By Stephen Brook and Kishor Napier-Raman
As business leaders, celebrities, sporting bureaucrats and miscellaneous grifters head to Paris for the Olympics, one group that will be largely sidelined is politicians.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese won’t be making the trip to Paris to cheer on the Australian Olympic team. Official duties will instead fall to Sports Minister Anika Wells. Not even Governor-General Sam Mostyn will be there.
In Sydney back in 2000, proximity and host-nation status made it politically acceptable for prime minister John Howard and his wife, Janette, to turn into Games super-fans. However, straitened times have now even prevented politicians of 2032 host city Brisbane from attending.
Missing out: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Neither Premier Steven Miles nor Opposition Leader David Crisafulli, who is rated a good chance of winning October’s election, will be in Paris. As far as we can tell, the most senior Queensland politician heading to Paris will be Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate.
The announcement in Paris on Wednesday of Australia’s flag bearers will be a big event. Singer Jessica Mauboy will be there to sing Higher, the official song of the Australian Olympic team, a track which was chosen with input from chef de mission Anna Meares and AOC Athletes Commission chair Cate Campbell.
Among the big sporting codes, rugby league is heading to Paris, while the AFL is staying home. Racing and NRL honcho Peter “Showbags” V’landys and NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo are the most prominent local sport administrators to attend.
Jessica Mauboy.Credit: Dean Sewell
As CBD previously reported, Hollywood superstar Nicole Kidman will head to Marseille to watch the Matildas. Catherine West, the new chair of broadcaster Nine (owner of this masthead) will attend the Paris Games, along with embattled Nine chief executive Mike Sneesby and other executives. Somewhere, Peter Costello is seething.
Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, will be in the stands in her capacity as a key sponsor of athletes competing in swimming, artistic swimming, beach volleyball and rowing among other things.
Katie Paige, chief executive of key sponsor Harvey Norman, has confirmed her attendance in Paris.
Former Olympic rower Rob Scott, better known as managing director of Wesfarmers, is another confirmed attendee. So is his wife, Liz Scott, a member of the AOC executive. She won a gold medal at the Sydney Games in the water polo as Liz Weekes.
As for former Olympians, they don’t come any bigger than swimming great Dawn Fraser, who has been invited to attend.
John Coates, AOC president from 1990 to 2022, will be there in his role as a vice president of the IOC, although he is retiring.
Sydney-to-Hobart yachting identity Matt Allen is going. He is an AOC vice president, as is Evelyn Halls, a former fencer and dispute resolution lawyer.
Former senator and federal minister for sport Mark Arbib is a member of the AOC executive.
UNITED THEY LUNCH
Well, it’s been a hell of a week for the CFMEU. Revelations in this masthead that the bad boys of the organised labour movement were getting in bed with bikies and other unsavoury underworld types forced the Albanese government to move to have branches of the union put into administration.
But some of the comrades still found reason to celebrate. Or perhaps commiserate. CBD’s spies spotted the CFMEU’s NSW construction division president, Rita Mallia, enjoying a long lunch at picturesque Sydney beachside Italian joint Pilu at Freshwater, before the entourage kicked on to Potts Point for more drinks.
Mallia is a key supporter of the controversial former Victorian state secretary John Setka (who quit hours before the investigation into the union was published) and NSW secretary Darren Greenfield, who insists on staying on despite facing corruption charges.
On Friday, the NSW division took to Instagram to claim the CFMEU was under unprecedented attack.
“CFMEU members are not stupid. They won’t be fooled by a rotten media hell-bent on destroying hard-fought-for and won conditions,” the union wrote.
No wonder Mallia seemed so unbothered by everything.
DIVINE COMEDY
Richard Alston, a communications minister in the Howard government best known for his prodigious complaints against the ABC, has found a handy post-political career as a man of letters.
The retired Victorian Liberal senator, who served a couple of years in that most plum of post-political postings as high commissioner to the United Kingdom, has already penned recent tomes on the public broadcaster (Their ABC: Inside Australia’s Largest Sheltered Workshop) and those smug inner-city virtue signallers (The Trouble With Elites). Now he’s onto a topic closer to his heart – the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri.
Across the nine circles of hell: Richard Alston.
Alston’s The Glory of Dante is set to be released next month by Connor Court, the publisher of choice for Australia’s conservative thought leaders.
Alston told CBD his first failed encounters with Dante were during his school days. After forming a friendship while in London with writer Clive James, whose widow, Prue Shaw, is a world-renowned Dante scholar, Alston thought, “Well, I’d better read the bloody thing.”
Now he’s fully across the nine circles of hell, does Alston think the 14th-century Italian writer has any lessons for our current politicians?
“Be true to what you know to be right,” he said. And he reckons that makes US President Joe Biden, whose position on abortion has evolved from scepticism to support, a “pretend Catholic”. Lord knows what that makes Donald Trump.
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