By any ordinary measure, Angus Taylor is a rich man.
We know this by the trappings of his privileged life: a fourth-generation farmer from south-eastern NSW, alumni of the exclusive The King’s School, Sydney University graduate, and a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University that fast-tracked him to a successful career as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. Much of his life has been divided between Sydney’s eastern suburbs and his country homes.
But putting an exact measure on the extent of Taylor’s wealth is no easy feat, even 13 years after he entered public life and despite his recent elevation to the position of alternative prime minister.
For starters, some of it is inherited farm land, accumulated over four generations of Taylors who have lived and farmed in the Snowy Mountains region since at least 1909, that has passed through successive generations to Taylor and his three brothers.
Much of it comes from Taylor’s successful career with McKinsey and later Port Jackson Partners, another consultancy, while his wife, Louise Clegg, has also had a successful career as a lawyer.
But his asset portfolio is both opaque and labyrinthine, with family trusts and holding companies – at least seven have been declared on Taylor’s register of interests over his 13 years in parliament – that own the various properties linked to Taylor and Clegg, his late father Peter, and his brothers Charles, Richard and Duncan.
Quite apart from the extensive rural holdings linked to Taylor’s corporate entities – 3500 hectares and counting – there are also his agribusiness investments from previous years.
For good reason, Taylor and his Liberal Party supporters might hope to maintain a high level of discretion around his family’s wealth.
Liberal Party leaders are always at risk of being caricatured as wealthy and out of touch; the characterisation of Malcolm Turnbull as “Mr Harbourside Mansion” was devastating during the 2016 election campaign, while Peter Dutton’s extensive property holdings were used to portray him as out of touch.
But while Turnbull’s self-made success was well catalogued through his high-profile and pre-political career as an investment banker and through the dotcom boom and bust, and Dutton’s vast property portfolio was documented on title records, there is less transparency to Taylor’s wealth, most of which came from his business career.
Taylor has, over the years, told colleagues and friends that he received not a single dollar from his family to get his start in life, other than them paying for his education at The King’s School. By his reckoning, he is a self-made man.
Further, following the death of his father, Peter, in 2022, he did not receive a single dollar of inheritance, and nor has he sought anything. Instead, the four tight-knit Taylor brothers have determined to band together to hold on to farmland accrued over generations, rather than break it up, as sometimes happens when a patriarch dies.
“My wife and I worked hard at school, at university and in our careers to build a life for our family,” Taylor said in response to detailed questions.
“Unlike most on the Labor side, I built a successful career outside of politics and came to parliament later in life.
“I want to use my skills and experience to revive Australians’ living standards and restore opportunity, so young people who work hard have a fair shot at getting ahead.
“We need to restore the dream of home ownership, and our policies will be geared towards that.
“At a time when everything is going up except real wages, it’s clear that only a Coalition government can protect the Australian way of life and lift their standard of living.”
Taylor’s official register of interests references only a home in Goulburn, a property in Sydney, and an interest in a slew of corporate entities and family trusts: among them the AJ & L Taylor Family Trust, Maclaughlin River Land Trust No.1, Maclaughlin River Pastoral and related entities, Farm Partnerships Australia, and his and Clegg’s main family company Gufee Pty Ltd.
At its most basic level, a trust is an entity that allows someone to own an asset for the benefit of other people, but it also obscures the ownership and beneficiaries.
Ultimately, it leaves a lot unaccounted for behind Taylor’s main company, Gufee Pty Ltd, so listed on his official register of interests.
The family farm
Long before Taylor was tapped for preselection by John Howard to run in the safe Liberal seat of Hume following the retirement of Liberal veteran Alby Schultz in the 2013 federal election, he was a country boy from Nimmitabel.
The third of four boys born to graziers Peter and Anne Taylor, the Taylor brothers share in a farming portfolio that dates to 1909, when their great-grandfather Henry Taylor purchased Jettiba in Holts Flat, south of Nimmitabel.
Henry Taylor made his purchase after moving from Bradford in the UK and scratching out a living for some years in the tiny town of Cathcart, in the Snowy region near the Victorian border. They were hard years, the land unforgiving, but over time, the Taylors have prospered.
The family’s farming operations have been an exercise in expansion since. The adjoining property Bellevue – a stone’s throw away – was another significant acquisition. It was purchased in 1936 by Taylor’s grandfather, Charles, and remains the family’s main homestead in the area, run by his oldest brother, Richard Taylor.
After Taylor’s mother, Anne, died in 1988, her widower Peter Taylor moved to another farm, Bobingah, paying $260,000 in 1989. It is now run by Duncan, the youngest of the Taylor siblings. Long held by an eponymous family company owned by the estate of Peter Taylor, a section of the land at Rock Flat includes a 6.25 per cent share in the name of each of the four Taylor brothers.
