Billionaires bankrolling victory bash

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Lindsay Fox is the latest Melbourne billionaire to get behind Bill Shorten’s tilt for The Lodge.

Margin Call hears Team Shorten has booked Labor’s mid-May election night party at the Hyatt Place, in Essendon Fields. The airport hotel is part of the business park owned by the trucking, property and airport billionaire Fox and his rich-lister buddy Max Beck, a property ­developer last valued at $660 million.

Proximity isn’t the only thing the venue has going for it.

Handily for campaign boss Noah Carroll, we gather Shorten’s rich backers aren’t exactly charging market rates.

And there’s one more benefit.

The airport location means the great Labor diaspora — not to mention Australia’s private jet-flying population — can commute in easily for the expected coronation of Shorten, who would be the first leader since Kevin Rudd in 2007 to get the federal party elected from opposition.

That could be crucial.

Clearly Visy billionaire Anthony Pratt is far from the only politically pragmatic member of Australia’s moneyed community.

AFL in airline dogfight

The Virgin-Qantas aviation war has broken out at the AFL and it could not be a more awkward situation for the code’s boss Gillon McLachlan.

Last September, Virgin Australia’s then CEO John Borghetti paid good money to extend its position as the AFL’s official airline for another five years.

The sport’s players — including its female athletes in the increasingly important AFLW league — all fly Virgin. The airline also runs its own AFL Travel site, helping fans to #FlyYourColours as their tag went.

Virgin is also a major sponsor of three AFL clubs: Carlton (whose board includes Jeanne Pratt), the Tony Shepherd-chaired GWS (the airline last year paid the club $541,590 in cash and another $516,590 in contra) and the Gold Coast Suns.

So imagine how new Virgin boss Paul Scurrah — who began in the job yesterday in a festive day at its Brisbane head office, which included a run around on the neighbouring park with Suns players Izak Rankine and Madelane Collier — is feeling about the news that his rival Qantas has launched a notably similar “Back Your Team” campaign. Alan Joyce’s outfit has even created a special pitch on its website to flog their new AFL product.

It’s brazen stuff by Qantas, especially when you remember that the board overseeing Joyce’s work is chaired by none other than Richard Goyder, who is also the president of the AFL.

How Goyder would manage the Qantas role with his president duties of the Virgin-aligned AFL has been a subject of interest ever since he was appointed as the airline’s chair last year.

Margin Call hears that McLachlan’s team at AFL House have been asked to look at Qantas’s arrangement to see if it is in breach of Virgin’s commercial agreement.

A spokesman for the AFL was conspicuously silent on its progress.

Needless to say, the sport’s other commercial partners — which include Toyota, Phil Chronican’s NAB and the union-loving Carlton Draught — will take an interest in the AFL’s decision.

Some companies might wonder why they should renew their hefty sponsorship packages with Goyder’s AFL if, as Goyder’s Qantas demonstrates, they can use the sport to spruik their products without paying up?

Video victory

In politics, you can lose even when you win.

Take Peter Phelps.

Over the weekend, Phelps’ career as a Liberal member of the NSW upper house came to an end. Phelps was too far down the ticket to hold his seat, as Gladys Berejiklian’s government was returned for the Coalition’s third term.

Liberal MP Peter Phelps. Picture: John Grainger

Cruelly, that’s despite the fact that it was Phelps — one of the three-person team in the NSW Liberals campaign office — who rediscovered the now infamous video of Michael Daley warning a crowd in the Blue Mountains about “our young children” losing their jobs to “young people, from typically Asia”.

“I thought: Holy shit!” Phelps told Margin Call about his moment of YouTube discovery, which helped returnBerejiklianto power.

As Margin Call revealed on Saturday, a pack of WhatsApp-using young Liberal staffers — concentrated in Don Harwin’s office — had first discovered the Daley video back in October.

They spliced it with a clip for South Park, shared it with each other and posted some happy face emojis.

And, incredibly, that was almost the end of it.

It wasn’t until Phelps’s rediscovery on February 11 that the clip’s potential to up-end the Daley campaign was appreciated.

However, the execution remained a work in progress.

Phelps’ first instinct was to post it on his Facebook page — which he did.

We’re told it sat there for two long minutes until another member of the Liberals tactics team saw it.

“Get it off Facebook!

“Take it down!” he shouted.

By this stage the Liberals tactics team realised they were on to something big.

The leadership team was informed. A rollout plan was conceived for maximum impact.

A well-informed source in the Liberals campaign headquarters told us a senior member of Berejiklian’s cabinet then leaked it to The Daily Telegraph ahead of the agreed time.

“He almost stuffed it up,” the source said, darkly.

But somehow, despite themselves, the Liberals pulled it off.