Paul Keating in his element with insults

Illustration: Rod Clement.

Former prime minister Paul Keating has had a fun few days.

Yesterday, our 24th prime minister set the tommy gun on the blue-chip membership of Jennifer Westacott’s Business Council of Australia (“dunderhead companies”, he dubbed them at the Sohn Hearts & Minds conference in Sydney which, as it happens, was sponsored by Commonwealth Bank, whose CEO Ian Narev sits on the BCA board and was in the audience at the Opera House).

Also on the wrong end of a Keating swipe in his lively address yesterday was the funds management business (overpaid, with “PhDs in greed”, making easy gains from his hard work in government, he told the room of fund managers).

All this built on an enjoyable Keating spray he delivered the night before on Leigh Sales’ 7.30 program on the ABC when, during an assessment of the Trump presidency, he lined up Phil Scanlan’s Australian American Leadership Dialogue.

“There was a thing called the Australian American dialogue — which by the way I never attended — which is a sort of a cult thing that’s gone on for years,” Keating began, insulting Scanlan’s baby with masterful economy.

“And I don’t know what the Americans put in the drinking water, but whenever the Australians come back, they’re all bowing and scraping and going on.”

It was a refreshingly partisan free attack.

The last two most egregious drinkers of the “cult’s” waters were then shadow defence minister Stephen Conroy (who while attending an AALD event in Washington DC in July called for a muscular response to China’s “bullying” behaviour in the South China Sea) and Conroy’s replacement as shadow defence minister Richard Marles (who while attending a subsequent AALD event in Honolulu said, bizarrely, that the Turnbull government should cede power to the military to ­determine freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea).

And among those handing out the spiked AALD drinking water? The alliance love-in’s co-chair Kim Beazley, the Labor leader who succeeded Keating in 1996.

Elites’ gabfest

What better way to end a week marked by a stunning people’s revolt over the elite than by a get-­together of our wealthiest citizens to discuss their best investment ideas?

Gary Weiss at the Hearts and Minds Conference. Picture: Hollie Adams/The Australian.

To be fair, they thought it was going to be in the aftermath of a victory by Goldman Sachs favourite Hillary Clinton, not the people’s billionaire Donald Trump.

Matthew Grounds, head of UBS Australasia at the Hearts and Minds Conference. Picture: Hollie Adams/The Australian.

And the packed room at the Opera House — which included fellow property billionaire Frank Lowy, his son Steven Lowy and former adviser David Gonski, Goldies local boss Simon Rothery, Airlie Funds Management’s Matt Williams, Perpetual’s Paul Skamvougeras, outsourcing fanatic Matt Barrie and RBA board member Allan Moss — did raise more than $3 million for charity at the inaugural Australian spin-off of the investment conference.

The pair responsible for the event were Matthew Grounds, boss of UBS Australasia, and Gary Weiss, the director of embattled listed aged-care provider Estia (which UBS helped to float in late 2014).

With their conspicuous presence in the room, it was perhaps no surprise that VGI’s executive director Rob Luciano didn’t use his speaking opportunity to publicly explain VGI’s hugely successful short position on Estia (whose stock fell another 1.7 per cent yesterday to $2.82 — after peaking just under $8 late last year). Instead, Luciano outlined VGI’s short position in the US-based Hanes, which this year took over fellow undies maker Pacific Brands. Very polite of him.

Picking on Apple

The spectre of Donald Trump loomed particularly large during the Hearts & Minds presentation given — over video from, pertinently, the US — by Magellan Financial Group chief executive Hamish Douglass.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, hosting a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in August.

Douglass (with a fortune last valued at $505m) picked Tim Cook’s California-headquartered Apple. That’s become a more exciting investment after Trump Tuesday.

Cook’s Apple was a regular target for Trump’s attacks throughout the campaign. “I’m going to get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China,” the now president-elect Trump said in March.

He also urged a boycott of Apple products following the tech giant’s stoush with the FBI over its encryption. And he’s flagged a major change in corporate tax to break up its “double dutch sandwich” offshore minimisation tricks.

For his part, Cook hosted multiple Silicon Valley fundraisers for Hillary Clinton, the most recent in August.

In what seemed to be an effort to improve relations, after Trump’s victory Cook wrote a note to Apple’s US employees — which found its way to just about every US media outlet — that concluded: “Let’s move forward — together!”

Hokey? Sure.

But its investors, including Douglass, will hope it helps make Apple’s future great again.

Inside running

Malcolm Turnbull’s government is, quite sensibly, pursuing every helpful connection to the enigmatic administration of the incoming Donald Trump.

Brandi Brandt on the cover of Playboy magazine with Donald Trump in 1990. Picture: Playboy.

One source of Trump familiarity — if not rapport — is a businessman Turnbull worked with back when he ran the Australian arm of Goldman Sachs: former FAI Insurance CEO Rodney Adler.

In his life before prison life, Adler was chummy with Trump.

They bonded over Pat Rafter’s victory at the 1997 US Open and the St Moritz hotel (now the Ritz-Carlton). The hotel was in FAI hands after it took possession of it from fallen billionaire Alan Bond, who himself bought it from Trump for $US180m in 1988 (more than twice the price Trump had paid for it three years earlier).

Adler almost sold the place back to Trump — but instead controversially flipped it to a rival developer, having strung Trump along for a year.

“It wasn’t the pleasantest of conversations,” Adler has said of his confession to the now president-elect.

Here’s hoping the 45th president doesn’t hold that against us. And, hey, with Trump’s lucrative Bond experience, he and Turnbull won’t be short of Australian billionaire stories to swap when they first meet in the Oval Office.