Unions join banking witch hunt

Illustration: Rod Clement.

Sally McManus ’s ACTU has joined forces with staff at the big four banks to ramp up the campaign for a banking royal commission, as an inquiry into the $3.5 trillion sector becomes increasingly likely.

The Julia Angrisano-led Finance Sector Union had been against a royal commission into the banking sector but in April last year switched sides — provided its terms didn’t allow it to become a witch hunt targeting bank minions.

And now that a commission is virtually a fait accompli, the ACTU and FSU have this week pooled their resources and escalated their campaign.

The pair on Monday evening began robocalling voters in four key federal electorates, including Finance Minister Kelly O’Dwyer ’sHiggins.

The recorded 30-second message features just-retired ANZ employee and FSU member Jenny Lennox, who says she understands how the banks work and believes that Australia needs a royal commission to get to the bottom of what the banks are up to.

“We need a royal commission and we need it now,” Lennox implores.

Earlier on Monday FSU reps along with former bank employees met with a range of politicians in Canberra including Labor heavyweights Bill Shorten, Chris Bowen and Tanya Plibersek, Labor senator Katy Gallagher, Nick Xenophon Team’s MP Rebekha Sharkie and the Greens’ Adam Bandt to outline the pressure they say the big banks put on their staff to sell customers products they could not afford.

As this week rolls on, the FSU and ACTU will be making royal commission calls in about 10 other electorates it considers vulnerable at the next federal election, due in the next 18 months.

If Nationals senator Barry O’Sullivan ’s commission of inquiry doesn’t get up in the next fortnight, expect this union-led campaign to rage through the summer.

Bermuda blues

Former AFL boss Andrew ­Demetriou seemed as surprised as we were by his cameo in the now public Paradise Papers.

After some investigating, ­Demetriou, now a director on James Packer ’s Crown Resorts board, told us his Paradise appearance related to his older brother James Demetriou, the former Essendon player-turned lawyer.

His brother James said he was also unaware of the connection to the shorts-and-high socks brigade.

“That is all news to me,” James told us.

According to the Paradise Papers, Andrew Demetriou was a shareholder of a Bermuda-registered company called AccTrak21 International Limited, which was created in 2001 by offshore tax specialist firm Appleby.

Andrew Demetriou’s older brother, James Demetriou.

Back in the late 1990s, brother James worked for AccTrak21, a Kuala Lumpur-based accounting software company.

Company records show from 1996 to late 1999, James was a director of the company’s local outfit AccTrak21 Australasia Pty.

James was given some shares in the business, which under its Kiwi-born managing director Tim Loving had ambitious plans to expand across the globe after advancing into the US and Australia, where it attempted to rival the Chris Lee-founded MYOB.

Andrew held the shares in the Bermuda-domiciled parent company on behalf of his brother.

“I got very ill and said to Andrew, ‘Will you hold these on my behalf?’,” James told us.

But the accounting venture did not work out.

By 2010 the Bermuda-based vehicle closed as the business went into administration.

Despite being domiciled for almost 10 years on the pink-sanded island, both Andrew and James Demetriou said they were unaware the company had migrated to Bermuda.

James told us he didn’t believe that oversight would cause any tax problems because the business didn’t make a profit or any capital gains.

No doubt that’s right, but it might still be worth flagging with his accountant and brother George Demetriou.

Just to be sure.

Man of the land

Tim Roberts-Thomson looks more and more like a cattle king after outlaying a speculated
$45 million to buy a large-scale cattle estate on Tasmania’s evergreen King Island.

The sale of the 6800ha King Island aggregation, which includes more than 10,000 Angus cattle, was confirmed last night by Martin Newnham, chief executive of specialist agricultural asset manager AgCAP, and hearty CBRE agricultural land spruiker Danny Thomas.

AgCAP is selling the entire portfolio of farms in its $180m Sustainable Agricultural Fund on behalf of 10 superannuation funds — which include AustralianSuper, Australian Catholic Super and AMP Capital — which are keen to exit the unpredictable farming sector at the top of the rural property market.

Tim and James Roberts-Thomson

Roberts-Thomson, together with his son James, owns TRT Pastoral, a cattle and farming business grown out of Roberts-Thomson’s 33-year-old industrial, school, government and healthcare contract cleaning business Mermaid Property Services, as well as
his cash windfall from the gradual disposal of his family stake in Hutchison Telecoms Australia, which he founded in 1989 along with his brother Barry Roberts-Thomson and Hong Kong’s richest man, Li Ka-shing.

TRT Pastoral is no new entry to the booming cattle and agricultural industry, unlike Australia’s richest woman Gina Rinehart or Amazon fighter Gerry Harvey.

Way back in 1994, Tim Roberts-Thomson bought trophy Howquadale Station fronting the magnificent Howqua and Delatite rivers near Mansfield in northeast Victoria, where he has since run a successful Poll Hereford cattle-breeding operation.

In 2007, at the depth of the millennium drought, TRT Pastoral bought the showcase 35,000ha co-joined properties of Juanbung and Boyong stations at the key junction of the Murrumbidgee and Lachlan rivers near Hay — described as the Kakadu of the NSW Riverina — from the Argentine billionaire and former Twynam pastoral boss John Kahlbetzer for a canny $10m.

Chip off the old block

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s daughter Daisy Turnbull Brown already had two jobs — one as a private school teacher and another as mother to two children.

And now she’s added a third gig to her repertoire — entrepreneur, just like her parents.

Embracing the destiny of her first name, Turnbull Brown has started a flower business in the basement of her and husband James Brown’s basement in Sydney’s Paddington, a home that she co-owns with her mother and first lady Lucy Turnbull.

The enterprise is called Unbunched and is backed by a company that the 32-year-old Turnbull Brown has called Knockers Capital.

She is running it with friend Amelia Taylor.

Like that of her ultra-high-achieving parents, Daisy’s is a full tilt household. Husband James Brown is a war veteran turned academic.

The ambitious Brown — who has been spoken of as a future Liberal MP — is currently on a leave of absence from the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney as he cleans up the tattered NSW branch of the RSL, of which he is the newish, reforming president.