Life’s really a beach for Palm Beach surf club manager
The prime ministership of the nation is not the only important leadership position in a state of flux at the moment.
Moving up the food chain — and for the second time in a year — the good folk at Palm Beach Surf Life Saving Club have been forced to go back to the market to find a new club manager.
And true to their noble lineage, this isn’t just any backyard barbecue put-your-hand-up recruitment strategy for the beach clubhouse in Sydney’s north. Former CIMB Australia chairman Michael Crowley and former Westpac executive cum Moelis adviser Jason Millett are overseeing the search.
They have put the search in the expert hands of fellow club member and recruitment executive Ben Derwent, who has said he’s only too happy to help.
Indeed, we understand Derwent has put the full firepower of Derwent Executive on the case, free of charge. Member of the year, anyone?
Even with Derwent’s expertise, it won’t be easy to satisfy this demanding bunch. The last club manager, Bruce Murray, tapped out after just one summer.
The chap before him, Peter Williams, stayed for 10 years. Before Palm Beach the ex-military officer had also been senior defence attache to the Australian ambassador in the US.
It seems that’s the sort of pedigree required to keep Palmy’s bronzed brigade in check.
Bell tolls for Aitken
Yes, they are a distinguished bunch in Palm Beach.
New ABC boss Michelle Guthrie has a holiday house at the upmarket enclave while billionaire Gretel Packer has the house right next to the Surf Club on Ocean Road after last year’s settlement with her brother James Packer of their late father Kerry Packer’s will.
It’s now Palmy folklore how one summer day in early 1992 a local lifesaver noticed a young James being swept out to sea in a rip and raced across the sand to drag him from the surf. A grateful Kerry bought the club an inflatable rescue boat as a thank you. Sun loving stockbroker Colin Bell also has a place there.
Maybe club manager could be just the gig for his former employee Angus Aitken?
After his recent Bali vacation, Aitken’s certainly got the tan for it.
Fantasy girlfriend
Staying in the Packer orbit but moving to the other side of the world, the Mediterranean party season has already kicked off ahead of Lindsay Fox’s conception party — now just days away.
It was a year ago that new coupling, pop diva Mariah Carey and casino billionaire James Packer, let their fledgling love all hang out aboard Packer’s Arctic P.
And now the betrothed pair look to be back on the Med for another summer at sea.
After traversing the northern hemisphere on her “Sweet Sweet Fantasy Tour” and completing a rigorous season at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Carey is in smashing shape for her wedding to Packer.
The Arctic P was yesterday lingering off the Italian island of Capri, whose streets the lovebirds traversed this time last year as romance blossomed.
Data glitch
Malcolm Turnbull might be cranky with the reds for texting voters under the veil of Medicare, but at least the Labor operatives hit their voter targets.
The same can’t be said for controversial Liberal vehicle Parakeelia, the in-house operation that manages voter data for the conservatives.
The business has been criticised for washing campaign funding through its operations to other parts of the Liberal Party that need more money.
The Libs say the business just manages a voter database for each electorate, a function that other parties outsource to tech experts.
But it seems Parakeelia’s technology might be a bit past it.
Might be time for them to do like Thatcher and hand it over to the private sector.
Over the eight-week campaign the system has had numerous stuff-ups.
It sent text messages rallying voters in electorates where they were no longer enrolled.
And to save on mail costs, the system married off couples that shared a residence.
That glitch even hit NSW Labor state director Kaila Murnain, who received mail from the Libs addressing her as “Mrs K Hollywood”.
So it turns out that I too am a victim of #surnamegate . Another #libfail in so so so many ways #ausvotes pic.twitter.com/Qau0x2rtR6
— Kaila Murnain (@kailamurnain) June 29, 2016
Which is not her name. Oh dear.
Parakeelia’s directors — party president Richard Alston, campaign director Tony Nutt and pastoralist party operative Samuel Burston (who once sought to be party president in the 1970s in Victoria and whose late dad Sir Samuel Burston was a director of the Reserve Bank) — might consider looking outside the tent for the party’s technology needs.
That’s if they are involved in the next campaign.
It’s a bit like the Libs in Victoria thinking president Michael Kroger could run the Queenscliff cafe owned by former state director Damien Mantach, who swindled $1.5 million from the party, as an income stream for politics.
Like that was ever going to work.
Shorten sweet
Enduring uncertainty after the close of polls on Saturday night meant little sleep for many political operatives on the weekend. But by Sunday Labor leader Bill Shorten’s young team had plenty of reasons to pause for celebration, with the campaign over, the Australian Electoral Commission’s counting on pause and the prospect of a hung parliament more alive than Richard Alston.
Shorten’s senior press secretary Ryan “Ryno” Liddell led Bill’s troops off the bus and into the Marquis of Lorne in Melbourne’s Fitzroy for a Sunday lunch session filled with beers and cheers. The restaurant is nestled in the electorate of Greens MP Adam Bandt, who will possibly soon be a government-forming lower house ally. It was all smiles around the table, which also included speechwriter James Newton, former chief of staff Ken Macpherson, policy director Amit Singh and media advisers Sam Casey and Jinane Bou-Assi.
Lunch watch
South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill, the man who secured his own immortality over a pizza with a state independent MP, was at it again in Adelaide — the new centre of the Australian political universe.
Weatherill won power in 2014 in the days after voters delivered another hung parliament. The Premier lured independent state MP Geoff Brock to his side by giving him a ministry and promising him a future for Nyrstar’s lead smelter, after driving hundreds of miles north to share a pizza with him in Port Pirie.
Yesterday Weatherill didn’t have to go so far to meet a far more significant potential kingmaker, Nick Xenophon.
The pair met at Italian joint Nano in Adelaide’s Vardon Avenue where Xenophon was offered the full resources of South Australia’s public service as he considered issues of state. Sounds like a good investment for the rust belt state.
More wrongs than rights at the AHRC?
A case of curious priorities over at the Australian Human Rights Commission where hand-picked appointee Giridharan Sivaraman seems to prefer playing politics over action on anti-Semitism.
Freehills partner given notice over synagogue tweet
Herbert Smith Freehills leaders have voted to remove one of its longstanding partners, Damien Hazard, over a ‘deeply offensive’ tweet targeting Jeremy Leibler.