Successful businesswoman Helena Carr was farewelled on Tuesday by a veritable who’s who of Australian politics and business, after dying late last month while in the Austrian capital of Vienna.
St Mary’s Cathedral at Sydney’s Hyde Park was jammed with mourners, led by the business executive’s husband of 50 years, former premier of NSW and senator and foreign affairs minister Bob Carr.
Labor powerbrokers and heavyweights, both past and present, came to pay their respects to the long-time first lady of NSW politics, including former prime minister Paul Keating and his former wife Annita van Iersel, along with NSW Premier Chris Minns, his wife Anna and NSW Deputy Premier Prue Car.
Anthony Albanese’s ministry was well represented, with Education Minister Jason Clare, himself a former staffer to Carr in NSW, speaking on behalf of the PM, who stayed in Canberra where the parliament was sitting.
NSW federal representatives including Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, Indigenous Affairs Minister and veteran also of the NSW parliament Linda Burney, Assistant Minister for the Republic Matt Thistlethwaite and high-profile senator and PwC nemesis Deb O’Neill all attended the service.
From Team Blue, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and wife Lucy were also there, with widower Carr recalling how the Turnbulls had had their first date at a dinner at the Carrs’ home.
Former ALP politician turned broadcaster and party heavyweight Graham Richardson was there too. Richo and late stockbroker Rene Rivkin took Helena’s place alongside Eddie Obeid as an investor in the 1990s takeover of listed company Offset Alpine Printing, after Carr pulled out of the deal. The company had been owned by Kerry Packer.
The business’s printing plant in Sydney subsequently burned down and was the subject of a years-long police and ASIC investigation, which came to naught.
Former ALP leader Kim Beazley, former transport minister Laurie Brereton, ALP numbers man Leo McLeay, ex-NSW minister Rod Cavalier, one-time defence minister John Faulkner and ex-Victorian premier and now Maurice Blackburn chair Steve Bracks and wife Terry were also in the church to pay their respects.
Also along was Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore and one-time mayor Frank Sartor, broadcaster Alan Jones – who was managing with a walking stick – and former NSW premier Morris Iemma, also assisted by a single crutch.
Former opposition leader Jodi McKay also attended, along with NSW Attorney-General Michael Daley, former NSW health minister Brad Hazzard and his old colleague Carl Scully, who’s now running an eponymously named consultancy shop. Former NSW premier Barrie Unsworth was there, as was lawyer, Carr bestie and ex-Australian ambassador to the Vatican John McCarthy.
NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey took time out from the state’s financials to also be there, as did former NSW pollie, ex-wife of the current PM and now Odyssey House CEO Carmel Tebbutt, and former NSW opposition leader Luke Foley.
Quite the turnout.
Fooling around
When it comes to the disasters that have befallen their Australian telco outpost Optus over the past 13 or so months, could the joke ultimately be on the powers that be at Singapore Telecommunications?
Fate may not be on the side of the $44bn Asian telco giant, which is owned by the Singapore government’s investment arm Temasek Holdings, whose local chief Kelly Bayer Rosmarin remains in damage control following last week’s national network outage.
Could the very first line of Bayer Rosmarin’s executive bio on the Optus website have foretold of the chaos to come?
“Kelly Bayer Rosmarin commenced as CEO of Optus and Consumer Australia on April 1, 2020,” it reads. Ah, April Fools’ Day, the one day each year when practical jokers and hoaxers run amok.
Whether her appointment was a joke gone bad all depends on how you see Bayer Rosmarin’s 2½-year tenure.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland seems frustrated enough by Optus’s cyber hack in October last year and then last week’s disaster to consider Bayer Rosmarin’s appointment a hoax gone very wrong.
The communications regulator’s review of last week’s outage, along with the telco boss’s appearance before a Senate inquiry, should provide further intelligence as to the significance of her start date.
If one incident is an anomaly, are two a coincidence or a pattern? And what if there is a third? Clearly, that’s just bad management.
Straight talking
Italian lawyer, human rights expert and academic Francesca Albanese took no prisoners at the National Press Club in Canberra on Tuesday.
Albanese is in Australia as a guest of the Australian Friends of Palestine Association in her role as the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories.
At lunch she showed why she is a controversial figure: earlier this year 18 members from both sides of the US congress joined together to call for her removal from her UN role because of “her strong bias against Israel”.
If Albanese doesn’t like what she hears, you’ll know about it.
To a question asked by Sky News anchor and National Press Club lunch host Tom Connell, she said: “I beg your pardon, I don’t mean to be rude, but can you really keep a straight face as you ask me this question?”
And to foreign affairs and national security correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age Matthew Knott: “Really you have some media that is as manipulative as in Italy.”
And there was more to go around with our PM’s namesake employing a refreshingly feisty, pull-no-punches approach.
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