Penthouse’s Damien Costas gulps from Milo Yiannopoulos mug

Illustration: Rod Clement.

There’s a diverse cast of outrage merchants and colourful business people cashing in on visiting controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos’s Australian tour.

The former Breitbart personality popped in to Canberra’s Parliament House yesterday, where the 33-year-old felt that his ­future was so bright he had to wear shades.

Perhaps it was his earlier Alan Jones pep talk.

Or maybe it was just the glare from One Nation’s Pauline Hanson seated in the front row, with independent senator David Leyonhjelm asking the dorothy dixers and as the interminably disloyal Nationals senator ­George Christensen watched on.

Turns out Leyonhjelm shares the same book publisher as the Greek-born, English-raised and now US-residing Yiannopoulos in Michael Wilkinson from Wilkinson Publishing, who was also in the meeting room to see his writing talent collide.

With Wilkinson was Yiannopoulos’s local publicist Max Markson and Yiannopoulos’s tour promoter Damien Costas, publisher of dinosaur porno mag Penthouse in Australia and New Zealand.

Milo Yiannopoulos speaks alongside Penthouse Australia/NZ publisher Damien Costas. Picture; Getty Images.

The unembarrassable Markson is the mag’s publicist, too, and also manages former Labor leader turned reactionary Mark Latham, who has helped with master of ceremony duties on the tour, along with right wingers Ross Cameron and Christensen’s senior political adviser, Andrew Bolt. Latham is also on Wilkinson’s writers roster, so plenty of circles within circles.

Costas couldn’t be blamed for tuning out momentarily from Milo’s press conference to tally the “fortune” (his word) that ­Yiannopoulos’s Aussie tour is dragging in to help fund the twice-failed local version of the girlie mag into the future, as well as opening an associated “supper club” in Sydney in the new year.

Margin Call understands that the Crown Street, Darlinghurst establishment is to be known as Guccione’s after the late US founder of the mag Bob Guccione. How sweet.

Along with planning Milo’s Aussie incursion, Costas has in the second half of the year rented a new premise in inner-city Darlinghurst, created a new corporate vehicle for the enterprise and put his foot on a domain name for a website.

All he needs to do now is sit back and wait for the Milo-generated cash to roll in.

Loud and clear

Didn’t BHP’s Scottish chief executive, Andrew Mackenzie,lay it on thick at the Melbourne Mining Club?

“Let me say it loud and clear, Melbourne is still at the centre of mining,” Mackenzie, 61 in a fortnight, told the high-powered room of Australian diggers and dealers yesterday.

“I live here and that’s important,” the St Kilda-supporting, Richmond-residing Mackenzie said.

That sounded an awful lot like a dig at the French-born, London-residing Jean-Sebastien Jacques, who runs rival Anglo-Australian global miner Rio Tinto and seems to have upset the more traditionalist pockets of the local mining scene by making no secret of his preference for Sydney’s sparkling harbour over Melbourne’s brown river.

BHP duo Ken MacKenzie and Andrew Mackenzie. Picture: Stuart McEvoy.

Despite being in the country, JS — who with wife Muriel Demarcus recently bought a $3 million apartment in Sydney’s Walsh Bay — was one of the rare mining bigwigs not along at the Mining Club.

Listening to Mackenzie were the boss of goldmining giant Newcrest Sandeep Biswas, boss of explosive outfit Orica Alberto Calderon, Shell Australia chairman Zoe Yujnovich, mining grandee Arvi Parbo and former WMC chief Hugh Morgan, one of the Cormack Foundation associates that president Michael Kroger’s Victorian Liberal division is dragging through the federal court.

Tale of one city

Andrew Mackenzie’s youthful BHP chairman, Ken MacKenzie,was also in the Melbourne Mining Club crowd.

There’s no doubting the 53-year-old, Canadian-born MacKenzie’s commitment to Melbourne, either.

As well as being elevated to one of the country’s most prestigious chairmanships, the former CEO of box business Amcor has this year been trading South Yarra property.

On June 13, three days before he was appointed as Jac “The Knife” Nasser’s replacement at BHP, MacKenzie and wife Dorothee Hansen-MacKenzie completed the $6.8m sale of the beautiful South Yarra terrace they bought for $4.6m in late 2012.

The buyer in the until now private transaction? None other than Georgia-born Macquarie Bank director Patricia Cross. Seems she and MacKenzie have more than just North American roots in common.

MacKenzie and Hansen-MacKenzie remain in South Yarra, having traded up to a majestic residence on one of the suburb’s most prestigious streets. They settled on their $7.5m, six-bedroom heritage residence in May 2015 — a month after MacKenzie’s 10-year reign at Amcor came to an end.

Seems there won’t be any harbourside property shifts in the Big Australian’s near future.

Fair result

A small victory for the ladies at billionaire Kerry Stokes’s Seven West Media to end a difficult year.

Word from Seven’s Pyrmont bunker is that internal legal counsel to the free-to-air broadcaster Justine McCarthy will be named as Bridget Fair’s permanent replacement as head of corporate and regulatory affairs.

Initially word was that McCarthy would merely fill in for Fair, who is off to run the Harold Mitchell-chaired industry lobby group Free TV, while a wider search was undertaken for the key role.

However, McCarthy is Stokes’s anointed one and will shortly join boss Tim Worner’s executive team, which after Fair departs only has one other woman: HR boss Katie McGrath, who joined in June.

McCarthy joined the media group from law firm Clayton Utz in 2012 and before that was with Herbert Smith Freehills.

It is understood McCarthy’s appointment still needs to be ticked off by the Stokes-chaired board — but, really, that’s just a bit of paperwork.

Paying tribute

The NSW Labor Right gathered in Macquarie Street’s Strangers Dining Room last night to pay tribute to one of their greats, the late Johno Johnson.

After taking a battering in recent weeks over its links to Chinese donors of interest to ASIO, it was an evening for the Sussex Street players to honour their better side.

And what a turnout: former prime minister Paul Keating, state opposition leader Luke Foley, NSW general-secretary Kaila Murnain, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher and the secretary of Unions NSW Mark Morey.

Although, perhaps surprisingly considering recent circumstances, no sign of either Yuhu billionaire Huang Xiangmo or ASIO’s chief spook, Duncan Lewis.