MCA joins the dots on race clash; Ozempic clone ban to slim down VCs

Still images taken from video of the protesters disrupting the evening.

The Museum of Contemporary Art has finally come clean on some ugliness that occurred on its rooftop last Friday, during which activist musicians and professional demonstrators hijacked an event and racially abused the crowd.

Footage sent to Margin Call depicts a lone MCA official attempting to intervene without success. This while musicians and their offstage affiliates – some clad in keffiyehs, others in hijabs – held up placards and a large banner scrawled with a message of grave importance. We couldn’t decipher what the banner actually said but it doesn’t take a Mensa membership to know what’s fashionable to shriek about at the moment.

Displays of this kind are becoming bog-standard in the arts, and we know from the experience of the Ann Johnson-chaired Sydney Theatre Company that audiences are growing weary of the sanctimony, the proselytising. Lessons learned out of their experience include a tarnished brand, a donor exodus, the loss of Gretel Packer from its board and, further downstream, staff lay-offs.

If the incident at the MCA had been confined to puerile protest, well, that would be grating enough – especially when tickets to the event were a not-insignificant $50 a pop. Sadly, our previous reporting on this subject included an eyewitness account of one musician shouting “f..k all you f..king white people” and referring to the audience as “f..king crackers”, which should have seen the band carted offstage – for some reason the MCA left them there until the end of the event about a half-hour later.

Understandably, the MCA wasn’t eager to draw attention to the matter (q.v. the STC imbroglio) but it did finally pony up a response and told us the activism was unsanctioned and marred an otherwise successful evening.

“Towards the very end of the night, members of the audience and the final band staged a short protest on stage mid performance. MCA Australia were (sic) not made aware in advance of any plans for the protest. The band remained on stage until the end of the event at 11pm,” an official said.

“MCA Australia does not tolerate racial abuse or discriminatory language of any kind.”

Apart from keeping the band onstage, the only loose strand remaining is how the activists weaselled their way into the programming schedule in the first place.

No vetting of the acts?

Fat chance

A big fat ban came into effect this week on the sale of replica weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, a development likely to sting the VC backers of Tim Doyle’s online health start-up Eucalyptus and its subsidiary, Juniper, a purveyor of medical fat-blasting treatments.

Some VCs will suffer more than others, of course. Marbruck Investments, run by Lachlan Clough, tipped $8m into Eucalyptus for 160,000 shares. That was in February, one month after the Health Department raised concerns with industry on the sale of replica fat-loss treatments. That signal be damned, Marbruck’s punt was terribly timed and went ahead two weeks prior to a Therapeutic Goods Administration announcement that it would start consulting on a ban.

Eucalyptus founder Tim Doyle. Picture: John Feder

So it’s not like Health Minister Mark Butler’s decision was all that unexpected. No word from Clough when we tried to contact, but arguably a bad call. Other Eucalyptus backers in line for some grief include Woolworths’ VC fund (known as W23), Airtree Ventures and One Ventures, all of whom were contacted for comment. Another backer, Blackbird, said the decision would undoubtedly affect Eucalyptus but Nicholas Crocker, partner at the VC firm, said Doyle’s team were prepared for the outcome.

“We remain strong supporters of Tim and the Team,” Crocker said.

Help for Hivery

Speaking of Blackbird, the VC firm appears to have come to the rescue of AI minnow Hivery. Led by co-founder Jason Hosking, Hivery was rumoured to be on the brink of collapse but was thrown a lifeline, apparently, Margin Call confirming that it completed a raise last month to the tune of $3.7m, Blackbird throwing in nearly half that amount.

Hivery’s founder and chief executive, Jason Hosking.

“The company is well-capitalised and positioned to execute against its product ambition, and we remain optimistic about the market opportunity Hivery is addressing,” a Blackbird spokeswoman said. However, there’s something odd about this raise, given it’s been just two years since Hivery raised $43m overseas. We can only wonder what prompted the sudden urge for a cheeky $3.7m top-up, a drop in the ocean next to that $43m of sloshing liquidity, because it’s the kind of dosh that basically helps keep the lights on, no? Reminder as well that reports published two months ago said Blackbird’s investment of $11.4m had dropped 47 per cent.

Food for thought

A few minutes with Google reveals that Commonwealth Bank chief Matt Comyn holds $11.5m worth of CBA shares, among other company benefits – enough to sleep reasonably well at night. But it’s a lower-profile investment in a plant-based start-up that’s garnering our attention. We’ve previously mentioned his stake in All G Foods, run by entrepreneur Jan Pacas, founder of pet-sitting business Mad Paws. Comyn bought a stake in that, too, but exited some time ago. Anyway, the CBA boss has recently gone in for another 100,000 shares in All G for roughly $535,000, bumping up an existing holding that he purchased two years ago and giving him a much meatier steak (sic) in the company, one firm enough to place him alongside W23, Ellerston Capital and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation on the share register.

Elementary error

And a word of appreciation to a reader who corrected the boob we made in our description of ASIC commissioner Alan Kirkland, specifically the get-up he wore at a financial conference in Perth last week. Kirkland was on stage styled as a Sherlockian detective.

The onstage hijinks with Alan Kirkland on the right, dressed in his Inverness cape.

Seems we erred in our description of his clothing. We said he donned a trench coat for the occasion, but keen-eyed Gerard Hayes tells us it was an Inverness cape. The difference between them being elementary, of course.