By Kishor Napier-Raman and Noel Towell
Peter Dutton’s mission to make Australia nuclear-powered will get a much-needed jolt on Thursday as Labor’s industrial-scale ideas factory, the McKell Institute, announces former union heavyweight – and nuclear enthusiast – Daniel Walton as its chairman, replacing Rudd/Gillard-era minister Craig Emerson.
Nuclear power enthusiast Daniel Walton will lead Labor think tank The McKell InstituteCredit: John Shakespeare
If you haven’t heard of Walton, we’d be surprised because as Australian Workers Union (AWU) national secretary, he was pretty handy at getting his name in the paper, never more so than when a journo needed a quote from a Labor-type undermining the party’s longstanding opposition to nuclear energy.
Of course, as chairman of McKell – the think tank once closely linked with the NSW right faction but which has sensibly diversified recently – Walton won’t be churning out policy papers or anything like that. It’s not even a full-time gig for Walton, , who called it quits with the union last year to take up some private sector roles.
Chris Bowen, Labor’s energy minister who has been having a mixed time trying to shoot down nuclear policy kites Dutton’s Coalition has been increasingly sending aloft, better hope it stays that way.
Anyway, Walton said he saw his new role as helping McKell satisfy “the stronger public appetite for practical, progressive policy reform”.
“I know I’m stepping into massive shoes, and I will certainly be bothering Craig frequently for his advice and wisdom,” Walton says.
Great news, Dan, but maybe don’t be asking Craig about nuclear power.
Meanwhile, farewell drinks for Emerson and his McKell comrades will be hosted by big six law firm Allens in their Sydney offices at Deutsche Bank Place on Thursday evening. These days, they get on so well with the Big End of Town.
STONE AGE
The Liberal Party has always had a thing for living in the past. It took the NSW division a painfully long time to find a new state director after Chris Stone announced he’d be departing following last year’s election loss.
This column didn’t help matters when we revealed social media posts made by the party’s first pick, Luke Dixon, causing him to pull out before he’d even been confirmed.
And while Woollahra Mayor Richard Shields has been happily ensconced in the top job since last September, the ghosts of Stone still linger. According to a list of senior officeholders filed with the NSW Electoral Commission, supposedly accurate as of March 2024, Stone and Shields are both listed as state directors.
A humble administrative error perhaps? If so, there are more where that came from. Stone remains a director of Bunori Pty Ltd, a private company dealing with the party’s everyday finances, and Liberal Asset Management, a custodial company holding the division’s long-term assets.
The directors of both companies are meant to be the state director, president, and treasurer. What’s more, according to internal state executive documents seen by CBD, the party owes $5500 to Stone Advisory, a business the former state director registered in January.
All this has led to a few raised eyebrows among party members, leaving us wondering if there had been some kind of shadow power struggle or a prank played by Liberal apparatchiks nostalgic for the glory days. Not so, a party spokesperson assured us – pointing to paperwork filed with the electoral commission in February to replace Stone with Shields as the state director.
Like all good bureaucracies, it seems like the fine print takes a while to get sorted.
NOVEL APPROACH
Readers might recall last week’s ripping read about an intriguing subplot in the Liberal preselection for the West Australian seat of Tangney, involving two fictional accounts of future Chinese subjugation of our beloved homeland, written 20 years apart.
And now that one of our novelists, former SAS soldier and Survivor Australia winner Mark Wales, has won the right to contest the seat for the party at the next election, CBD immediately feared that history might keep repeating itself – and not in a good way.
That’s because Dennis Jensen, who held the seat between 2004 and 2016, blamed coverage of his novel The Skywarriors for losing his preselection for Tangney. The former MP insists his book was misrepresented by the media as a work of “erotic fiction,” costing him his spot on the ballot.
Now, while not everyone would agree that that’s exactly how it went down, we’d hate to see anything like that happen to our man Wales.
But a publicist for Pan MacMillan, which will publish Wales’ debut novel Outrider in July, assures us that not only has the Chinese invasion angle been overblown but that not even the most hardened hit-piece hack would find anything to work with in there. Not a hint of racy material, raunch, smut or even romance to be found in Outrider’s 370 pages.
Instead, we’re promised a “lightning-paced action thriller for fans of Matthew Reilly and Lee Child”.
Glad we’ve sorted that one out.