By Kishor Napier-Raman and Noel Towell
Former senator-turned-transparency-warrior Rex Patrick has used freedom of information laws to get hold of the prime minister’s diary again, and this time Anthony Albanese’s people didn’t drag the process out for a year before capitulating in the face of the threat of legal action. Progress, of sorts.
What jumped out at us is that this prime minister’s office is well and truly open for business, with a downright throng of CEOs and other big-end-of-town heavyweights getting through the door.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has found plenty of time to chat.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
Albo had chats with Mike Henry, boss of minerals giant BHP, and Jakob Stausholm of BHP’s rivals Rio Tinto, and climate warriors might not be pleased to learn that Meg O’Neill, CEO of oil and gas behemoth Woodside, got to chew the prime ministerial ear for half an hour in Perth in early February.
There was time for Graeme Beardsell, CEO of Fujitsu Australia and NZ, and Jayne Hrdlicka, then CEO of Virgin Airlines. Business Council of Australia honchos Jennifer Westacott and Tim Reed also popped in for a natter and a cuppa in late July.
Casting his net into international waters, Albanese sat down with Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of the $US10 trillion investment juggernaut BlackRock Inc in San Francisco, and caught up with Markus Krebber, CEO of German energy titan RWE.
If this is a Labor leader in the pocket of the unions, everyone is being terribly discreet about it. Among a mere handful of meetings with the comrades throughout the year the ACTU’s president Michele O’Neil and secretary Sally McManus would be the only ones you’d have heard of.
The big sporting codes aren’t excluded from the PM’s presence, fans will be relieved to hear, with former AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan, NRL supremo Peter “Showbags” V’landys, Cricket Australia’s Nick Hockley, Tennis Australia’s Craig Tiley and even Gianni Infantino, president of football’s world governing body FIFA, securing audiences with Albanese.
But in the end, the people outside his inner circle that Albanese is hanging out with most – apart from FM radio jocks – might not be that surprising.
Greens leader Adam Bandt and Liberal leader Peter Dutton jointly top the charts with seven meetings apiece last year followed by state and territory leaders.
Makes us wonder why they’d even bother to keep all that secret.
LOBSTER LADS
Speaking of the prime minister’s schedule, on Friday Albanese made a big speech in western Sydney about how he too could feel voters’ cost-of-living pain.
Nothing says “I feel your pain” more than eating lobster with a billionaire. Which is just what the PM was doing three days earlier, when CBD’s spies spotted him entering a private dining room with Merivale boss Justin Hemmes at the manbunned pub baron’s swanky new restaurant Good Luck.
Albanese had spent the morning opening up an affordable housing project in Westmead with Treasurer Jim Chalmers, Housing Minister Julie Collins and Sydney backbenchers Andrew Charlton and Sally Sitou. But by lunch he was followed into the private room by three live lobsters, pulled out of the tank.
At Good Luck, a kilo of lobster will set you back $250. An average southern rock lobster weighs between 600 and 1200 grams, and while maths never was CBD’s strong suit, we figure it wasn’t a cheap lunch.
HOME GROUND
It’s bulldozer season in Mosman.
Sydney Swans chair Andrew Pridham is proceeding with plans to demolish and rebuild his Mosman trophy home Hopetoun, which he picked up for a then-suburb record $25 million in 2018.
The $8 million plans involve razing the six-bedroom residence for a new pad with pool, cabana, guest residence, boat ramp and private beach access.
The changes were first flagged in 2019, with the latest modification filed with the council this month.
There’s no reason to rush, since Pridham won’t actually be living there – the mansion is simply an investment property.
Pridham isn’t the only one doing a bit of work in the uber-wealthy suburb. Olympian turned Sunrise host Matt “Shirvo” Shirvington got the council green light for a $2.1 million renovation to his seven-bedroom Mosman trophy home, which he’d been trying to sell as recently as January.
BARD BURKE
There are few cabinet ministers with more on their plate than Tony Burke, who leads the government in the lower house while carrying the can on forever contentious industrial relations reform.
But Burke had a chance to put the brawler persona to one side when he was wearing his minister for the arts hat at a Sydney Writers’ Festival event put on by the Irish consulate on Thursday night.
The minister was spotted deep in discussion on Irish poetry with the night’s entertainment, reigning Booker Prize winner Paul Lynch. We hear Seamus Heaney was a mutual favourite.
When asked by a member of the Irish delegation how he got time to read, Burke said he’d already powered through eight novels so far this year. Despite Burke’s workload, we’re not surprised by his bookworminess.
After all, he named new translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey as his top reads of 2023, a welcome change from the dad histories, Churchill biographies and Tim Winton novels that make up our political class’ standard reading fare. No wonder the Booker winner wanted a chat.
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