By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
Even while he was treasurer of NSW in Dom Perrottet’s Liberal government, Matt Kean faced accusations of disloyalty from the rightward fringes of the party over his outspoken belief that climate change is real.
The suspicion that green Kean was always some kind of tree-hugger turncoat grew even more feverish when last year he took a job as the Albanese government’s hand-picked chair of the Climate Change Authority, just days after quitting state politics.
Making his blue-tinged former colleagues see red: Matt Kean.Credit: Renee Nowytarger
No doubt those Liberals will be even more furious to hear Kean is set to speak at Electrify Bennelong at Macquarie Park this weekend, a community sustainability expo being promoted by that electorate’s Labor MP, Jerome Laxale.
Kean appearing in Laxale’s social media posts, under the Labor-red letterhead, for an event in the now-safe Labor seat once held by John Howard will no doubt send plenty of Liberals insane.
Not that they don’t have much to occupy their thoughts. Last week, while Kean was off in Belem, Brazil for the COP30 United Nations Climate Change Conference, his old party comrades were voting to win back urban seats by dumping net zero and adopt the Nationals’ climate policy.
We’re sure that will do wonders in Bennelong.
In other Liberal moderate faction news, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull is heading south to the Hawthorn Arts Centre in Melbourne this month for a special event – not with his former treasurer Josh Frydenberg but Frydenberg’s teal deposer, Kooyong MP Monique Ryan. The night is billed as “a special evening of conversation” about national security. Well, if a 90/10 verbal split (in Malcolm’s favour, we predict) could be classified as a conversation.
Shore thing
The chat groups of the Shore Old Boys have been running hot, hot, hot after our recent item recounting an intervention by the late but frequently compromised ALP politician Graham Richardson into his son’s high school debating contest.
Regular readers will recall we brought you an item last week about a fresh-faced Liberal MP in 2007 who began his maiden speech to the NSW parliament by recalling a high school debate between his North Sydney private school Shore teammates and some lads from rival St Aloysius down the road.
“It [my election] is the culmination of a political journey that had a somewhat inauspicious start when, as a 15-year-old student, my entire debating team was banned from debates,” said Pittwater MP Rob Stokes, who would go on to become a prominent state government minister.
“It seems the father of a boy on the opposing team had taken strong exception to a particular argument, and called our principal demanding that we all be removed. The principal felt obliged to comply – that father was, after all, Senator Graham Richardson.”
Richo complaining about improper conduct. How ironic.
What we failed to realise was that Stokes was merely the timekeeper on the team, and not one of the debaters.
The Shore team included Chris Taylor, later one of the ABC’s Chaser team, Richard Scruby, now a leading barrister, and Matt Warburton, now a partner at Mills Oakley.
Taylor used the word “bastard” in the debate – and Stokes clowned around with the stopwatch, raising the ire of Richo, whose son Matthew Richardson, SC, is now a top barrister.
When we confronted him, Stokes told us: “Yes – I was the chair.”
Which, as our Old Boy source noted, is “the fancy name we gave to the timekeeper”.
No one called Jones
On the weekend, Ann Peacock threw a party. Not the sort of thing that CBD would normally concern itself with; Ann Peacock not throwing a party would be more of an item for us.
Most recently, Peacock has been dividing her time between Sanctum, the new-ish, sport-themed private members club founded by ex-AFL bossman Andrew Demetriou, and her duties as a director on the board of the Victoria Racing Club, which just staged a very successful Melbourne Cup carnival.
On Sunday, the Liberal Party royal (she was previously married to Victorian powerbroker Michael Kroger and her dad is former leader Andrew Peacock) posted a photo on the socials featuring some cakes she credited to Sky News talking head Peta Credlin.
Ann Peacock at a recent party, but who is the man in the corner who looks an awful lot like Alan Jones.Credit: Instagram
But the corner of the frame was of more interest to us.
A bald-headed elderly gentleman in a powder-blue suit, whose face is just out of frame, looked an awful lot like disgraced broadcaster Alan Jones, who is facing trial next year over 27 indecent assault and sexual touching offences.
When CBD came calling, Peacock denied the man was Jones. A doppelganger, perhaps, we suggested? We’ve not seen anyone else wear that shade of blue, after all.
Peacock politely told us she had nothing to say. So we will be left wondering.
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