symptoms. Hmmmmm.
We asked Butler if the nation was going to see its Chief Health Officer in the press conference after national cabinet meets again on Friday, and he told us to ask the Prime Minister.
We asked Albanese’s people as well as putting a request into the health department for an interview with Kelly. When we hear from anybody, or if there is a sighting of Kelly, we’ll let you know.
Underworld to ASIC
It’s the job of corporate watchdog ASIC to crack down on white-collar criminals. And that’s a world the regulator’s new chief communications officer Zoe Viellaris has a bit of experience with.
In the 2000s, Viellaris was head of brands and communication at Astarra Funds Management, a holding company for Trio Capital, the Albury-based fund manager which collapsed spectacularly in 2009 in Australia’s largest superannuation fraud, which led to 11 people being either jailed or banned from providing financial services.
Viellaris was never a director and there’s no suggestion she was involved in the collapse of Trio. Meanwhile, her twice-bankrupted late husband Maurice Terreiro had arguably closer links to Trio, as he was once in business relationship with Shawn Richard, the only person to be jailed over the fund manager’s collapse.
It was hardly the shadiest connection of Terreiro’s. When notorious Sydney loan shark, standover man and pimp Michael McGurk was murdered outside his Cremorne home in 2009, Terreiro allegedly owed him $500,000 in debt.
That was enough for sledgehammer-wielding goons to chase Terreiro, who drove Viellaris’ yellow Mazda 626, across a Redfern car park.
All that excitement is in the past. Viellaris comes to the regulator after a more recent stock-standard career in corporate communications, with managerial roles at Commonwealth Bank and Westpac.
Teach for the stars
Teach for Australia, the NGO which takes bright young things destined for a glittering career in management consulting and convinces them to work in disadvantaged schools until the youthful idealism burns out, made a big breakthrough this week.
Its program, which fast-tracks talented university graduates into disadvantaged government schools, will now be piloted in NSW, to the likely annoyance of education unions who have criticised its high cost and attrition rate.
CBD was curious to note then that TFA donated $3000 to the National Party, hoping to buy a seat at a fundraising dinner marking Education Minister Sarah Mitchell’s decade in Parliament last year.
That money was probably a waste. Any face-time with the minister was ruined as COVID-19 restrictions led to the cancellation of the dinner. And NSW had already promised to back the program in its 2020 budget, well before the donation was dropped, despite earlier opposition from the Education Department.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.