Smart Roxy Jacenko develops interest in property

It has been a big week for Roxy Jacenko, who has added Sydney eastern suburbs property developer to her other business interests as a fashion publicist and professional Instagrammer.

Work has just begun at the Paddington property Jacenko, 36, bought for $2.66 million at an auction in mid-2014.

After more than two years of stunning growth in the eastern suburbs property market, that’s looking like a smart purchase.

The building was previously a cafe and commercial office. It was bought through a company, RPHC Holdings, of which she is sole director.

At the time it was reported that Jacenko was going to move her PR firm, Sweaty Betty, into the building — a plan that didn’t seem to do justice to her boundless ambition.

The revised plan received approval from Woollahra Council last year and is a much better fit to her entrepreneurial character. Her development application was approved to build six apartments on the site (for $1.7m worth of work).

Luxe architect SJB is doing the work, which should be done by the time Jacenko’s husband Oliver Curtis is released from prison after serving his sentence for insider trading.

NAB defections

Another week, another one of Andrew Thorburn’s NAB army is jumping ship to private health insurer Medibank.

Medibank boss Craig Drummond. Picture: Stuart McEvoy/The Australian.

The latest is Emily Ritchie, who helped run the media for the spin-off of NAB’s troublesome British business, Clydesdale Bank, which was completed in March.

Ritchie will be in charge of Medibank’s media, reporting to her old boss at NAB, Meaghan Telford, who hopped to the private insurer back in July. Telford is now the head of external affairs.

Since July, Medibank has been run by Craig “Mark” Drummond — the man Thorburn beat to the NAB top job back in August 2014.

It is yet another departure from NAB’s communications wing, and follows last month’s departure of group executive Michaela Healey and Stephen Conroy’s better half Paula Benson, who was the division’s key executive until she left in March.

Not-so-big Australian

BHP Billiton boss Andrew Mackenzie’s cash remuneration wasn’t halved to $2.95m for nothing.

It’s been a horrible year for the shrinking Big Australian.

BHP Billiton boss Andrew Mackenzie.

The stock’s down 12 per cent over the past 12 months. The miner has shed 15,000 jobs — 19 per cent of its workforce.

And the latest manifestation is the interesting arrangement flagged for the miner’s AGM, which will be held at the Brisbane Convention Centre on November 17.

Before chairman Jac “The Knife” Nasser kicks off the official meeting at 11am, some of BHP’s key executives — led by Mackenzie — will run a “shareholder information session”.

That will give a chance to talk about “community issues, developments with Samarco and climate change”, before the webcast AGM begins.

The expected robust exchange with the anti-fossil fuel crowd should provide some needed cut and thrust for new executive George Wright (previously the Labor Party’s national secretary), who by then will be six weeks into his job after politics and likely in need of the adrenaline.

Think tank wars

The local think tank wars continue to blaze.

Former foreign minister Bob Carr. Picture: James Croucher.

Former foreign minister Bob Carr is now running the Australia-China Relations Institute, which in its foundation stages received a $1.8m donation from Yuhu Chinese property magnate Huang Xiangmo, who has been a generous donor to both major political parties.

Peter Jennings, the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Picture: YouTube.

Executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute Peter Jennings has been one of the most vocal critics of Carr’s influence on Australian foreign policy. Jennings worries that Carr as foreign minister, and in his subsequent life, has taken “active steps to try to elevate China’s position relative to
the US”.

On ABC radio yesterday, Carr asked why people weren’t raising funding questions with Jennings over his defence strategy think tank?

Just under half of ASPI’s funds come from the Defence Department. The rest — about 54 per cent in the most recent year, as documented in its annual report, which will be tabled next month — comes from other sources, including the Commonwealth Bank, PwC, IBM (the census experts), the Japanese government — and, most interesting to Carr, American weapons manufacturers Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

“We’re not here to promote a line about anything,” says Jennings, who noted ASPI, as a creation of the Australian government, has to table an annual report to parliament explaining its operation.

But won’t funding from weapons manufacturers tilt ASPI’s research towards the hawkish on foreign policy questions?

“I don’t need to receive sponsorship from anyone to be a hawk. I’m pro-defence industry,” he told us. “I’m pro-US alliance. If that makes me hawkish, guilty as charged.”

Please explain

Twenty years after she shocked Australian politics with a maiden speech that claimed Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians”, where should One Nation senator Pauline Hanson and the gang dine in Canberra but Griffith Vietnamese? That would never have happened in 1996. The BYO restaurant is a favourite of the political class. One of its traditions is for diners to scribble a line and sign a sheet for the walls.

Pauline Hanson and the gang dined at Griffith Vietnamese.

Which is exactly what Hanson (who had the sweet and sour pork), her fellow Queensland senator Malcolm Roberts (with the idiosyncratic climate ideas), her NSW senator Brian Burston and adviser James Ashby (of “Slippergate” fame) did on their debut visit to Canberra as a team last month.

“I don’t like it! I love it! Please explain!” wrote Hanson.

“The empirical evidence is here — delicious,” wrote Roberts.

Over the decades, the One Nation founder has substituted “Muslims” for “Asians” in her revised worldview.

So while Canberrans may bump into Hanson’s new crew in coming months at Tony Abbott’s favourite Chinese restaurant, Portia’s, Paul Keating’s preferred Turkish restaurant Ottoman should remain a One Nation free space.