By Noel Towell and Kishor Napier-Raman
The surprising fuss a few years ago over the sighting of Australian men’s cricket captain Pat Cummins swigging from a bottle of hipster elixir kombucha had two vaguely rational explanations.
First, Australian cricket lovers were more used to seeing their national team idols chugging harder stuff – beer mostly – over the decades than the fermented, lightly effervescent drink that Millennials have made their own.
Pat Cummins has teamed up with kombucha manufacturer Nexba.Credit: PA
Then there was Cummins’ status – if that’s the right word – as a “family member” of the PepsiCo-owned sports fuel Gatorade as part of the brand’s partnership with Cricket Australia.
But now, the skipper has made his partiality for the fermented stuff not only official but lucrative, with the announcement on Tuesday of a deal to make Cummins the face of home-grown operation Nexba’s sugar-reduced kombuchas.
Cummins will take a stake in Nexba’s parent Goodness Group Global, and you can too – we weren’t a bit surprised to learn – with the company bang in the middle of a capital-raising effort ($1.28 an ordinary share and they reckon they’ll be profitable next year, if anyone’s interested).
We have to concede it’s a deft piece of PR timing, using Cummins’ high profile on the back of the thrilling Ashes series in England to not only shift a few bottles of fizzy, but to help with a capital injection, too. Very cute.
But we reckon that Pat’s professed reason for teaming up with Nexba – that the deal would help him “make a real impact in the lives of people by promoting healthier alternatives to sugary and artificially sweetened drinks” – will be triggering to his curmudgeonly culture-war critics.
Berlin’s heartbreak hotel
CBD was delighted to learn that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is resting his weary head at Berlin’s grand old Hotel Adlon while in the German capital to develop military ties with NATO and further send Paul Keating over the edge.
The joint has history. It became a popular spot among Adolf Hitler’s SS during World War II, after their first-choice hangout around the corner was destroyed by Allied bombing, and was later taken over by Soviet troops after the Red Army captured the city in 1945.
Credit: John Shakespeare
But the Adlon’s more recent history might also ring a bell. It was the scene of the late US pop star Michael Jackson’s notorious baby-dangling incident in 2002, when Jackson held his nine-month-old son Prince Michael II over the balcony of the hotel’s presidential suite, as fans who had gathered at ground level outside gasped in horror.
It was a moment that, for many, removed all doubt that there was something seriously NQR about Jackson, who was later accused by several young men of sexually abusing them. He was in Berlin at the time to accept an award for charity work for children. True.
Not that any of this has anything to do with Albo, but in the unlikely event that a group of adoring fans gathers below the PM’s window at the Adlon, our advice – just for appearances’ sake – is to stay inside.
LONGO’S RUN
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission was dragged in October into a two-year Senate inquiry that the Albanese government could do nothing to prevent.
And it turns out the corporate regulator’s chairman, Joe Longo, wasn’t thrilled with the proposed inquiry either by the look of internal ASIC emails obtained through freedom of information.
“This is extraordinary. What can be done to narrow the breadth of the terms? Can PJC [the parliamentary joint committee on corporations and financial services] do this??” Longo wrote in an email to his deputy chair Sarah Court and chief of staff Louise Macaulay.
The “terms” were those introduced by committee member and Liberal senator Andrew Bragg, and they passed the Senate last year, triggering an inquiry by the upper house’s economics reference committee into ASIC’s handling of complaints.
The regulator still doesn’t seem entirely happy with the process, with all parties recently accusing ASIC of obfuscating ahead of the inquiry – claims Longo forcefully denied in his opening statement before the committee last month.
CHARLIE’S BUCKET
Embattled celebrity neurosurgeon Charlie Teo has a bit to get off his chest.
Restricted from performing surgeries in Australia while awaiting the outcome of a disciplinary hearing, Teo has resorted to going on podcasts to mouth off about his enemies in the medical community, cancel culture and pesky journalists.
But it was a claim made during an online discussion with “storyteller and keynote speaker” Bradley Dryburgh that caught CBD’s eye, with Teo appearing to claim the support of a prime minister, no less.
“I’ve had the most powerful politicians, right up to the number one politician in Australia, call me up and say, ‘Charlie, we feel for you, is there anything we can do to help?’ And I say, ‘Yes, stop them from bullying me’, ” Teo told Dryburgh.
Did Albanese or (more likely) his predecessor Scott Morrison ring up Teo to offer support? If they did, neither man’s office was prepared to tell us on Tuesday.
Charlie Teo blasted his enemies in the medical community, cancel culture and the media.Credit: Kate Geraghty
The rest of the interview featured the surgeon lashing out at his perceived enemies in the medical community and the media, whose treatment of Teo was likened by both the host and guest to cancel culture.
Teo labelled reports in this masthead about him operating on the wrong side of the brain “slanderous and defamatory”, accusing media companies of being “all about clicks”.
Given it was years of fawning journalism that helped build Teo’s cult of personality, well, talk about biting the hand that feeds! Conceding that the prospect of operating in Australia again was “unrealistic”, Teo claimed his current predicament is the end point of a 20-plus-year campaign to “get” him by jealous fellow doctors.
“From the minute I came back to Australia from America in 1999, they have been trying to persecute me and malign me, right from the first few weeks after I came back. I knew that one day they’d strategise well enough to bring me down.”
He didn’t disclose who “they” were.
The recent inquiry heard Teo slapped an unconscious patient across the face in front of her family, and failed to get a single supporting reference from an Australian neurosurgeon.
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