Sin-binned Bridget is still a good sport

Rod Clement Margin Call cartoon.

The former federal frontbencher Bridget McKenzie isn’t going to be caught out on her pecuniary interest declarations ever again.

McKenzie stepped down as the deputy leader of the Nationals last month after it came to light she hadn’t disclosed her membership of Wangaratta clay target club that had received funding in the sports grants program while she was sports minister.

She’s still a sports enthusiast, sitting among the record 86,174 at the MCG on Sunday night.

Margin Call spotted that she’d expeditiously updated her receipt of corporate hospitality, courtesy of Commonwealth Bank, even before she turned up to the ICC Women’s T20 cricket final.

CBA boss Matt Comyn hosted 200 guests, with McKenzie the most conspicuous of the half dozen or so attending colleagues.

McKenzie’s official paperwork, lodged last week, was followed by her posting a national anthem video from the ground on to her facebook page, which has 13,000 devotees.

“It was a great event and fantastic for women’s sport,” she told us.

CBA has sponsored the women’s cricket team for 21 years.

A new big cheese

Barry Irvin, the hands-on executive chairman of dairy group Bega Cheese, is taking his hands off the udder.

It comes after the energised Bega Cheese veteran returned to work earlier this year with positive results and prognosis after undergoing chemotherapy.

No waning of enthusiasm for the industry on either the corporate or personal side.

Indeed, he has expanded his own private dairy holdings, selling 700,000 shares in the dairy group, worth just over $3m, to fund his latest purchase.

The shares had been trading at $4.51 last week, but dropped to $4.14 on Monday.

Irvin, who has been at the ASX-listed company for two decades, retains 2 million shares, worth around $8.2m.

His sell-off came after the company reported a 17 per cent revenue rise in the first half of the year to $230m, which had prompted an 11 per cent price spike.

Irvin told shareholders he’d had bought a “significant neighbouring dairy farm” with associated water rights through his family investment company.

His family has been buying farms on the NSW far south coast since the late 1970s.

The Bega Cheese company was founded as a dairy co-operative in the 1890s and turns over more than $1.4bn annually.

In 2017, Bega expanded its portfolio to include peanut butter.

This year Irvin has given up his regular early Monday morning milking duties on the family farm, which he’d done to remind himself what all his suppliers were going through.

“If you’re dealing with drought, they’re dealing with drought … or dealing with floods and mud and whatever it might be.”

(Of course, Bega was also hit by fires this year.)

“It can fade if you don’t keep doing it and reminding yourself where this business began,” he told the rural press.

Given farmers are searching for margin and stable trading conditions while trying to navigate climate change, Irvin decided that he had “to give it my all”.

His son, Andrew, has assumed management of the dairy farm.

Super blooper

Something of an ALP own goal on Monday when the Senate economics committee was meeting to review the bill to allow superannuation choice.

Labor senator Tony Sheldon, a committee member, formally declared his allegiance to the Transport Workers Union, where he was a former national secretary.

Sheldon further advised he had exercised his own super choice since becoming a NSW senator last July.

He’d elected to stay with TWUSuper, rather than join the one that the Commonwealth politicians can join, the Public Sector Superannuation accumulation plan (PSSap).

The acting economics committee chairman, Senator Andrew Bragg, seized the moment.

“With parliamentary colleagues we can all choose our own super fund as Senator Sheldon inadvertently highlighted.

“Senator Sheldon says he is exercising choice to contribute to TWUSuper as a member of parliament,” Senator Bragg added.

“This is the same right that he and the TWU want to deny its own members.”

The hearing was told by TWU national secretary Michael Kaine that “collective choice” was more effective for his members than individual choice.

The government’s Your Super, Your Choice Bill will prohibit enterprise agreements that lock workers into union-backed super funds.

“TWUSuper is governed at the board level by union officials (and) they are scared of competition,” Senator Bragg added.

Through the roof

There’s a new $8m Canberra record residential homebuyer, but no one has yet pinpointed the biggest homebuyer in the national capital of the past decade.

Berkely agent Bill Lyristakis was always hopeful it would break the $7.3m Canberra house record that was set just next door back in 2010.

But it took 16 months to secure the sale.

Woodleigh, the Red Hill property, was sold last week by Lynlea and Clive Rodger who’d bought the Mugga Way home in 2000 for $2m. The Rodgers’ purchase from Gordon and Doreen Smith, of Discount Tyre Service acclaim, had bettered the then $1.79m Canberra price record.

Woodleigh, a two-storey house with 508sq m internal floor space, sits on a 7963sq m block, with tennis court, pool and a koi pond.

The highest sale in the past decade was just across Mugga Way, which sold in 2013 for $7.2m.