Sun shines down south for Paula Benson

Illustration: Peter Nicholson

Hasn’t Stephen Conroy’s wife Paula Benson bounced back fast?

Months after she left her executive gig at NAB as Andrew Thorburn’s head of corporate ­affairs, Benson has picked up a plum board spot.

She has just been appointed as a director of the Victorian Funds Management Corporation, a public authority that manages $50 billion-odd.

Sod whatever the weather man might say, the sun is always shining in Premier Dan Andrews’ southern republic!

That should cheer up Conroy, the Streetfighting Labor senator (and Victorian ALP power­broker) who has been in such a bad mood over proposed media reforms.

The Benson news follows the appointment of the fund’s new CEO, Lisa Gray. A fellow former NAB executive, Gray was appointed in February.

A spot on the VFMC board is one of the better gigs the Victorian government can dish out.

Former Mirvac chairman James MacKenzie is the current chair — not a surprise really as he is considered one of the businessman best connected with the Andrews government.

MacKenzie got the spot in 2015 after then chairman John Fraser was made Treasury secretary, which forced the former UBS executive, from time to time, to spend the night in Canberra.

Court roll call

We couldn’t spot any of them in the lunch crowd at Fix St James.

But peering down from the peanut gallery in the baroque St James Park court yesterday, you could spot the whole cast.

In an unremarkable grey suit sat convicted 30-year-old insider trader John Hartman, finally in the witness stand at his former best friend’s insider trading trial.

Less than three metres away to his left in a bespoke navy suit, paired with an artfully shaped light blue tie, and tasselled loafers (are they a thing?) was Oliver Curtis, who closely watched Hartman as he calmly answered questions from the barristers.

A further three metres away in an outfit worthy of Fashion Week — and thoroughly exotic in the fusty courtroom — was the wife of the alleged insider trader Curtis, PR queen Roxy Jacenko, whose eyes darted from Hartman to her husband to her white iPhone.

Behind her sat Oliver’s father Nick Curtis, the founder and chairman of corporate advisory firm Riverstone Advisory, which, as it happens, employs his son. Next to Nick sat the burly bodyguard, who has daily accompanied their ensemble. And on the other side of the court to “Ollie”, the 12 jurors who will decide his fate looked on.

Long arm of the law

Meanwhile in Waverley Local Court, the harsh reality of life in Sydney’s eastern suburbs was on display as Shari-Lea Hitchcock, the long-time mistress of billionaire Richard Pratt, pleaded not guilty to charges of biting a member of the Rose Bay constabulary.

The court heard how on Good Friday this year Hitchcock was alleged to have got her choppers into the long arm of the law after a scuffle with another woman who had stopped to help “a 46-year-old woman, who appeared to be intoxicated” and was “walking in the middle of the road”.

Hitchcock, who had a daughter Paula, now 18, with Pratt, was charged with common assault, assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest.

As it happens, Hitchcock was at lunch with girlfriends on the fateful Friday in late March. Paula was among the party.

It’s been a turbulent period for the former mistress.

Last October an AVO was taken out against her boyfriend Dallen Alexander in Nowra Local Court, where it was heard that the pair had had an on-again off-again relationship for three years and had lived together for about 14 months in which there had been numerous instances of domestic violence.

Hitchcock will be back at Waverley court on June 29.

Maiden contrite

Moving to the Goulburn courts where yesterday The Sunday Telegraph’s formidable political editor Sam Maiden had her licence disqualified for seven months.

She also copped a $1000 fine after being convicted of drink driving and failing to obey a police direction while attempting to drive home from a country function.

Speaking outside the court, Maiden could not have been more contrite: “Obviously on the night in question I made a grave error of which I’m deeply remorseful for, underlined by the fact I pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity.”

As our political class know well, Maiden is tough as Blundstones. We trust she’ll bounce back this Sunday.

Grand designs

It’s hard to believe the Member for Batman David Feeney and his politically savvy Maurice Blackburn lawyer wife Liberty Sanger could forget to register their $2.3 million house in Northcote. The Labor power couple have plans for the place worthy of Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designs.

Architect to the rich and famous Rob Mills has been hired to work on the pad in Melbourne’s inner north .

The couple bought the south-facing home in 2013 from a developer who had a proposal to build a block of five flats on the site knocked back by the local council.

Since then and for more than two years the couple have been tinkering away on plans for their new Northcote house.

With Mills’s design team by their side, Feeney and Sanger are planning a new two-storey abode with a pool, which they say will be their home. For now they reside in an East Melbourne apartment, which they bought in 2010 for $2.9m.

They also have an investment property in Seddon, which looks like it might blow over in a modest breeze.

Despite Feeney recalling all the elements of his $6m-plus property portfolio, he can’t disclose its full details now even if he wanted to.

The register closed when the parliament was dissolved on May 9 and Claressa Surtees, who manages the regular flow of paperwork from MPs went overseas on holidays.

Praise be for caretaker mode!

Real-time gifts

Still, an inability to get declarations on to the public record can work in a pollie’s favour.

Last time around, after the 43rd Parliament was dissolved, the Member for Warringah and then opposition leader Tony Abbott tried to record on the register the gift of Rolex watches (which he thought were fake) that had been given to him out of a plastic bag by Chinese instant noodle billionaire Li Ruipeng at an informal dinner at Parliament House in June 2013.

We’ve all been there.

The registrar dutifully sent the Abbott disclosure back, with the instruction to resubmit it as part of his update if he was returned as a member of the 44th Parliament.

When then opposition industry spokesman Ian Macfarlane, who also received a watch, worked out after the September 2013 election (which Abbott won) that the fancy time pieces were real, he told federal director Tony Nutt, who gathered up the watches so they could be returned.

That meant that Abbott never had to resubmit them as gifts and the Abbott Rolexes never appeared on the public record.

Gray sheds the grams

Outgoing federal Labor MP Gary Gray leaves Canberra a much smaller man than when he arrived, having shed a noticeable amount of kilograms in his last few months of office.

But the former resources minister’s standing in the mining community has not diminished, as was demonstrated at a Tuesday dinner in Perth held to welcome various South American government delegations who were in town for the Latin America Down Under mining conference.

The former resources minister’s effusive praise for the industry and its significance to the world went down very well with the assembled.

No doubt there’ll be a few corporate gigs on offer to Gray, who is no stranger to boardrooms given his pre-political career within Woodside Petroleum.

WA’s minister for state development Bill Marmion was along in a particularly jovial mood. Fair enough, too. The dinner got him out of another late-night session with his under-pressure government colleagues.

BHP Billiton’s WA head honcho and Colombian-born Edgar Basto was the highest-profile corporate and would have enjoyed reminiscing about the old country with the president of Colombia’s National Mining Agency, Silvana Habib-Daza.

Hopefully no one brought up the small matter of that Brazilian tailings dam disaster.

The chief executive of nickel miner Western Areas, Dan Lougher, was seated on a table hosting the delegation from Cuba, although we are assured the company has no intentions of heading to Havana to pick up a slice of the local nickel industry.

PM dines out

Meanwhile in our nation’s capital, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s head bureaucrat Martin Parkinson and the Secretary of the Department of Communications (and Parky’s wife) Heather Smith were out to dinner at Manuka Italian restaurant Belluci’s on Tuesday night.

Good to see that the Canberra power couple taking advantage of the relative quiet of caretaker mode for a romantic detail.