By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
King George of Bankstown has returned to Macquarie Street.
George Mladenov had spent a lifetime among the backroom brawlers of the NSW Labor Right, and was on the cusp of securing a spot on the party’s Canterbury-Bankstown Council ticket, only to give it up to realise a lifelong dream when he appeared on Australian Survivor in 2021.
George Mladenov… from Macquarie Street to TV celebrity and back again.Credit: Nigel Wright
Turns out the Machiavellian world of local Labor branches is an excellent training ground for reality TV. King George, as he’s known on the show, became a fan favourite during his two seasons, and is set to appear on screens again later this year.
Now between gigs, Mladenov has gone back to where it all began, doing some staffing work for his old boss, NSW Upper House MP Tania Mihailuk.
When the duo last worked together both were still with the ALP. Now, both are politically homeless. Mihailuk dramatically quit the party in 2022 after launching into a late-night spray under parliamentary privilege against former Canterbury-Bankstown mayor Khal Asfour. She joined Pauline Hanson’s One Nation shortly before the 2023 election.
In an interview with the Herald last year, Mladenov said he was “nowhere near” One Nation on the political spectrum.
Luckily, Mihailuk quit Hanson’s train wreck of a political operation last December, and it paved the way for the gang to get back together.
King George told CBD he’d known Mihailuk for 15 years, and was working as a short-term relief casual in her office.
“With some free capacity in between my schedule and travels, I like to fill my time with fulfilling work; digging into policy and legislation at the coalface in state parliament is always exciting to me,” he said.
“Once a political operative, always a political operative.”
We can’t disagree with that.
Of course, Mladenov isn’t the only TV star to have graced Mihailuk’s employ. As CBD revealed last year, conservative media’s resident steampunk Daisy Cousens was working as a staffer for the MP.
Off the mark
Clive Palmer works in mysterious ways.
Nobody is quite sure why he burnt hundreds of millions of his own hard-earned dollars over the past two election cycles to get a single senator elected.
Nobody can say why the billionaire mining magnate keeps wasting the High Court’s time with doomed legal battles – he’s 0-5 before the country’s top judges.
And similarly, nobody could quite figure out the logic behind Palmer’s decision to try and trademark the word “teal”, first reported by this masthead in January. A childish attempt to troll the current crop of independents? Some kind of elaborate 5-D chess electoral strategy? Palmer’s media minders, who themselves aren’t sure what he’s up to half the time, wouldn’t explain.
While the mystery of Palmer’s application with IP Australia remains unresolved, CBD can report that at least one of his applications has failed. The regulator objected to Palmer’s teal trademark, with IP Australia’s trademark examiner issuing an “adverse report” last month. That means Palmer can either let the application lapse, or respond to the examiner’s report, which he has until February next year to do.
Would Palmer, who loves an appeal more than Marnus Labuschagne, seek to keep on fighting for his trademark application? If so, his minders didn’t respond, leaving Clive’s latest frolic a mystery, once again.
Big Dicker energy
David Dicker, the luxuriously bearded founder of Dicker Data, looks more like a cult leader or Tolkien character than a hardware and software logistics mogul.
“Authoritarian shithole”: David Dicker is no fan of how Australia treats its billionaires.Credit:
And he certainly has the suitably fabulistic turn of phrase to match. Dicker left these shores in 2019 to live out of a luxury hotel in Dubai, describing Australia as an “authoritarian shithole”. He’s since bemoaned the way those in his home country who make lots of money are “abused and denigrated”, unlike Americans, who show appropriate fawning deference to their billionaires. They did just make one president. Twice.
Anyway, with deep pontifications like this, it’s no surprise that Dicker, the successful owner of a private jet and unsuccessful owner of a Formula 1 team, cops a bit of gentle denigration in columns such as ours.
While busy trying to break into F1, Dicker has also been dealing with the costly fallout from his divorce with second wife, Delwyn Dicker. Last year, he sold $200 million worth of Dicker Data stock – about 10 per cent of the listed company – with the proceeds set to go toward a divorce settlement.
And on Wednesday, the company announced Dicker was selling another 8.3 million shares, worth $67 million all up, again citing the divorce.
“The proceeds from the share sale is to fund David Dicker’s final divorce settlement instalment, along with other personal funding needs,” the company said in an announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange.
In 2021, Dicker sold $42.2 million worth of shares, with the proceeds going toward buying a second-hand private jet, and his Rodin hypercars. All those expensive toys, it seems, cost less than the divorce.
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