By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
The cost-of-living crisis is even hitting the nation’s deep-pocketed billionaires. On Monday, CBD’s spies spotted mining magnate and litigation enthusiast Clive Palmer at Tullamarine Airport terminal three, boarding a – gasp! – Virgin domestic flight.
The indignity of it all! After all, Palmer owns a private jet or two. We pondered if the legal bills from his mania for litigation, or the media bills for his mania for political advertising, had all become too much.
Wings clipped: Billionaire Clive Palmer.Credit: AAP
Or is the one-percenter playing man of the people and learning how to fly coach in time for another election, where his United Australia Party won’t even be on the ballot?
Rest assured, readers – Palmer will be back flying billionaire class tout de suite.
“His plane is getting serviced,” a spokesman for Palmerworld told us.
Bowled out
The fate of what might be the last piece of vacant land in Paddington is set to be decided by the High Court imminently.
The old site of the Paddington Bowling Club was handed back to Indigenous owners in 2021, but a legal challenge by the leaseholders, Quarry Street Pty Ltd, ultimately succeeded in the NSW Court of Appeal. As CBD reported last year, the La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council was granted special leave to appeal to the High Court, with a hearing set for March 4.
Quarry Street has an intriguing history of its own. The Paddington bowlo lease was originally controlled by developer turned now-embattled pub baron Jon Adgemis, who transferred it to a former friend, Kathmandu founder Jan Cameron.
The Tasmanian businesswoman and philanthropist is now out of the picture at Quarry Street after she was found guilty of using a Caribbean tax haven to conceal her ownership of 14 million shares in a baby formula company, and subsequently fined $8000 and disqualified from running a company for five years.
Albo v AFL
Where would political journalists be without election date speculation? Probably in the same place showbusiness journalists would be without Melbourne architecture grad turned Kanye West-adjacent global celebrity Bianca Censori, or business writers without the Murdochs: with nothing much to write about.
Gather Round… for a federal election.Credit: Photo by Michael Willson/AFL Photos via Getty Images
So it is with this in mind that we open up a hitherto unexplored can of worms about the forthcoming federal election date speculation that could put the Albanese government on a collision course with the most powerful economic/sporting/sponsoring/cultural/tribal vampire squid in at least half the country: the Australian Football League.
Journalists with far more political acumen than us have long touted the favourability of April 12 as the day we will head to the polls. It’s a complicated formula that involves integers of WA election times federal budget divided by the square root of Kevin ’07 multiplied by don’t mess with Easter or Anzac Day. Or something.
But April 12 is slap-bang in the middle of the AFL’s Gather Round, when the powerful city state travels to Adelaide for a long weekend of footy and wineries and SA Premier Peter Malinauskas doing endless media victory laps.
The event brought nearly 46,000 visitors to the state and $91.6 million in 2024.
“People can postal vote or absentee vote,” one political type told us.
But can you really see man of the people Anthony Albanese forcing Isaac Heeney et al to line up at Aldinga Community Centre and exercise their civic duty? You know the answer.
Frequent flyers
Last week we brought you news of Labor MP Dr Michelle Ananda-Rajah campaigning for a Senate seat on your dime – legally – as her seat of Higgins will be abolished at the next election.
Now we learn that the Department of Finance is looking into it.
A reader last week queried the point of Ananda-Rajah distributing a glossy flyer to electors in the federal seat of Higgins in the dying months of her term, as the electorate will be abolished at the next election.
The flyer featured the one-term MP and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in front of Parliament House and listed various Labor achievements.
The glossy flyer from Dr Michelle Ananda-Rajah which has sparked an investigation.
Readers who don’t live in Higgins but other electorates – including nearby Kooyong and Goldstein – tell us they have received the flyer as well.
“I just couldn’t work out why [Ananda-Rajah] was wasting money. I later found out that she was intending to be a Senate candidate,” barrister Louise Duncan, who lives in neighbouring Goldstein, told us.
No slouch, Duncan got in touch directly with Sally Bektas, from the Department of Finance’s ministerial and parliamentary services section.
“I have sent it on to the appropriate area and asked that they consider and investigate accordingly,” Bektas responded. This was news to Ananda-Rajah’s office. Her office sought pre-approval from the department before printing.
The department didn’t answer our questions, but helpfully directed us to the “Federal elections – Parliamentarians – Ministerial and Parliamentary Services – Member of the House of Representatives – Recontesting – Redistribution – Communicating with residents outside your current electorate” website. Gotta love the bureaucracy.
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