By Kishor Napier-Raman and Noel Towell
The silly season is just kicking off and, around the country, hordes of middle-aged blokes are gearing up to get on the sauce and debase themselves at the office Christmas party.
Last year’s Sky News affair was a particular classic of the genre: broadcaster Chris Smith was stood down after allegedly making lewd comments towards a younger female staff member after a long session at the Ivy.
As CBD has reported, Smith is now proudly sober and is monetising that fall from grace by way of a new-ish crisis management firm, while interviewing all manner of wackos on his TNT Radio show (Vladimir Putin fanboy Simeon “the Aussie Cossack” Boikov is a repeat guest.)
Meanwhile, Smith’s old bosses at Sky are taking no chances. They’ve ditched the Christmas party this year. A spokesperson for the network confirmed that respective state bureaus would be hosting office luncheons instead. It all sounds decidedly un-festive. Plus, we hear managers are even being discouraged from joining any impromptu “kick-ons” to the pub triggered by employees, lest anyone get the wrong idea.
Looks like Sky has given corporate Australia a blueprint for how to tackle bad (male) behaviour in the workplace: when in doubt, simply throw your hands in the air, and cancel Christmas.
LOU’S BLUE
CBD reported last Friday on the rather Trumpian pitch made by former ACT senator Zed Seselja in his attempts to return to convince NSW Liberals to give him another shot at the Upper House.
But Zed might have been outdone by former NSW Upper House MP Lou Amato, who’s a distant contender in the race for Marise Payne’s old Senate spot. Amato, a conservative, was dumped by former premier Dominic Perrottet from the party’s upper house ticket to make way for more women, and hasn’t gotten over it.
“I AM NOT ONE OF THEM” was the thunderous email sent by Amato to delegates last week.
“If you want a polished politician, I am not that. I am not a lawyer. I am not an expert communicator. I am not interested in climbing the greasy pole,” he wrote.
So what exactly is Lou? Well, according to his rant, he’s “just a man who believes something is seriously wrong with Australia, and that something is seriously wrong with our party”.
Or in other words: “I am an outsider.“
Now last we checked, Amato spent eight years in state parliament, first getting the nod over the now independent member for Fowler Dai Le thanks to some factional manoeuvring for the boys. Then again, he hardly set Macquarie Street on fire.
Amato reckons he’s going to stick up for the “the tradies, the mums and dads, the battlers” in Canberra.
What better way to prove your battler bona fides than begging the party apparatchiks and backroom boys to appoint you to a vacant Senate seat without having to face the electorate.
VEXATIOUS VITO
Vito Zepinic’s recent history is so colourful that his past life, as a one-time security chief for Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic, is sometimes forgotten.
In these pages, Zepinic, who has convictions for pretending to be a psychiatrist, is best known as a vexatious litigant extraordinaire. As the Herald reported last week, Zepinic has notched up 23 court losses since a judge declared him a vexatious litigant in 2017. Make that 24.
The very day after this masthead’s story, Zepinic was handed another loss by Justice Desmond Fagan in the NSW Supreme Court, stemming from his futile 15-year battle with legal and medical authorities to let him practise as a psychologist.
Zepinic was struck off as a psychologist in 2010 over convictions two years earlier in the Burwood Local Court for falsely holding himself out as a medical practitioner.
In Zepinic’s latest attempt to get reinstated, he name-dropped the NSW attorney-general and the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation agency as a co-defendants. Once again, he was self-represented.
No surprises that Fagan wasn’t having a bar of it, tossing out Zepinic’s latest attempt to get reinstated, and ordering him to pay around $40,000 in total costs to both defendants. We’re not sure how he keeps affording it either.
In perhaps the judicial understatement of the year, his honour drily described Zepinic as “a very experienced” litigant “as a search of his name on Caselaw reveals”.
BAKER’S DELIGHT
Alexi Baker, partner (and one-time subordinate) of former Nine boss Hugh Marks is on her way out at the NRL, where she’s held the position of chief customer and digital officer.
Both parties declined to comment, although CBD hears Baker is hoping to expand her board work (she’s been a non-executive director at Global Traffic Network since last year) and is looking for similar positions.
Baker’s partner Marks (the couple had their first child, Hugh’s fifth, last year) also walked away from the NRL recently, where he’d been helping negotiations during a bitter pay dispute between the league and its players.
Marks resigned as chief executive of Nine, owner of this masthead, in 2020 a day after his and Baker’s relationship was revealed.