While the owners’ legal representatives did not appear at the hearing, the court heard construction could “significantly increase the risk of the sewer main failing and causing a pollution event in Middle Harbour”.
A stinky proposition indeed. No surprises, then, that Sydney Water’s injunction was granted until a more substantive hearing this week.
Lobby land
December 10 is D-Day for Big Tech giants, when the Albanese government’s teenage social media ban is slated to come into force.
This week, representatives from TikTok, Meta, Google and Snapchat will descend on Canberra for meetings with Communications Minister Anika Wells and eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant.
With details still fuzzy on exactly which platforms will be banned, and the threat of retaliatory tariffs from the Trump administration looming, we expect Big Tech’s lobbying blitz to continue right down to the buzzer.
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Representatives from some of those platforms might feel a bit miffed at last week’s Senate estimates revelation that 4Chan, the internet’s filthiest sewer, has managed to escape the naughty list.
Especially since 4Chan doesn’t have any smooth-talking former staffers pleading its case in the Canberra bubble – unlike the other tech giants, who hire their share of former ministerial apparatchiks.
Take Google, which despite having three different firms registered as lobbyists, is now, as of this month, also being represented by Premier National, run by Liberal moderate powerbroker Michael Photios.
One might expect Anthony Albanese’s sweeping election victory in May to have been a kind of extinction-level event for Liberal-aligned lobbying firms.
But business isn’t going too badly for Premier National, which has added 11 clients since the federal election. It looks like Photios, a former NSW minister, saw the writing on the wall earlier than most, moving his firm toward a more bipartisan footing in January by promoting Tom Kenny, fresh out of Albanese’s office, and ex-Kevin Rudd staffer Kathryn Conroy to partners.
More recently, the firm has become, as far as we can tell, the first major lobbying shop to land someone from the Greens, with the party’s former ACT MP Amanda Bresnan joining in July.
The message to Liberals is pretty clear: evolve or die.
AHHA moment
Until this week, the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association operated as the national peak body for public hospitals. But no longer. This week, news filtered out that the association had been put into voluntary administration and would no longer be operating as the national peak body.
There had been no communication from AHHA itself, beyond a statement from administrators McGrath Nicol confirming that they’d taken over.
“Due to the financial position of AHHA, we regret to advise that the administrators are unable to trade the business and have no alternative other than to undertake an orderly wind-down of operations,” McGrath Nicol said.
Our calls to AHHA’s chief executive Tony Farley also went unanswered, although he later referred us back to the administrators at McGrath Nicol. Farley was appointed interim CEO in May on a short-term contract to “steer this national peak body through a critical period”. That, it certainly was.
Before being hired by the AHHA’s chair, who happens to be former NSW health minister Jillian Skinner, Farley last popped up on CBD’s radar when, in his last job as executive director of Sydney Catholic Schools, he put noses out of joint with a ritzy Christmas cocktail soiree.
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