Taylor has not declared the stake because he holds no financial interest in the property.
Subsequent acquisitions have taken the rural landholdings in which Angus holds an interest to more than 3500 hectares. Among the most recent was 470 hectares in Gadara, west of Tumut, bought in 2024 for $6.6 million.
Not included in Taylor’s latest log of farmland interests is a 780-hectare farm on the Victoria border that was owned by a syndicate of farmers as part of the Jam Land Pty Ltd company, of which Taylor’s family trust was one of a handful of minority owners.
Jam Land sold the Corrowong property, Ambyne, in 2023 for $3 million, but not before the NSW environment department declared that 28 hectares of native grasslands had been illegally cleared after it was sprayed with herbicide.
Taylor denied having any involvement in the property at the time, and the owners of Jam Land argued the cleared area did not contain an endangered ecological community.
After remediation orders were issued for the site, Jam Land launched an appeal in the Federal Court with assistance from the Australian Farmers Fighting Fund. It was unsuccessful.
Angus’s farming interests have not been limited to the land. There is also his agribusinesses. In 1999, Angus and Richard were among nine co-founders of Growth Farms Australia, a farm management business that operates primarily across the eastern states. Angus was a silent partner with an initial stake of 3.3 per cent in the company.
By 2015, the business managed about $400 million in agricultural assets, according to a joint interview by Richard and Angus Taylor with The Weekly Times.
In 2020, the Taylor’s family trust Gufee Pty Ltd sold its shareholdings in Growth Farms Australia for an undisclosed amount, believed to be about $10,000.
The family homes
Taylor and his wife, Louise Clegg, purchased their first Sydney home in 2000, a month before Taylor’s 34th birthday. It was a semi in the seaside enclave of Bronte for $835,000.
Thanks to the property boom in the early years of this century, the couple did well on the Bronte house, selling in 2005 for $1.4 million. The following year, they upgraded to a five-bedroom house with a swimming pool in Woollahra for $4.3 million.
The Woollahra house was sold a decade later, three years after Taylor entered parliament, for $6.77 million to Jeremy Bond, the grandson of the late Perth tycoon Alan Bond. The same house was resold last November for $14 million.
When Taylor threw his hat into the ring for Hume in the 2013 federal election, he also put his money into it. In 2012, the Gufee Pty Ltd trust paid $1.65 million for Taylor’s farmland home near Goulburn.
The property was once owned by Brigadier George Hurst in the 1950s and 1960s, but a subdivision after he died in 1972 left the original homestead on 200 hectares that is now the Taylor family home.
The improvements since then have been substantial: there is now a tennis court, a private lake, and a series of approved development applications: the first in 2022 at an estimated cost of $1.35 million and $1.9 million worth of alterations and additions in 2024.
Then there’s the Sydney bolthole. A three-bedroom apartment in Sydney’s Edgecliff that Clegg purchased in 2020 for $2.77 million in a grand art deco building where neighbours include thoroughbred trainers and racehorse owners John and Trish Muir, and former ABC chairman Donald McDonald and his wife, Jane.
After six years of price growth, and given the apartment includes one of only four car spaces on title, local agents say its value would have a bottom line of $4 million on the current market.
Company affairs
One of Taylor’s first forays into online agribusiness was called The Farmshed, founded in 2000 at the tail end of the dotcom boom. It was not a success, and put into voluntary administration in 2002.
Also listed among his former corporate affairs was a farm management software company, Farmsmart, founded in early 2003 with his former McKinsey & Co colleague Tony Reid. The company was folded in 2009, and a few months later, Taylor set up Agriculture Managers (Australia) and its subsidiary Australian Agricultural Securitisation, both ultimately owned by a Cayman Islands-registered entity. Taylor had severed any involvement with the companies by the time he entered federal politics in 2013, and he has always insisted he never drew any benefit from them.
Perhaps Taylor’s best-known achievement was during his management consultancy years, first at McKinsey & Company, driving the creation of Fonterra, a dairy co-operative owned by New Zealand farmers that at one point was responsible for 30 per cent of the world’s dairy exports.
By the time Taylor won his seat, his corporate interests had been reduced to his family trusts and a management consultancy and corporate advisory firm, Centaurus Partners, founded with one of his McKinsey colleagues, John Roberts. Taylor resigned as a director in 2015.
Over the almost 13 years Taylor has been a member of parliament, he has regularly updated his register of interests, but never offered any more than the minimum required. The assets held by those family trusts – and any proceeds from them – are not declared, and nor are they required to be.
It is a situation that has long offered another veil of privacy over the wealth and business interests of a man now elevated to lead one of Australia’s two major parties of government.
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