Another David Feeney brain fade

Illustration: Rod Clement.

It’s remarkable really what Labor Member for Batman, the forgetful David Feeney, can actually get done when he sets his mind to it.

Feeney is still only 47 but can’t seem to remember a thing. Where is that citizenship paperwork that the formerly faceless man says clears him to sit in the House of Reps? And how many houses do he and his Maurice Blackburn Cashman lawyer wife Liberty Sanger actually own?

Paperwork can be a headache for the Labor powerbroker, although not when it comes to the multi-million-dollar development of his new home in Northcote.

It’s the same Northcote home that Feeney previously rented out, but neglected to declare on his register of members interests until he was reminded of its existence mid-last year.

Oh, that $2.3 million house ...

The Feeneys, who have one son, have managed to successfully shepherd no fewer than four building permit applications relating to the property through the local City of Darebin within the past year, as they construct their dream home.

Or at least the second version of their dream home after the Feeneys, who until last year lived a world away from Batman in a luxury apartment in East Melbourne that they now rent out, withdrew an original application in 2015 to build a Rob Mills-­designed mansion on the Northcote block.

The member’s new piecemeal approach to construction saw him apply in November last year to demolish the 1910 heritage home and then in March seek approval for “stage one”: the construction of a slab and walls.

By August, the Feeneys were ready to submit plans for “stage two”, which comprised completion of the home, and then in September they submitted the paperwork to apply to build a pool, with works now con­tinuing.

During the build the couple are renting a three-bedroom terrace on the same street, literally down the road and across the railway line, for $775 a week.

Here’s hoping Feeney remembers to pay his rent.

And then yesterday, amid the chaos of Canberra, the like­lihood of a roughly $1m by-election against Richard Di Natale’s inner-city conquering Greens and threats within Team Bill Shorten that they might replace the forgetful former Victorian state secretary in the likely showdown for Batman, Feeney forgot one more thing.

A fortnight before he confessed to his latest memory fail, Feeney had managed to delete a tweet he’d posted that mocked the government’s handling of the citizenship debacle.

But Feeney seemed to have forgotten that his social media footprint extended beyond 140 characters to a Facebook post at the end of October criticising Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s handling of the unfolding crisis and, in particular, matters relating to the Nats’ Fiona Nash and Barnaby Joyce. Feeney declared the PM had shown “bad judgment”.

The endangered Member for Batman seems to know a bit about that.

Moving house

In contrast, the financially minded Member for Higgins Kelly O’Dwyer is something of a stickler for detail, even if she doesn’t like it.

The Minister for Revenue and Financial Services and her UBS investment banker husband Jon Mant were quick to inform the parliament in March this year that they were auctioning their decade-long South Yarra home after buying elsewhere in Higgins.

Then two months later, there was official news that the couple, who in the intervening weeks had grown from a family of three to four, had actually sold the house (for $2.7m) and no longer had a mortgage with Westpac.

But where in expansive Higgins did O’Dwyer and her expanding brood move to?

Security concerns have meant the clever couple have gone to great lengths to keep the whereabouts of their new digs, which appear to be mortgaged to CBA, under wraps.

But we hear that the O’Dwyer-Mants have touched down in a leafy suburb, where the blocks are expansive, the gardens are clipped and the bread is white.

The average house price for the area’s mostly Edwardian piles is in the order of $4m-$5m, with at least a few investment bankers, fundies or lawyers on every street.

Fairfax boss Greg Hywood, who spends most of his time in Sydney, still has his foot on a home just around the corner on nearby Central Park.

Following the birth of their son Edward in April, Mant has been on paternity leave from his role as head of investment banking at UBS in Melbourne, with the couple anticipating the leave would run for about six months. But he is yet to return to the Swiss bank as his wife now prepares for a royal commission into her sector.

It might be a while yet.

Foreign affairs

There’s a lot that remains hazy about the Turnbull government’s proposed Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme.

That’s the register that Attorney-General George Brandis suggested his former cabinet colleague Andrew Robb would probably have to join, an observation that enraged the Liberal trade minister turned $880,000-a-year consultant for billionaire Ye Cheng’s Chinese conglomerate Landbridge, which owns the Port of Darwin.

And Robb is unlikely to be the last person unhappy to be associated with the register.

One interesting test case may be former prime minister Paul Keating. Will the Labor legend have to declare his foreign associations?

Chinese billionaire Ye Cheng. Picture: Michael Franchi.

The former Labor PM is, among a host of roles, the chairman of the advisory board of the enormous China Development Bank, an opaque organisation that has assets worth more than $1.6 trillion and has surpassed the World Bank as the biggest international lender to developing countries. It describes itself as “a policy financial institution under the direct leadership of the State Council”.

It’s unquestionably an outfit working on behalf of a foreign power, one with serious international clout.

And as Keating told a $3000-a-head charity investment gathering in Sydney last month, the chairmanship puts him in not infrequent contact with Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and the President of the Middle Kingdom.

But will any of Keating’s work — his articulate speeches on the “barrenness of foreign policy in Australia” or any other advocacy — be deemed “general political lobbying”, as outlined in the vague guidelines for Brandis’s new scheme?

When asked yesterday, the Attorney-General’s office said it would not be drawn into hypotheticals about individuals.

If it comes to it, pity the member of the A-G Department who gets the job of calling our 24th prime minister for a fact-finding chat on his China role.

It’s going to be fascinating to see who self-reports for the scheme and who requires a nudge from the Attorney-General’s Department, which will be given information gathering powers to support the scheme’s administration.

Margin Call spotted a few corporate advisers and lobbyists in Aussies yesterday whose foreign business clients will probably see them soon join the new register.

To focus their minds, those who fail to fess up could face up to seven years imprisonment. Plenty of reason to err on the side of full disclosure.