What the man said to the Bishop

Brisbane’s ‘tower of power’ is almost ready.

James Toback is known as “one of Hollywood’s biggest creeps”, so it is with some relief that we can report that his recent meeting in New York with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop was professional at all times.

To go by the considerable literature on the man, that was no sure thing.

Julie Bishop, Brett Ratner and James Toback.

Toback, now 71, has for decades had a reputation for risque approaches — often while wearing a raincoat — to women in New York.

The poster for James Toback’s 1987 film The Pick-up Artist.

His signature move — as first documented in a cringeworthy feature in Spy magazine in 1989, and again thoroughly documented in recent years — is to big-note himself as a Hollywood director, tell his target “You need to be in my next movie”, and suggest they head to the Harvard Club in midtown.

The rest of his pick-up material isn’t fit to publish in this newspaper.

So what was the writer and director — who appropriately enough was behind the 1987 Robert Downey Jr-vehicle The Pick-up Artist — doing with his arm around our Foreign Minister at Liberal grandee Nick Minchin’s consulate in New York?

Toback was at the lunch as the plus-one of Brett Ratner, who Bishop knows well through their mutual friend — and Ratner’s Hollywood business partner — James Packer, the Crown billionaire.

The three were discussing potential film productions that could be done in Australia. It’s not clear how far advanced an Australian-based Toback production is, or how worried we should all be.

It’s an instructive example of the perils of the trademark brand of selfie diplomacy the DFAT star practises, which has Bishop at one moment solving the world’s problems with civic-minded billionaire Mike Bloomberg, then embracing US Secretary of State John Kerry after hanging out with The Pick-up Artist.

The tower of power

Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Queens­land government — and her an army of 5000 state bureaucrats — should start moving into their new $653 million riverfront “Tower of Power” in Brisbane next month.

Brisbane’s “Tower of Power” is almost ready for the Palaszczuk government.

There are just a few touches on 1 William Street to be finalised, including the signage that will be emblazoned on what — at 266m high — is the city’s tallest tower. The Woods Bagot-­designed tower certainly provides highly visible advertising space.

Our mail is that, after some sort of tender process, the sign has been won — or rather bought — by Cbus Property, its developer. Cbus owns half the building.

The other half is owned by ISPT Super Property.

Palaszczuk inherited the leased space from her predecessor Campbell Newman, who signed an extravagant 15-year contract back in 2012, which the current government can’t break. According to local agents, no other tenant would pay the steep net annual rent of about $650 a square metre for 75,000sq m.

Current Treasurer Curtis Pitt called the Newman inheritance the “biggest financial debacle in Queensland’s history”. So don’t expect to see the anchor tenant’s logo stamped up the top.

Cbus — Construction and Building Unions Superannuation — is a Melbourne-based industry fund, chaired by former Victorian Premier Steve Bracks, with about $27 billion under management.

Considering the rent the Victorians are charging the Queensland taxpayer, they are hardly short of money to secure Brisbane’s most visible billboard.

Watchdog bites

There’s a bit going on in the Cbus world, at least at board level.

John Dawkins was education minister in the Hawke government.

The industry superannuation fund’s independent director is John Dawkins, the former Hawke government education minister.

It will be interesting to watch how long Dawkins — who only this week was on the front page of the Australian Financial Review, lecturing the Labor Party on higher education policy — stays in the Cbus role after yesterday’s development.

As was revealed by the ABC, Greg Medcraft’s corporate watchdog ASIC is pursuing the former chairman of collapsed private education roll-up Vocation with civil charges of “misleading and deceptive conduct”. Dawkins says “ASIC’s proceedings will be vigorously defended”.

For now, in addition to his Cbus duties, Dawkins is a co-chair, alongside former Howard government minister Helen Coonan, of the public affairs and corporate PR firm GRACosway. That’s an awkward hat to wear as the ASIC case goes ahead.

It’s an unfortunate end of September for Dawkins.

The month began with the good news that he had joined the board of listed NSW central coast property development play Hudson Investment Group, a firm with a market cap of $8.4m, making it one of the smaller firms on Dominic Stevens’s stock exchange.

No hooray for Henry

Treasurer Scott Morrison didn’t even try to keep a straight face yesterday when he was asked about NAB chair Ken Henry’s concern about the budget.

Treasurer Scott Morrison. Picture: Kym Smith.

Henry — the wombat-loving federal Treasury secretary from 2001 to 2011 — told this paper over the weekend that, despite the Turnbull government’s recent success improving the budget bottom line by $6.3 billion, by his calculation it was still short $360bn to honour policy commitments and discharge debt.

Secretary of the Treasury John Fraser.

“Is he right?” ScoMo was asked by Aunty’s Michael Brissenden.

“A lot of that spending, as Ken will remember, (was) during the years at which he was Treasury secretary, telling the previous government to go household and go hard,” said ScoMo, struggling to contain his glee.

We can only imagine the conversation ScoMo had with his current Treasury chief John Fraser about Henry’s latest contribution to fiscal debate.

Speaking of Fraser, he certainly seems to be getting along well with his Treasurer — even before he set fire to the “wellbeing framework” Henry created for Treasury back in his day.

The Henry document described wellbeing as “a grassroots statement of our mission, encompassing market, non-market, material and intangible components”.

Fraser razed that and replaced it with a sharper focus on the long-term fiscal. A man after ScoMo’s heart.

Their fiscal bromance has some wondering if reports of Fraser’s departure from Treasury are premature.

The field of likely replacements include Environment secretary Gordon de Brouwer (the cunning fellow who helped Greg Hunt smuggle a “secret” emissions trading scheme into Abbott’s direct action scheme) and Mike Baird’s chief bureaucrat Blair Comley (a protege of Martin Parkinson, the head of Malcolm Turnbull’s public service), but they might have to wait a while yet — at least if Fraser keeps enjoying the job.