By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
Don’t be fooled. Peter Dutton’s no-show at the Business Council of Australia’s recent annual dinner doesn’t mean the opposition leader has forgotten about the big end of town.
With an election looming, Dutton has put out the begging bowl at a series of big-ticket fundraisers in Sydney and Melbourne this week.
Peter Dutton has put out the begging bowl at a series of fundraisers.Credit: Elke Meitzel
Kicking things off was a private lunch with new Cook MP Simon Kennedy in the Sydney CBD on Monday. Tickets started at $4000 a head, but the truest believers could have paid up to $10,000. A former McKinsey man, Kennedy’s fundraising capabilities helped him win a preselection battle for former prime minister Scott Morrison’s old seat.
Dutton is betting big on the suburbs to get him to The Lodge, and on Tuesday he was in Parramatta for a luncheon with the Liberal Party’s candidate Katie Mullens. The location was Tingha Palace in Parramatta Leagues Club, the kind of lazy Susan Chinese joint you’d expect to see Labor right warriors like Graham “Richo” Richardson plotting a political coup.
On Wednesday, the opposition leader will be back in the Sydney CBD for a $5000 a head private boardroom lunch hosted by the Mitchell Federal Electorate Conference, the seat held by Morrison’s key factional ally Alex Hawke.
Generous friends in Victoria won’t miss out. On Thursday, Dutton is headed to Melbourne, where, after years of disastrous electoral performances, the Liberals think they can nab a few seats.
The wannabe PM will appear at a lunch event (where single tickets are again going for between $5000 and $10,000) at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Club, one of those stuffy old joints that still won’t allow women to become members. The club resisted a 2022 push to allow women to join, thanks to the resistance of its youngest members. While Dutton’s office didn’t respond to questions about the fundraiser, women can still attend the club as guests.
Dutton, like Anthony Albanese, who also charges big bucks for his time, can’t win the election without a bit of help from wealthy donors. But he also can’t win without female voters, who deserted the Liberal Party in droves after the bad vibes of the Morrison years. And yet, despite all the hand wringing about the Liberals’ “women problem”, nobody thought too hard about the optics of holding a fundraiser at an all-male club. Go figure.
COMEBACK CARMELO
CBD does not profess to have the psephological powers of Antony Green.
Recently, we wrote off the council career of flashy, Bentley-driving former Sutherland mayor Carmelo Pesce, who quit the Liberals to run as an independent months after losing a preselection battle for former prime minister Scott Morrison’s old seat of Cook.
We weren’t the only ones. Pesce himself all but conceded defeat on the phone to CBD less than two weeks ago, when the results looked like he wouldn’t be returning to council.
But, like another well-known politician from the Shire, Pesce has made the most of an electoral miracle. When the NSW Electoral Commission revealed its final numbers on Monday, Pesce had scraped back in after 11 counts, thanks to Labor preferences.
Former deputy mayor Carol Provan, who quit to run as an independent along with Pesce, was also narrowly elected. The pair both abandoned the Liberals after being dropped from the party’s ticket in the Shire by the state executive, despite lobbying from NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman who wanted to keep them. With those two back, we’re in for a very entertaining few years in the Shire.
LOG OFF
Like any politician, Premier Chris Minns is no stranger to a few barbs from the jokesters over at The Betoota Advocate.
But CBD was surprised to see Minns copping a bit of heat over his government’s foot-dragging on a promised Great Koala National Park on the NSW Mid-North Coast.
NSW Premier Chris Minns is copping flak over Labor’s promised Great Koala National Park.Credit: Kate Geraghty
“Government Reveals Plans to Rename Great Koala National Park to Below-Average Largely Deforested Koala National Park,” came one post in September.
“‘It’s Just a bit of Hedge-Trimming’ Says Government in Defence of Logging Great Koala National Park,” the Betoota boys wrote last weekend.
While CBD is fully supportive of our furry friends, koala conservation hasn’t been as headline-grabbing or zeitgeisty as Betoota’s other recent targets. And a scan to the bottom of Betoota’s Instagram posts revealed that both were ads.
Who was paying Australia’s sixth-most culturally powerful people (according to our stablemates at the AFR) to fight for koalas? CBD can reveal that the bankrollers were mattress and bedding start-up Koala, who collaborated with the Nature Conservation Council of NSW to protect their namesake.
The mattress makers, which count cricketing great Steve Smith as a lucky early investor, have been lobbying Minns to stop logging in the proposed national park area, urging the premier to “get into bed with us and help save the koalas”.
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