By Kishor Napier-Raman and Noel Towell
Next month’s special ASEAN Summit in Melbourne, which commemorates 50 years of Australia’s partnership with the regional bloc, is a pretty big deal, with a bunch of South-East Asian leaders flying in for high-level meetings.
Which means the action around the sides will be a bit of a feeding frenzy for the foreign affairs wonkocracy. On Monday, the Lowy Institute, the pointy-headed think tank founded by Westfield magnate Frank Lowy, will host a special address by the Philippines’ president Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr.
Marcos is the nepo baby son of the country’s notoriously repressive dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his shoe-loving wife Imelda, having surged to power in 2022 thanks in part to a TikTok disinformation campaign of historical revisionism around his daddy’s kleptocratic regime.
It’s caused a bit of chatter among foreign affairs watchers, questioning why Marcos was the only ASEAN leader to get a platform from the venerable institute. CBD hears Lowy was only ever going to host one leader and Marcos was their guy, owing to his relatively new government, and the geopolitical significance of which direction he takes the Philippines.
While the small-l liberal centrists at Lowy have given a stage to plenty of world leaders, we reckon there’s never been one from such a cursed family dynasty.
PYNE TIME
Former defence minister Christopher Pyne and his firm Pyne and Partners have always taken a refreshingly eccentric approach to the business of lobbying for weapons companies.
Last year, this column spotted Pyne threatening to do a “shoey” while working a crowd of NSW Labor MPs. And last week came another case of what the firm calls its “personal touch” when it brought Labor’s man mountain, Hunter MP Dan Repacholi, to Brisbane to visit clients in the Sunshine State.
Rather than your standard mixer, the trip involved a quick stop at arms manufacturers NIOA, where Repacholi, an Olympic shooter, flexed his talents on the gun range. The privately held munitions company was founded by Robert Nioa, who is Kennedy MP Bob Katter’s son-in-law. Christmas would never be dull.
While Pyne may be a lifelong Liberal whose blood runs a very Barossa Valley blue, his firm is clearly getting on well with the Labor side of politics. Recent disclosures to the Australian Electoral Committee showed Pyne and Partners donated nearly $40,000 to the ALP, and not a cent to the Liberals. That’s business, baby!
No surprises then that while some Liberal-run lobbying shops have faltered, the Pyne organisation’s push towards world dominance continues apace, with the firm to launch its new Melbourne office with a swanky soiree in a couple of weeks.
Attendees at St Kilda’s Buba Local Shuk are promised the company not only of the P&P team, but clients too, “as well as Victorian parliamentarians, government staffers and the business community to celebrate this exciting new chapter”.
Well, how could we resist?
WEST AND LESS
Billionaire Channel 7 owner Kerry Stokes’ latest media venture, online news site The Nightly, was launched on Monday amid some big talk from its Perth-based editor Anthony De Ceglie about “disrupting” the East Coast news market with a heady dose of “working-class economic conservatism”.
Now, CBD doesn’t fancy being disrupted, exactly, but we’re all for more players in the media game. Trouble is, if the first edition is anything to go by, the new publication’s commercial underpinnings appear to be an all-western affair and firmly skewed toward the state’s mining sector.
So let’s see, the ads on Page 1 and 2 were taken out by Hancock Prospecting – whose owner, Australia’s richest woman, Gina Rinehart, is one of the backers of the site – while page 5 and 6 belonged to resources behemoth BHP, which has a huge presence out west.
There is an ad for something called Streamer on Page 7 – but wait, it’s a Stokes venture that works with (wait for it) BHP, and a little further along, we’ve got page 19 taken out by Perth-based oil and gas giant Woodside.
Page 21 brings us an ad for Mineral Resources, the mining services outfit based in – you’ve guessed it – Perth and owned by Chris Ellison, another one of The Nightly’s financial backers. Only an appearance by commercial real estate outfit Colliers on page 24 breaks the monotony.
On the editorial side of things, space was found for a-less-than-complimentary yarn on Andrew Forrest, Stokes’ fellow West Australian and his adversary in a long-running, internecine sandgroper feud.
Well, something for everybody in there, as long as everybody’s from the west, so we reached across the Nullarbor to ask De Ceglie when we would see a bit more of a national mix.
The editor declined to comment, but sources close to the publication told us to be patient. Before the week is out, they assured us, we’d see The Nightly carrying ads for Australia-wide big-hitter Harvey Norman and global punting giant Ladbrokes.
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