By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
At the top echelons of Sydney’s most esteemed cultural institutions, this spring has been a season of musical chairs.
But no soon-to-be-vacant chair is being watched as closely as the one being warmed by David Gonski, president of the Art Gallery of NSW’s Board of Trustees. The veteran business leader, whose name is on half of Sydney these days, is set to depart the role he’s held since 2016 at the end of the year.
CBD has it on the best authority former NSW Liberal leader Peter Collins has been appointed to the gallery’s board. Collins is president of the Powerhouse Trust, which would leave another chair waiting for the Minns government to fill.
Meanwhile, the identity of who replaces Gonski at the top remains a mystery. According to the rumour mill, former Labor premiers Morris Iemma and Nathan Rees were both prospects for the board. But both were flummoxed when contacted about this by CBD.
Arts Minister John Graham has also appointed former premier Bob Carr to chair the board of the Museums of History NSW. Carr, a well-known history buff, told CBD he was grateful for the appointment.
“My affection for and fascination with history is well known,” he said.
“I spoke last week at my first board meeting about elevating history in NSW, engaging with the public about history. Not about any single enforced narrative, but on the basis that history is many stories and they jostle with one another,” he said.
He seemed more excited about this one than becoming premier.
Cop spin
Call it the curse of Karen Webb.
In late February, during an interview on Sunrise, the NSW Police Commissioner responded to criticism of the force’s handling of a horrific double murder by quoting Taylor Swift lyrics.
Weeks later, the NSW Police’s executive director public affairs Liz Deegan was dropped like a stone. She was the third person to serve in the role since Webb’s 2022 appointment.
It’s a role the cops still haven’t filled. The subsequent decision to draft Steve “Jacko” Jackson from Seven’s Spotlight blew up as the tabloid veteran emerged as a side character in the lurid Bruce Lehrmann affair.
Jacko was gone before even getting to start, but not before two weeks of damaging headlines and a war of words between the police and minister Yasmin Catley’s office. Happily, he’s found a new home at the Daily Mail, filling the brief of snarky, salacious celebrity yarns with aplomb. Frankly, there’s nobody better suited.
As for the top media job with the cops, which pays a quite nice $329,583 a year, well, the net is still being cast. CBD reported in May a job ad was out. Now, in December, the job is again advertised.
That’s despite us hearing months ago the search for a new spinner was reaching the pointy end. There were some whispers that Natalie O’Brien, an investigative journalist and former Sun-Herald reporter who recently took a redundancy at News Corp and is married to former deputy commissioner Nick Kaldas could be in the mix. When we called her to ask, she laughed, which means no, in case you’re wondering.
So we asked the police what was taking so long. Their response?
“The role is subject to standard NSW government executive recruitment processes. Mobility matching within government was unsuccessful and competitive recruitment is underway.”
All a bit cryptic – and what you get when you go for months without a top spinner.
Manne up
Landing in bookshops this week with a thud equivalent to a concrete slab hitting a puddle is public intellectual Robert Manne’s big (486-page) A Political Memoir. Subtitled “Intellectual Combat in the Cold War and Culture Wars”, the book canvasses Manne’s life in the intellectual trenches.
But it is also, according to one reader, “a lot of fights with people who were big a very long time ago”.
That includes John Howard, Keith Windschuttle, Gerard Henderson, Nick Cater, anyone associated with Quadrant, Bill Leak, Peter Singer and Chris Mitchell. Then there is his love of, but ultimate disappointment with, Kevin Rudd.
Manne gets on with the business of settling scores of his many feuds, even when he professes not to be settling scores.
“I have spared readers details of the vendettas mounted over the decades by two political enemies, Gerard Henderson and Keith Windschuttle, principally because their lines of attack almost never concerned questions of any general significance or interest.”
It’s a strong candidate for condescending backhander of the year – and we are not even beyond the introduction.
The book is published by Manne’s old stomping ground La Trobe University Press with Morry Schwartz’s Black Inc.
“Morry invited me to write a long book. I am extremely grateful to him,” Manne said. Whether readers are is another matter.
Manne told this paper he fully expected The Australian to fire up at him because they cannot take criticism. He says he hadn’t read the paper in years but, in the light of what he expected was coming, he was going to have to renew his subscription.
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