Terry McCrann: How John Elliott became a business buccaneer

He strode the national stage as a colossus in the mid 1980s, and like others of his time was unique in style, chutzpah, and – to be blunt – degree and type of criminality.

John Elliott with a glass of Carlton Draught beer at the Harp of Erin hotel in Kew, Melbourne.

And so they go. Successively, Robert Holmes a Court, Christopher Skase, Alan Bond and now John Elliott – and a dozen or more lesser players like Laurie ‘don’t stand between him and a bucket of money’ Connell.

All those paper-shuffling entrepreneurs from that dizzying, dazzling and ultimately detonating decade of the ‘greed is good’ 1980s.

All now shuffled off into and reunited in that grand casino in the sky, or perhaps, ‘the other place’.

West Australian businessman Robert Holmes a Court in an undated photo. Photographer not known.

Holmes a Court checked out early and first, dying suddenly in 1990.

Skase hightailed it to Majorca with a container load or two of stuff and never returned, dying in distant disgrace in 2001.

Bondy stuck around and did time – the only one who did.

There was always a lingering respect and even affection for him up to his death in 2015 because of that – and for winning the America’s Cup when it actually meant something. Something big: just ask (the late) Bob Hawke.

And now Elliott – ironically on the same day the Jam Factory in Chapel St Prahran was back in the development news; the day after the earthquake had rippled down the street, like a primeval tolling of the departure bell for Elliott.

Former Qintex businessman Christopher Skase with wife Pixie in Majorca, Spain. Picture: Andrew Murray.

Why ironic? Why a bell-tolling? Because seizing control of the actual jam factory – and the rich underused property on which it sat – on that Chapel St site back in the 1970s was the foundation of the Elliott story.

It would become a story which took him to control of iconic companies like Elder Smith and Carlton & United and indeed to the very threshold of control of the most powerful establishment company of them all, BHP.

BHP would also be his nemesis.

He lunged at it and lost – literally everything.

From his mastery of corporate Melbourne to his mansion in Towers Road Toorak.

Now each of the eighties entrepreneurs were unique in their styles, their chutzpah, in their – to be blunt – degrees and types of criminality.

Holmes a Court and Bondy emerged from the same town, Perth, but they could have been coming from different planets: Bondy the Pommy bogan house painter, Holmes a Court the utterly urbane corporate chess player.

But in the mid-1980s, as I wrote in 2004, Elliott strode the national stage as a colossus like no one else. Certainly, like no one else then; and arguably indeed since, all the way to this September 2021.

Alan Bond in a still from an interview in 2014.

What made him unique was that he was – at that one moment in time – master of all he surveyed, and he uniquely surveyed both corporate Australia and the Liberal Party.

In both cases, he did so at their very heartlands – their citadels of real power as they were then, running down Collins St and around the corner and up William.

He did so with that powerful “man of the people flavour” – embracing, even personifying as he did, two great icons of our culture.

Both named Carlton – the beer and the footy club.

Only Elliott could, as he did in the mid-1980s, seriously contemplate the choice.

Take command of Australia’s most powerful company, BHP. Or of the Liberal party and ultimately of the country.

He didn’t just project the confidence and arrogance which would subsequently decompose into bluster and ridicule as his world fell apart in the 1990s.

He positively radiated it. He almost literally glowed.

Still 35 years on, indelibly imprinted on my consciousness, is a pivotal press conference when speculation on his intentions ran white hot.

Like I had never before seen and never since, business journalists from all over the country and most of the Canberra pack were there; and in those days there were dozens of both.

Ranked behind them, so to speak, were further dozens of very nervous company executives, company directors and politicians – of both major parties.

Which way would he jump?

Would he turn his back on the brilliant corporate career? Having made himself, his supporters and a host of followers rich?

Would be move from Liberal party bag man to the man.

I have never seen the equal of his presence, his aura, that day.

As I wrote in 2004 – interestingly, in the light of subsequent events – “think Donald Trump and the (younger) Bill Clinton rolled into one”.

It was the absolute high point of his career and of his life. It was also the first day in the rest of his life and it was all downhill.

He committed to staying with Elders and its pursuit of BHP – only to run, like all the debt-funded entrepreneurs, into the 18 per cent interest rates and Paul Keating’s “recession we had to have”.

You could almost believe that Keating ‘did it’ to stitch up his great and perhaps, as he saw it after he’d seen off Bob, his only rival.

Businessman John Elliott in Melbourne in 1992

That was back when Keating’s actual nemesis, John Howard, was still Lazarus before he had his triple-bypass.

The years after 1990 were the barren years, the ugly years, the years when you wanted to look away – as indeed, so many who had waxed rich with him quite literally did, as he prowled ‘his patch’ along Collins between Queen and William and up Bank Place to the Savage Club.

And outside the Club, at ‘his table’, when he wanted a smoke.

I remember at a point in the 1990s when his great friend – at Carlton and in business – the late Dick Pratt wanted to persuade me to help rehabilitate John in Melbourne business.

Elliott had bailed Pratt out after the devastating 1987 share market crash – when he, Elliott, was still riding high before hitting Keating’s recession reef in 1990.

Pratt wanted to return the favour.

The three of us settled in at Pratt’s office. The two of them drank scotch – Johnny Walker Black Label, I think or maybe it was Chivas Regal.

Anyway, they polished off a bottle, and a bit, over about two hours. I stuck with (Carlton) light beer.

Dick tried hard, but it was never going to go anywhere.

Even if I wanted to be persuaded, and I didn’t, it would have been no avail. And so it didn’t.

On one front Elliott got lucky, seriously lucky, when the corporate cop’s pivotal case against him – supported by an insider grass in his former key money man Ken Jarrett – fell over, or was felled on a technicality, at the last legal hurdle.

But that was pretty much it.

There was no rehabilitation, either corporate or financial, and certainly not in terms of the Melbourne establishment, which had helped create him, certainly funded him, and waxed rich with him through the 1980s.