By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
It’s been a hot minute since we checked in on colourful Sydney porn king, right-wing tour impresario and CBD favourite Damien Costas.
The brash publisher of nudie magazine Penthouse’s Australian spin-off and promoter responsible for bringing conservative culture warriors to these shores has shrugged off years of court battles, cranky creditors and embittered former business partners to turn over a new page as an author. Self-published, of course.
Damien Costas.
Costas’ new book, What Happened to the Lucky Country (displaying in title alone, a profound ignorance of what Donald Horne really meant), was released last month.
It’s basically a lengthy rant about the sheer horror that is modern Australia, where good patriotic characteristics such as larrikinism have been lost to psychological frailty and slavish deference to rules as exemplified by COVID restrictions that happened years ago.
And while it hasn’t exactly got critics and readers jumping out of their chairs, Costas’ book has excited the people that really matter. Sky News bloviator Rowan Dean reckons “if ever a book demanded a trigger warning, this is it”.
And then, there’s the foreword by Mark Latham, former Labor leader turned Macquarie Street’s resident village idiot, in which he refers to One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts as a “right-royal dingbat” for believing that United Nations globalists are secretly working to destroy Australia. While lavishing praise on Costas’ book, of course.
Costas the businessman first burst on the scene as the promoter behind alt-right poster boy Milo Yiannopoulos’ 2017 Australian tour.
But that was soon followed by a spectacular falling-out between Costas and his co–promoter, celebrity agent Max Markson, over unpaid debts, which brought its share of legal action and media mudslinging.
Costas was eventually bankrupted by his former printer, but in 2021, convinced a majority of creditors to vote in favour of having the bankruptcy annulled. Amid all that, there was the matter of Costas’ former business partner Sean Dolman jailed after being caught up in Australia’s biggest meth bust.
With all that behind him, Costas last graced these pages as the man behind British nativist politician Nigel “Mr Brexit” Farage’s 2022 Antipodean tour, and has recently been doing interviews rebranding as a wise survivor of the digital publishing game.
Now, it seems Costas has taken a dash of inspiration from the blokes he’s spent years bringing to Australia.
Wavin’ Flag
Last week, CBD brought word of former Liberal frontbencher Wyatt Roy’s remarkable post-political journey to Saudi Arabia, where he’s become part of the Kingdom’s squillion-dollar global PR campaign to launder its image as a cartoonishly evil petrostate run by a family of repressive religious zealots.
Former Liberal minister Wyatt Roy celebrating Saudi National Flag Day.Credit: Instagram
In an attempt to show off the kingdom’s cool and fun side, Roy posted on Instagram a video of himself riding a hydrofoil surfboard while waving the Saudi flag to Instagram. Turns out our youngest ever MP and minister hadn’t completely abandoned his Aussie roots. In the video, Roy was riding an “eFoil”, an electric board from Byron Bay-based company Fliteboard, founded by kitesurfing world record holder and serial entrepreneur David Trewern.
Before being turfed out of politics, Roy was assistant minister for innovation in the famously innovative and agile Turnbull government, and it’s nice to see him maintaining the passion for True Blue Australian innovative agility on the global stage.
Head of Innovation is also Roy’s title at Neom, the futuristic linear megacity that is the vanity project of Saudi de facto ruler Mohammed bin Ozymandias (or was that bin Salman?).
Right now, Neom needs all the innovation it can get, with recent reports suggesting the project was set to blow out to an eye-watering $US8.8 trillion, and take over half a century to build. Various elements of the ambitious project have recently been scaled back, with the former chief executive Nadhmi Al-Nasr departing last year.
With financials like that, we don’t begrudge Wyatt a little aquatic escapism.
Dicker Down
All good things must come to an end. On Friday, one of Australia’s most eccentric rich-listers stepped down as chairman and chief executive of the company he co-founded in 1978.
We’re talking about David Dicker, the (almost) billionaire behind Dicker Data, the lavishly bearded lover of fast cars and private jets who left Australia in 2019 because it was an “authoritarian shithole” to live his best life out of a Dubai hotel room.
In the past two years, Dicker has sold nearly $300 million worth of stock in his logistics software company, citing costs associated with the divorce settlement with his second wife Delwyn Dicker.
The firm announced its co-founder’s departure to the market late Friday, with Dicker set to stay on for six months in a consulting role. Meanwhile, the other co-founder, Fiona Brown, who happens to be Dicker’s other ex-wife, will move into an executive chair role.
According to the release, Dicker will be stepping down to pursue “other interests”. Maybe this time, he’ll finally realise his dream of getting a Formula 1 team on the track, after his last bid was stymied by the sport’s governing body.
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