Kerryn Phelps adds ALP fire power for next Dave Sharma battle

Cartoon: Rod Clement

Kerryn Phelps has assembled a rainbow coalition to support her second showdown with the Liberals’ Dave Sharma for the previously blue-ribbon electorate of Wentworth.

Right by her side for the duration of the 45th parliament — and preparing for round two with Sharma in May — will be experienced Labor operative Darrin Barnett, who is now officially a member of Phelps’s staff as her principal adviser.

Barnett, who was press secretary to former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard and most recently has spent his time as a partner at public affairs consultancy Watson Consultants, played a key role in Labor’s Super Saturday series of by-elections in July.

As Phelps was gearing up to run in Wentworth following the axing of prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and his retirement from politics, Phelps’s campaign manager and businesswoman Wendy McCarthy recommended Barnett to run her high-profile campaign.

McCarthy is a close friend of former governor-general Quentin Bryce, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten’s mother-in-law.

Those Labor credentials infuriated some Liberals, who saw a double agent snatching a seat away from them for Shorten.

We gather Team Shorten has wished Barnett all the best as he, and his new boss, try to pull off that trick for a second time.

Kerryn Phelps with adviser Darrin Barnett in Parliament House. Pic: Gary Ramage

The newly elected independent Phelps has certainly hit the ground running since her election in October, even dominating Canberra’s last sitting day of the year with her Nauru bill.

Also now on Phelps’s Wentworth team is Alex Michael, who for a short stint worked in Turnbull’s office when he was the local member.

Michael is now based out of Phelps’s Edgecliff electorate office assisting with media matters.

Plenty there for Canberra conspiracy theorists.

Crash’s last drinks

More on the intriguing back­story behind financial engineer Chris “Crash” Craddock.

Craddock was a mostly unknown player until he emerged at the centre of a debt-heavy $3.3 billion bid for GrainCorp put forward by the Tony Shepherd-chaired Long-Term Asset ­Partners. As Margin Call has explored this week, the 42-year-old CEO of the untested Long-Term Asset Partners has had an unorthodox career.

Craddock hasn’t had a conventional job in the finance or investment world for almost a decade.

Before that he’d had ever so brief stints with broker Bell Potter, been a junior for a few months on the small-cap equity sales desk at Deutsche and been a director of Bluegum International Marketing, a Queensland meat marketing outfit that went into insolvency.

Now we can reveal that wasn’t the entrepreneurial Craddock’s only failed foray into small enterprise.

We wonder whether GrainCorp chairman Graham Bradley’s due diligence on LTAP has turned up Craddock’s time as a director, company secretary and shareholder of Black Kross Pty Limited, which for a couple of years until late 2014 ran an underground bar in Brisbane.

The venture, trading as Brunswick Social in the basement of the former Sun newspaper building in Fortitude Valley, had a liquidator appointed to its operations in September 2014.

By then it had amassed debts of about $163,000, of which about $53,000 was superannuation. The business was ultimately wound up.

No wonder Bradley and his board — not to mention enterprising GrainCorp shareholder John Wylie — are so far taking a cautious approach to Crash’s latest venture, by far his most audacious yet.

Hywood high jinks

Was it the balmy Sydney summer night, the impending $8 million golden handshake or the sense of a hard job pretty well done?

Whatever it was, Fairfax Media’s almost redundant boss Greg Hywood was in fine spirits at the “The Long & Winding Road” party he threw on Wednesday night at Carriageworks, the Eveleigh arts institution on whose board sits his trusty adviser Sue Cato.

Along for the notably upbeat inner-city knees-up was Roger Corbett, who as Fairfax chairman appointed Hywood — soon off to Aspen for four weeks on the slopes — as the media company’s CEO in 2011.

“Roger, quite correctly, saw off Gina,” said Hywood to loud applause and shouts of “hear, hear” from a room that included Gina Rinehart favourite Michael Stutchbury, editor-in-chief of the Australian Financial Review.

Corbett’s successor as Fairfax chairman, Nick Falloon — who is joining the Peter Costello-chaired Nine board that will oversee the corporate consummation — was overseas (on a golfing holiday, according to the cocktail chatter).

“Nick, quite correctly, saw off private equity,” said Hywood of his absent chairman.

Speaking of PE, Hywood said his erstwhile chief financial officer David Housego was off to do a research project on cats.

“Despite his well known dislike of cats. One in particular.”

Now who could that be?

Hywood then revealed his fellow executive redundee Dhruv Gupta — Fairfax’s departing head of strategy — is off to join Geoff Culbert’s team at Sydney Airport.

Meanwhile, HR boss Michelle Williams was leaving, said Hywood, “because there is no one left to be made redundant”.

Joining Hywood was a bevy of the media company’s distinguished employees and former employees: Darren Goodsir, Pam Williams, Brett Clegg, Kate McClymont, the recently elevated Chris Janz (whose enlarged Nine exec gig was foreshadowed by Margin Call) and the recently redundant Mark Hawthorne (whose Age splash in 2013 concerning Queensland’s Crime and Misconduct Commission and Peter Costello is understood to be well remembered by the man who by the end of the week will officially sit at the top of the new $3bn combined company).

Fairfax’s billionaire director Jack Cowin was along performing his final act for the media company and was swooped on by a bandana-less Peter FitzSimons (who didn’t miss the opportunity to give his rah-rah republican recruitment pitch).

Greg Hywood’s Maserati.

Hywood finished his entertaining speech on an optimistic note: “It’s tough to make it work. And it’s you that made it work. And [Nine] will make it work.”

Gracious words and all said — we understand without Hywood’s knowledge — with a picture of his famous Maserati blazing on the accompanying slide show behind him.

The room loved it.