Two months since Australian Turf Club members voted to reject the $5 billion proposed sale of Rosehill Gardens Racecourse and stick a knife in the Minns government’s housing plans, the moment still looms large over Sydney’s politics.
That night, upper house MP Mark Latham, one of the fiercest opponents of the sale, ended his relationship with then partner Nathalie Matthews. Matthews has since accused Latham of a sustained pattern of emotional, physical and financial abuse and pressuring her into degrading sexual acts in an application for a private apprehended violence order. Latham denies the allegations.
Peter McGauran resigned after Australian Turf Club members voted to reject the $5 billion proposed sale of Rosehill Gardens Racecourse.Credit: Sam Mooy
Right before Latham became the unwelcome centre of attention, ATC chair Peter McGauran, a former Nationals minister in the Howard government and one of the architects of the Rosehill sale, resigned. On Monday afternoon, the board will vote for McGauran’s successor, a formality that has devolved into a messy proxy battle between supporters and opponents of the scuppered deal.
On one side is McGuaran’s protegee Ben Bayot, another champion of the deal, who has the presumed backing of Racing NSW and its mercurial chief executive, Peter V’landys.
But the failed sale, which enjoyed the joint support of V’landys and Premier Chris Minns, showed that not even the double-team of Sydney’s most powerful person and the state premier can always get their way, particularly when faced with a wall of Boomer recalcitrance.
Standing against Bayot is Sydney silk Tim Hale, SC, who ascended to the board four years ago with the backing of trainer extraordinaire Gai Waterhouse and former International Olympic Committee vice-president John Coates.
ATC sources say the vote will go down to the wire, with each camp having three definite votes each. So far, ATC board member Caroline Searcy is the swing vote, and both camps have offered her the vice-chair position in return for support.
But one of Bayot’s three votes is that of McGauran himself. Hale’s supporters have legal advice, prepared by barrister Steven Finch, SC, showing that McGauran has already resigned his board position and is ineligible to vote. Team McGauran has its own advice to the contrary.
If McGauran is ineligible, Hale will win comfortably. But whatever happens with this afternoon’s vote, we can’t imagine a swift resolution. The faultlines in Sydney’s racing community created by the vote in May are too deep. And once lawyers are called in at 10 paces, things tend to get messier. Still, bringing together the warring tributes of the ATC is probably a whole lot easier than finding a new site to build 25,000 new homes in Sydney.
Notes on a scandal
Everything is connected. This weekend, tech billionaire Richard White was dragged into the sordid scandal that has shredded what little remains of Latham’s reputation.
Latham was accused by former partner Matthews of domestic abuse last week, including defecating on her during sex and driving his car at her, claims the upper house MP denies.
White, the “LinkedIn lecher”, was accused by multiple women of trading business advice for sex, and has been punished with a promotion to executive chairman of his logistics software company WiseTech Global after staging a successful boardroom coup following a brief stint in the sin-bin.
The “LinkedIn lecher” Richard White.Credit: Bloomberg
In texts revealed by News Corp papers, Latham urged Matthews to “get the compo NDA” from White after the allegations against him surfaced last year. When White regained control of his company this year, Latham suggested Matthews perform oral sex on him to celebrate.
There’s no suggestion that White and Matthews had any sexual relationship. The pair’s paths crossed last year at the International Forwarders and Customs Brokers Association of Australia’s national conference in Cairns, where Matthews interviews White about cyber-security in a video posted to LinkedIn.
“You have to build multiple ways of defending yourself,” White told Matthews. Indeed.
Last week, Latham’s lawyer Zali Burrows sought to subpoena messages between White and Matthews as part of his defence against her private apprehended violence order.
Burrows, CBD readers may recall, is also representing Bruce Lehrmann in his appeal against Federal Court justice Michael Lee’s decision in his defamation case against Network 10 where his honour found, on the balance of probabilities, that the former staffer had raped ex-colleague Brittany Higgins.
Last year, Burrows told this column that her client Lehrmann was “the most hated man in Australia”. Latham, it seems, is determined to fight him for that dishonour.
On the Block
SPOTTED: Labor MP and federal Infrastructure Minister Catherine King was seen at a media preview for season 21 of The Block, touring around the five new properties in the quaint Victorian hamlet of Daylesford.
The federal member for Ballarat admitted that she is the occasional Blockhead, and even chimed in with some interior design tips. “Burgundy is the colour of the season,” she mused while strolling around one master bedroom. Well, she ain’t infrastructure minister for nothing!
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