By Stephen Brook and Kishor Napier-Raman
One of the most controversial properties in Melbourne is coming back on the market.
CBD hears that 16 St Georges Rd, Toorak, is back in play.
Regular real estate readers will remember the property was the location of Idylwilde, the landmark 1913 estate which was controversially torn down in 2015, prompting a Toorak outcry.
The property sold for $18.5 million in 2013.
The exterior of the block at 16 St Georges Rd, Toorak, taken in 2019.Credit: Simon Schluter
The word on the street, or should that be the word around Monkey Bean in Toorak Village, is that the asking price would be north of the $40 million asking price it was last on the market for. Land only. What a liberty!
Hungry for more details, we approached NextGen realtor Jack Edgar from RT Edgar. RT’s great-grandson told us that the property was being offered off-market ahead of a potential spring campaign.
We, as in the Melburnian property market, have been here before.
Back in 2019, owner Xiaoyan “Kylie” Bao put the property on the market with a $40 million plus price guide after icing her plans to build a grand $18 million home.
More recently, locals appear to have fought off a proposal to put five townhouses on the site. People power, Toorak style.
Some in the real estate market, given its history, are wondering if the property really will go all the way to a sale.
‘Nobody cares about the Liberals’
It’s a truth universally acknowledged in election post-mortems these days that the Liberal Party has a serious “woman problem”. It would be more accurate to suggest that the party has a man problem.
Step forward 80-year-old ex-party president Alan Stockdale, treasurer of Victoria under Jeff Kennett, now among a trio of administrators fighting to retain control of the party’s troubled NSW division.
Those were the days: then-premier Jeff Kennett and treasurer Alan Stockdale in 1998.Credit: Joe Castro
Stockdale put his foot very far back in his mouth during a four-hour Zoom call with the NSW Liberal Women’s Council, suggesting that the party didn’t need gender quotas because the women were “sufficiently assertive” and that it was the men who needed protecting.
But this was hardly the end of Stockdale’s humiliation session.
Under party rules, the women’s council president is given vice-president status and sits on the state executive. But the administrators refused to confirm whether they would retain this rule when pushed by the council’s current president, Berenice Walker.
When it was suggested that removing a key female powerbroker from the party would be a bad look in the newspapers, Stockdale told attendees they’d be hard-pressed attracting media interest because “no one cares about the Liberal Party”.
Well, we do. And given the number of headlines the opposition is generating, we’re not alone.
Stockdale didn’t return CBD’s calls, and we imagine his phone has been lighting up since the comments.
Discussion then turned to former NSW Upper House MP Lou Amato, who campaigned against the Liberals for expelled party powerbroker Matt Camenzuli in his failed run as an independent against Labor’s energy minister Chris Bowen in McMahon.
The trio said that Amato hadn’t been disciplined because at the time they thought Camenzuli, booted from the party after unsuccessfully trying to sue Scott Morrison over preselections in 2022, was a chance to win the seat (he got 9 per cent of the primary vote).
Matt Camenzuli pictured here in 2023.
The same generosity wasn’t extended to the 83-year-old mother of regional independent MP Andrew Gee, who was expelled from the Liberal Party on polling day for campaigning for her son.
The superannuated administrators did, however, agree with a comment from the virtual floor suggesting that ageism was the new sexism. That’s just what the Liberals need. Quotas for 80-year-olds.
Another social media snafu
Zoomers – great on social media, not so great on history. Even when they are in the employ of the Australian Labor Party.
How else to explain the embarrassing snafu by West Australian Labor Party this week when preening itself over the defection of headline generating Greens senator Dorinda Cox.
Regular readers will recall our item on Wednesday about Cox nuking her Instagram page after defecting from her somewhat troubled time with the Greens to the good ship, ALP.
A now deleted Facebook post from WA Labor welcoming Dorinda Cox to the party and mistakenly referring to her as the first indigenous WA Senator.
As we reported, Cox’s profile went dark on Monday, before defection hit the homepages, while her Twitter (sorry, X) account went private, no doubt to vanish all the times that the WA senator had attacked Labor policies (most recently the decision to green-light an extension of energy giant Woodside’s North West Shelf gas project until 2070, which Cox had described when she was a Greens senator – that is, last week – as “catastrophic for many reasons”).
You say tomato and I say tomato: Let’s call the whole thing off!
Now trouble with social media appears infectious. How else to explain WA Labor’s over-excited Facebook welcome to Cox?
“Making history as WA’s first Indigenous senator, Dorinda Cox is a proud Yamatji-Noongar woman, fierce advocate, and former police officer.”
Oops. In its rush to post, WA Labor had completely forgotten about Pat Dodson, who was appointed to fill a casual vacancy in Western Australia in 2016 and elected to the Senate later that year.
He’s only a Labor legend and was, among numerous other positions, special envoy for reconciliation and implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart before resigning due to ill health last year.
We asked Labor for a response. Given the younger generation’s consuming devotion to identity politics, we would have expected better.
Get Nuke
The Greatest Show On Earth arrived in Sydney with a bang.
We’re talking, of course, about the World Nuclear Fuel Market’s annual meeting and international conference held at the Shangri-La Hotel this week. Their description, not ours.
In fact, the organisers really leaned into the circus imagery in an official event brochure.
“With development not unlike the circus, commercial nuclear power has matured from its early days as a sideshow performance to a significant contributor in meeting the energy needs of the developing world,” it said.
Uranium producers were likened to “tightrope walkers”, other nuclear executives and lobbyists were likened to jugglers and acrobats, but nobody got to be the clown.
Perhaps the organisers thought the real clowns to be the Australian public, who overwhelmingly rejected Peter Dutton’s nuclear push at last month’s federal election.
That didn’t stop the Minerals Council chief executive Tania Constable from mounting a passionate defence of nuclear energy in her keynote address, arguing that it proved the path to net zero, voters be damned!
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