Money, as they say, can’t buy you class. Okay, it’s a tired old cliche, but also … the truth.

And no money is more classless than money procured through criminal enterprise. This thought crossed CBD’s mind as we found ourselves confronted with a diamond-encrusted watch in lurid Tiffany & Co blue, with an estimated price between $20,000 and $30,000.

The watch was part of a large haul of luxury bling being sold by First State Auctions, which includes the final tranche of items requisitioned by the Australian Federal Police during Operation Elbrus – the probe that smashed the country’s biggest tax rort.

Siblings Adam and Lauren Cranston, the children of former high-ranking Australian Tax Office deputy commissioner Michael Cranston, were among five people convicted of conspiring to dishonestly cause a loss to the Commonwealth and conspiring to deal with the proceeds of crime over their role in the $105 million crime. Michael Cranston was charged but later acquitted.

Adam was sentenced to 15 years jail, with a 10-year non-parole period for his role as one of the architects of the payroll-tax evasion fraud.

The auction is a window into those ill-gotten gains: dozens of Rolexes, plenty of garish jewellery with enough diamonds to secure multiple forevers.

Also up for auction from the collection is a Birkin bag, which could potentially allow you, dear reader, to acquire that symbol of nouveau riche tackiness without dropping thousands at Hermes first to get you on the list. If you can cope with the item’s very dubious backstory.

Right versus right versus right

Australian Labor Party’s preselection for the state seat of Prahran has turned into a good old-fashioned, right-faction throw-down.

Regular readers will recall that the seat came into play when former Greens MP Sam Hibbins late last year admitted to having a consensual extra-marital affair with a staffer, which was against party rules. The Greens swiftly said sayonara Sam, and he subsequently quit the parliament.

The resulting byelection in February was a rare bright spot for the Liberal Party, when its candidate, Rachel Westaway, flipped the seat, beating Greens candidate Angelica Di Camillo in a poll that Labor did not contest. That decision still rankles with some (Jacinta Allan – where was your competitive spirit?!)

Now the ALP three-cornered contest for preselection to run in next year’s election is between a trio (or do we mean troika) of right-factioners: Rachel Powning, an ex-mayor of Port Phillip; current Port Phillip councillor Libby Buckingham, who was supported by federal MP Josh Burns; and Stonnington councillor Meghan Hopper, a former mayor of Moreland (now Merri-bek), which makes her move south of the river quite the leap.

Hopper, who won the popular vote in the preselection this week, had backing from Labor’s AWU faction, and included former federal leader Bill Shorten and Victoria’s former major events minister Tim Holding, who presumably made calls from the chateau he is restoring in western France.

The final decision comes on Friday after a meeting of the ALP’s public office selection committee, the body of 100 officials elected by the ALP state conference. That’s presuming some of the candidates don’t withdraw first.

Bringing home the …

Last weekend, dozens jumped in kayaks and paddled out into Newcastle Harbour to stage a blockade in the world’s largest coal port, part of a protest organised by climate activist group Rising Tide.

More than 130 people were duly arrested.

Among them was independent investigative journalist and activist Wendy Bacon, 79, who has no fear of water, or cops, or vast hulking coal ships. She was charged with breaching sections of the Crimes Act by paddling into an exclusion zone set up around the harbour with approval of NSW Transport Minister John Graham designed to protect the shipping lane.

Attending the large, almost carnivalesque protest on Newcastle’s Horseshoe Beach with Knitting Nannas, an organisation of older, female climate activists, Bacon told CBD that she was driven to get arrested by a sense of frustration at how both NSW and federal governments had approved new coal and gas projects, with little apparent concern for the environmental impacts.

“People who run fossil fuel industries only think of short-term profits. They don’t pay serious attention to their children and grandchildren,” she said.

Not that this is the first rodeo for Bacon, a Walkley winner and former journalism academic at the University of Technology Sydney, who had lost count of how many times she’d been arrested.

In 1971, then a twenty-something student journalist, Bacon spent a week in prison awaiting sentencing for obscenity charges after publishing a poem, “C--- is a Christian Word”, at a time of heightened debate about censorship.

A decade or so of activism meant that Bacon was denied membership of the NSW Bar in the early 1980s, a decision upheld by the NSW Supreme Court, which found her not a fit and proper person to practise law.

More recently, she was arrested twice during a campaign against Sydney’s WestConnex toll road mega-project, although she was acquitted of any charges.

Despite that long history of being a thorn in the side of police and the establishment, Bacon told us the Newcastle action was a memorable one, arrest be damned.

“It was one of the most inspirational things I’ve been to in my lifetime,” she said.

Sharma’s Christmas falls flat

Silly season is usually a time for colleagues to gather and celebrate. But what happens if the year that was contained nothing to celebrate?

This is the challenge facing the Liberal Party. A federal election annihilation, leaders dumped in both NSW and Victoria, Sussan Ley spending recent weeks looking anxiously over her shoulder – no-one’s feeling particularly festive.

Little wonder that so many of the party’s end-of-year events have been fizzers. Exhibit A: Liberal senator Dave Sharma, now the party’s upper house voice for Western Sydney, held his end-of-year drinks at Commonwealth Bank stadium in Parramatta. Those who turned up numbered about 10 to 15, according to some estimates.

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