Coronavirus strikes the top end of Melbourne

Cartoon: Rod Clement.

The coronavirus has struck at the top end of town in Melbourne, with a security guard at the prestigious 120 Collins St skyscraper testing positive to the highly contagious virus.

The building’s tenants, which include the James Shipton-led Australian Securities & Investments Commission and investment banks Rothschild, Citigroup and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, were sent into crisis mode overnight as the building’s owner, Investa Property, informed them of the unfolding situation.

Tenants, which also include ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, executive headhunting group Korn Ferry and the Peter Costello-chaired Future Fund, were notified of the confirmed case via email around midnight on Tuesday by the building’s general manager Toni Prantzos.

By Wednesday morning office workers were being told by their employers to stay away from the office building, which is at the so-called Paris end of Collins Street, opposite the 101 Collins Street tower of power.

As of Wednesday morning, however, the 52-storey building had not been officially locked down.

Investa told tenants that the security guard had been confirmed positive on Tuesday night, after first experiencing symptoms on March 15.

“We are taking all necessary precautions to minimise the risk to tenants,” Prantzos said in the email.

“Overnight we will complete a thorough deep clean of the entry points, all lift cars, goods lift, lift lobbies, service corridors loading dock, shared bathrooms, end of trip and bike storage.

“In the best interests of all building occupants, (we) have directed that all security staff vacate the building and self-isolate.”

However, a spokesman for Investa told Margin Call that “120 Collins Street remains open and in line with Investa’s COVID-19 Emergency Response Plan”.

A new security team has also now been deployed in the building.

Still, tenants weren’t taking any chances, with many corporates telling staff to work from home, with no one permitted to return to the office until further notice.

In the driver’s seat

Shopping centre heiress Betty Saunders-Klimenko is set to star in the upcoming Supercars championship docu series on Fox Sports.

The eight-part series follows the trials and tribulations of her 2019 Supercars campaign, not just on the racetrack, in the pits and the garage, but also the personal lives of her Erebus team.

Drivers David Reynolds and Anton De Pasquale and CEO Barry Ryan appear alongside Klimenko, who is the team owner.

It will be broadcast on Fox Sports 506 and Kayo, starting next Tuesday, an entertainment offering while the 2020 championship is in hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The recent Albert Park event was cancelled after a day of running and upcoming events in Tasmania, Auckland and Perth have been postponed.

Klimenko is the adopted daughter of John Saunders, who died in 1997 aged 75 as one of Australia’s wealthiest men. Liberated from the German Dornau concentration camp, Saunders arrived in Sydney in 1949 and opened a sandwich shop at Town Hall station, where he met a delivery boy and fellow emigre, Frank Lowy.

They opened a Blacktown delicatessen and then the duo undertook their first development, a shopping centre in Blacktown in 1958. Westfield Holdings listed on the stock exchange in 1960.

The long business relationship between Saunders and Lowy ended in 1986 when Saunders sold much of his 20 per cent stake.

Supercars CEO Sean Seamer hopes Inside Line will be an annual production, with a different team to feature each year.

Fox Sports chief Peter Campbell says it follows on from the success of Formula One’s Drive to Survive on Netflix where there was also full access inside the team’s highs and lows.

Klimenko set up Erebus Motorsport in 2011, buying a facility in Melbourne, along with an SLS AMG GT3 from Europe. They expanded to a second car a year later. In 2017, they secured the coveted Bathurst 1000 title.

Erebus Motorsport, now racing under the Penrite Racing banner, races a Holden with a Walkinshaw engine. No word yet but they could possibly be interested in a Camaro link-up down the track.

Klimenko’s involvement in racing started in 1998.

Lack of leadership

Peter Clare, the former top executive with St George and Westpac Bank, has really fired up, suggesting Australia has too much government and not enough leadership.

He said he was compelled to speak out about the inadequacy of three levels of government in the current national crisis.

“It would seem to me that one of the main structural impediments to the current lack of prevalence of strong leadership is that we live under an anachronistic local, state and federal-based system of government.

“How has this duplicative and accountability-deflecting system been allowed to persist here in Australia?

As at 20 March 2020, Clare stepped down from the role of CEO of RoZetta Institute but remains a non-executive director.

“Let’s focus on the ‘once in a lifetime’ crisis at hand … let’s demonstrate leadership, compassion and combine it with scientifically based rationality.”

He argues we must cede more local decision-making power to strong local governments who can accurately and directly represent the real interests of their local constituents and
let the federal government govern in the real interests of the nation.

“The spread of the COVID-19 virus is a global crisis and Australia is an international citizen with which comes an international obligation to behave responsibly and rationally.”

He noted state governments were closing their borders.

“Those borders are lines drawn on a map … arbitrary codified delineations between societies that existed in the 1800s bearing little meaning, other than historic, today.”

Clare has also suggested the stock exchange be shut down, “so we don’t all get gloomy about our investments and superannuation balances”.

His LinkedIn posting has secured much positive commentary from entrepreneurs including Alan Greenstein at Zagga Group and Capsifi founder Terry Roach.

Dutton’s home affairs

The COVID-19-positive Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, who is still in isolation after testing positive just under two weeks ago, has quietly sold his Moreton Bay hinterland family home.

The off-market deal was struck on January 28, with settlement on February 27.

Margin Call gleans he’s bought back into his electorate, which is a huge 772sq km set north and west of Brisbane. That move has yet to happen, nor make its way on to his parliamentary pecuniary interests statement.

Dutton had called the private Camp Mountain acreage his family home since 2003, when he paid $710,000 for the six-bedroom home on 2ha.

The member for Dickson is self-isolating at an investment property, missing the House of Representatives proceedings after recently travelling to Washington DC.

Care for kids

While industries are shutting down one after the other and thousands of workers laid off daily, thankfully it’s business as usual for Kirrily Dutton, the wife of Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton.

The minister’s wife famously owns and operates two childcare centres in suburban Brisbane.

The Duttons are taking no chances with their small charges as the coronavirus spreads across the nation but childcare centres are still allowed to remain open.

Mid-last-year Dutton relinquished his interest in the family trust whose trustee operates the childcare centres to remove any doubt around his eligibility to sit in the parliament.

The centres have benefited from government subsidies and so Dutton’s ownership raised questions under Section 44 of the Constitution, but they were never directly tested in the court.

Dutton, of course, was the first Canberra pollie to test positive for the coronavirus after a trip to the US, so the virus has already touched the prominent Queenslanders’ lives, but not their kiddies’ centres.

At Dutton’s Bald Hills Childcare Centre staff are carrying out temperature checks with a handheld thermometer on the forehead of all children each morning as they enter the centre’s care.

Staff are also about to institute the same for the parents, which is a leaf out of the book of the authorities in Singapore schools, where students are having their temperatures taken as they arrive and leave school each day in a bid to stop the virus and track its spread.

No such practice is required in Australian schools yet.

At Dutton’s Camelia Avenue Childcare in Everton Hills, management has suspended any tours for prospective families to minimise traffic through the centre and it’s poised to institute virtual tours of the facilities.

All very real after reports of two infected children in Gladys Berejiklian’s NSW, one a two-month-old girl and another a seven-year-old boy.