Blushing teals should be turning red; Case of the smooth-talking Ruffy imposter

Sophie Scamps and Monique Ryan in Parliament. Picture: Martin Ollman

Preaching from the pulpit of The Guardian on Tuesday, teal MP Monique Ryan took great issue with airline lounges and the access being granted to members of parliament.

There was also a swipe at lobbyists who cruise these vaunted spaces, who lie in wait among the comfortable nooks, or lurk near the espresso machine, hoping to spring forth and catch an unsuspecting politician for a little chat.

Ryan isn’t so fussed with MPs enjoying a plush seat and glass of vino ahead of their flight, but she does think lounge access must be declared for transparency. It’s a point she made multiple times. “Australians want more transparency from their government,” she thundered.

And then came an unexpected admission.

“When I was elected in 2022, I accepted membership of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge and Virgin’s Beyond Club … I’m not telling my colleagues to give up their Chairman’s Lounge memberships, although I do think we should declare them and any upgrades offered to us.”

Talk about burying the lede.

Ryan’s confession of a Virgin Beyond Club membership has, in fact, never been known. It’s a perk that she enjoyed for almost a year but never disclosed in her parliamentary declaration of interests. That’s ironic, given disclosure of such benefits formed the foundational argument of the piece she’d just written.

The discovery of a yawning gulf in the word and deed of any politician normally induces surprise, but in the case of Ryan and her teal sisters these discoveries have become routine, the amusement factor waning with the usual laws of diminishing returns.

There’s Sophie Scamps, an aspiring property magnate with a sizeable portfolio who has the gall to whang on about housing affordability.

We all remember North Sydney MP Kylea Tink, who campaigned for climate action but later emerged as a shareholder in Viva Energy and Beach Energy, both of which make mountains of money selling oil and gas.

Tink’s explanation – that she purchased the shares to engage in “shareholder activism” – is as credible as the bunkum ginned up by Ryan over her failure to declare the Virgin membership, which we have now brought to her attention, and which she has corrected.

Kylea Tink who simultaneously lobbied against climate change while holding shares in energy companies. Picture: Martin Ollman

A spokeswoman said Ryan was given her Beyond membership on October 21, 2022, and that she asked for it to be cancelled on September 19, 2023. Virgin acted on this two days later.

“It was not originally declared on her register of interests due to an administrative error. For completeness this has now been rectified in her register of interests,” the spokeswoman said.

Yes, when a teal fails to disclose a perk it’s known as an “administrative error”, but for anyone else elected to parliament without the slush funding of Simon Holmes a Court it’s an appalling lack of transparency requiring wholesale reform and a colorectal from the NACC.

Even looser with her facts, Ryan went on to claim that parliament was overrun by lobbyists. Maybe she’s right, in the way of a broken clock, but her flights of exaggeration were wholly unnecessary.

“Every sitting day,” she wrote, “almost 2000 lobbyists are in the house – 10 for every member of the house and the Senate”.

As anyone who has ever set foot inside Parliament House would know, this is absurd. There are 1791 people holding sponsored APH access cards as of February 2023 and Ryan seems to think all of them converge on the building each sitting day.

Sure, it might appear that way to the teals, looking down from atop an eyrie of self-righteousness.

Then again, it would also explain why the queue at Aussies is getting too long. YB

The real deal

Props to the bogus billionaire who fooled the door staff at the GH Mumm marquee on Melbourne Cup day, slipping in as Raphael Geminder despite bearing only a passing resemblance to Pact Group’s cardboard king.

So confident in his act was the prankster that he not only talked his way into the exclusive pavilion of the champagne house, but stopped to conduct a few interviews with the waiting media along the way.

The smooth-talking Raphael Geminder impersonator in the Mumm Marquee. Picture: Luis Enrique Ascui

And he certainly looked the part of a billionaire, sporting a monogrammed Gucci blazer – the genuine item is worth $4000 – but in retrospect, who knows? You can find a reasonable facsimile on Temu for the bargain price of $54.25, delivery included.

Not entirely the fault of the journalist that printed the results of the interview, to be fair – the staff at GH Mumm confidently told snappers from a variety of publications the trickster was the real deal, and backed up their identification when questioned by more dubious folks inside the media tent.

Fake Geminder was quoted as saying he was there for the “people watching and the socialising”, and we don’t doubt that.

As appalled as we should be, you had to admire the pretender’s moxie – his appearance at Mumm came only a little while after Fiona Geminder and sister Heloise Pratt had breezed past the marquee, trailing their own media pack.

The geniune Raphael Geminder with wife Fiona.

The fraud wasn’t discovered until late in the day – presumably people close to the real deal spotted the interview after publication and intervened.

Cue a retraction and apology from the Melbourne newspaper – along with a frenzied set of messages from the flacks at Mumm, begging those who had not yet gone to print to scrub both his name and photo from their own copy.

Champagne comedy. NE