The bipartisan firm also employs former Liberal senator Zed Seselja, and ex-Queensland premier Rob Borbridge, and has a client list that includes Rio Tinto and AGL.
CBD hears Foley has been doing consulting work for Govstrat for some years but was added only recently to the federal government’s register in anticipation of potential engagements in Canberra.
Foley, who quit the leadership after being accused of harassment by an ABC journalist (which he’s always denied), still pops up around Macquarie Street every now so often, and could be up for a new gig if reports linking him to a spot on the Greyhound Racing NSW board – an organisation with about as much baggage as Labor in its wilderness years – are true.
Abbott the lifesaver
Some people just attract headlines. Case in point, former prime minister Tony Abbott, without whom several prominent media outlets including this very column might sometimes struggle for content.
Setting aside his long and significant political career, Abbott also lays claim to a rich and varied hinterland of stuff just happening to him.
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There was the time in the 2000s that a Parliament House sound recordist turned out to be the long-lost son he thought he had fathered out of wedlock as a teenager and given up for adoption. (Even more bizarrely, the whole thing turned out to be a case of mistaken identity).
There was the time PM28 raced into a burning building during the height of the bushfire crisis in 2020.
Or the time a luggage scanner at Melbourne Airport ruthlessly swallowed up his new spectacles.
Not to mention a train-wreck prime ministership that lasted barely two years.
Now we are greatly indebted to Sydney commercial FM radio (a phrase we can’t believe we are typing) for bringing to our attention the time back in the 1980s a youthful Abbott saved a woman and her little ones from a house fire.
To quote the somewhat breathless press release: “Speaking on 2DayFM’s The Jimmy & Nath Show with Emma, Sky from Balmain revealed she’s been searching for her mystery hero for 34 years.”
As “Sky from Balmain” told Jimmy (or was it Nath or Emma?): “When I was four-years-old, my house had burnt down on top of us, basically, and a gentleman pulled us out of the building, like he ripped the bars off the windows and everything! And it took me 34 years to find out who it was, because I’ve been searching forever, and it was actually Tony Abbott.”
Abbott confirmed the incident to CBD.
“Yes, it’s broadly correct. I was with a couple of mates at the Bald Rock Hotel … and we suddenly noticed flames coming from a top storey window of the house next door.
“There were young kids behind a barred window on the ground floor who couldn’t get out. I found a bit of pipe and smashed the (locked) back glass door to let the family out. No heroics really, just a good team effort to make sure people were safe.”
Back to Sky: “I’d love to take him back to that pub and have a beer. And you know, you know, thank him for saving my life, but I have actually been in contact with his office, and he said yes, that was me”.
This column would also personally love Sky from Balmain to take Tony from Warringah for a beer, or perhaps better, an onion.
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