By Kishor Napier-Raman and Noel Towell
CBD always loves a spectacular friend break-up, particularly those involving large sums of money.
So when the dust-up between former special forces commando turned occasional nude OnlyFans model-cum-political aspirant Heston Russell and his former pal, Big Vape lobbyist Michael Kauter, made a return to the socials, we simply couldn’t look away.
It all started with an otherwise delightful lunch hosted by Kauter and his kidney specialist husband, David Gracey, at their former Woollahra home in 2020. It ended with a crunching sound: Russell had inadvertently wrecked the couple’s $100,000 BMW by crushing it in the car lift.
Russell reportedly contributed about $8000 to the damage, according to Kauter, who says the whole incident cost him a whole lot more – $150,000 for the written-off Beamer (not covered by insurance) and car-lift, plus around $1 million in proceeds from the Woollahra house due to the damaged lift, which the couple sold at a loss for around $11 million. They’ve since moved to Mosman.
Nearly four years on, Kauter has paid off the car and, last week, took to Facebook to vent his frustration in a series of now-deleted posts.
“Some friends cost you nothing and are friends for ever [sic]. Some friends cost you $150,000 plus at least $1,000,000 in lost proceeds (thanks for the $8000),” he wrote.
“You caused great stress and difficulty. What a great man of Aussie values you are Heston! And I was a friend, imagine your enemies!”
Kauter also says that before the friendship went south, he’d introduced Russell to conservative figures like Pauline Hanson and broadcaster Alan Jones, a particular champion of the former soldier.
Russell, meanwhile, is doing rather well for himself financially. Last year, he won a $400,000 payout from the ABC after the Federal Court ruled the public broadcaster defamed him in an article wrongly alleging he’d killed an Afghan prisoner.
He’s also had a recent turn as a motivational speaker, turning up at Big Four consultancy Deloitte’s Brisbane office to rev up the troops with a PowerPoint on leadership.
But on the matter of Kauter’s wrecked car, he declined to comment.
SAFE SPACE
There were smiles all round when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese bumped into Nyunggai Warren Mundine at the Great Hall in Parliament House on Thursday as the great and the good marked the 16th anniversary of the Stolen Generations.
Anthony Albanese and Nyunggai Warren Mundine are all smilesCredit: Alex Ellinghausen
The casual observer might have concluded the PM had forgiven Mundine as a leading voice in the successful no-campaign that defeated Labor’s signature project for 2023, the Indigenous voice to Parliament.
Mundine, though, doesn’t seem in a particularly forgiving mood about certain aspects of the Voice campaign and is planning to confront senior SBS executives over a panel discussion the network broadcast on referendum night and where the No campaigner insists he was denied a “safe space”.
But CBD has no fears for Warren’s safety when he appears in the rarefied environs of the Royal Sydney Golf Club at the end of the month to address members of the arch-conservative legal think-tank, the Samuel Griffith Society, whose Melbourne offices played host to one of the first major planning sessions, way back in October 2022, that developed into the No campaign.
Organisers of the golf club get-together are promising a “memorable evening of fine dining, thoughtful discussion and unexpected stories from Mundine,” – and all for just $150, which is not bad, by Samuel Griffith standards. If it sounds like your bag, don’t hang about. Seats are limited, the society assures us.
We sang out to Warren on Thursday, hoping for a little sneak preview of what he was going to talk about, but he wasn’t available to chat.
BLANK CANVA
So it may not have looked like the best few days for Damien Singh, the former chief financial officer of homegrown tech juggernaut Canva, who stepped down abruptly last week reportedly while the $40 billion software producer investigated claims of inappropriate behaviour.
But look a little closer, and maybe things weren’t all bad for the 2023 CFO of the year, as awarded by CFO Magazine, who had been with Canva since 2016 and helped the start-up reach $2 billion in annual revenue.
Singh appeared in a series of online posts by Melbourne influencer Victoria Curtis, with the tech bro and self-described “make-up queen with a line of suitors, or so you’d think” attending the Superbowl in Las Vegas together, in what had every appearance of a “hard launch” – as they say on the socials – of a relationship.
But with one of the shots showing Singh decked out in San Francisco 49ers gear, we’re going to have to put the result of the big game on the negative side of the ledger for the finance whizz.
Australia’s business press has been desperate for a chat with Singh – who offloaded his terrace home in Sydney’s posh Paddington to ASX chairman Damien Roche for $13.5 million – since news broke of his departure from Canva, and CBD had no better luck on Thursday, with neither Curtis nor Singh responding to our request for a chat.