Wider front in petrol conflict; NSW Libs’ svengali

United Petroleum chief executive David Szymczak.

No end of irony to the Scooby-doo unmasking of United Petroleum chief executive David Szymczak in the Federal Court on Wednesday.

Szymczak was revealed as the top-secret client who hired strategists at Civic Group to besmirch OTR, a competitor business from South Australia intent on elbowing its way into the Victorian market. United were petrified of how that would decimate their margins.

There’s a layer of political intrigue to this story that’s lost in the regulation dullness of the directions and interlocutories of the civil courts.

United Petroleum was founded by Israeli-born billionaires Avi Silver and Eddie Hirsch. Their competitors in this instance were the Shahin brothers – Yasser, Khalil (Charlie) and Samer (Sam) – who remained on the OTR board until the family empire was bought out by Viva Energy for $1.2bn in March.

The Shahins are of Lebanese-Palestinian origin, and Samer, in particular, is politically active as a co-founder and treasurer of the Australian Friends of Palestine Association, an organisation whose positions on Hamas, the proscribed terrorist organisation, are worth noting in the supercharged political climate of the present day.

OTR’s Khalil “Charlie” Shahin.

Two years ago the AFPA told a Senate inquiry that Hamas, responsible for the October 7 attacks in southern Israel, was not in fact a terrorist group at all and designating it as such would be morally wrong.

“Hamas’s ultimate objective is the liberation of Palestine. It is a bona fide resistance group,” the Association wrote, comparing the terror group to that of a stone-throwing child or a pregnant woman, and other civilians in Gaza. “To so categorise such as terrorists is a bid to discredit and silence opponents.”

Having forced Civic Group to cough up the name of their client, the Shahins have now dusted their hands of this lengthy legal side quest and presumably will now turn their legal armaments on to United Petroleum.

But the pursuit of Civic was always questionable, a case mounted on spurious grounds of copyright infringement. OTR’s legal ambition was to sue Civic Group for distributing a photograph of Yasser Shahin alongside Warren Wilmot, the disgraced former CEO of 7-Eleven, who left the company in 2015 amid a worker underpayment scandal.

Bizarrely, the forbidden photograph of Wilmot with Shahin was actually published by OTR itself – as a promotional shot – to mark Wilmot’s appointment as OTR’s chief executive officer three years later.

It’s funny because OTR would go on to face similar accusations of wage theft in the forthcoming years. In April the company was found guilty of stealing $2.3m in entitlements from 1500 of its employees. Two years earlier it paid $5.8m to settle another case of worker underpayment.

And then, we note, are Civic’s known links to the Jewish community, through its partners and employees, and its assistance to the Israeli embassy, when it invited journalists for a screening of the graphic footage collected of the Hamas massacres – or what some in the Shahin family might shrug off as resistance.

Seizing the chance

Oh, the anger! The grief! So much raw anguish over the implosions within the NSW Liberals, and all of it guided by tractor beam at party president Don Harwin and Opposition Leader Mark Speakman, their careers now evidently on thin ice … and you best believe the sun is shining.

And yet so little has been said of Speakman’s mischievous, scheming deputy, Natalie Ward. She’s been up to her hairline in the organised man-skinning of Shields and running a personal protection racket for Harwin, her factional godfather.

Speakman’s folly was publicly insisting last week that his state director, Richard Shields, “fall on his sword” over the council nominations fiasco. That was stupid. Was it spurred by an unscheduled temporal lobe difficulty? Was it a desperate attempt to appear strong and virile in the face of perceptions that he runs a custard-soft leadership? Or was it more likely that Ward has just been the egger-on in chief of Speakman’s woeful public remarks? If this was the Lion King, she would definitely play Scar.

At the first sign of trouble last week, Ward convened Liberals in her office for a 6pm crisis meeting, pushing a narrative onto everyone that Shields was expendable and that Speakman needed to kill him off to be perceived as a “strong, decisive leader”. Harwin, you can be assured, did not come in for the same treatment.

NSW Liberal Party deputy leader Natalie Ward and leader Mark Speakman. Picture: Richard Dobson

Ward revealed at the same meeting that she’d already reached out to Shields’ predecessor, Chris Stone, asking if he would act as an interim replacement – this while Shields himself was still in the job.

Sharpened political instincts aren’t required to see Ward’s long-game. She covets a lower house seat to be premier one day, but she was already burnt once in a previous attempt, two years ago, when she lost a preselection battle to the savvy Matt Cross, formerly a staffer to ex-premier Mike Baird, and who won by sipping a million cups of tea with the elderly delegates of Davidson.

Ward, who would sooner eat glass than chitchat for hours about modular nuclear reactors, doesn’t believe in legwork. She’s a master skydiver of political parachuting and entitlement, believing seats in parliament should be awarded like a peerage, and no one, in her mind, is more entitled than she. A friendly state director could helpfully act as facilitator of her dreams.

We’re not denying that Speakman’s a leader with his own agency, making his own silly decisions. He’s not Ward’s ventriloquist doll – but it’s clear to see that it’s been her hand in the small of his back this whole time, channelling him into poor decision-making, pushing him out into the acid rain.

Flights of fancy

Labor-linked pollster Kos Samaras of Redbridge appeared in the Financial Review this week on the topic of aircraft noise. He was talking about the political risk of this cacophony and the pressure it might create in marginal seats close by, federal and state, vexed as they are by the possibility of a third runway at Tullamarine airport.

For you see, the neighbourhoods surrounding Tullamarine are gentrifying, Samaras said, and this was “definitely going to be a problem” for Labor. He may well be right.

But for Samaras and Redbridge, the fact that they lobby for the unloved Avalon airport near Geelong is certainly no issue. He says the two aren’t in competition.

“It offers a different product. It services a different part of Victoria,” Samaras told Margin Call. “Melbourne Airport is effectively the only airport in the state of Victoria that has the type of services it offers. There is no other alternative.”

Meanwhile, Avalon’s website says it can’t wait to expand its role in international travel.

“Avalon Airport is the gateway to the world and we can’t wait to get back to taking you to new and exotic destinations! Watch this space to be the first to find out which exciting new locations we have planned for you.”