Senator Pauline Hanson has developed a bit of a penchant for being slow to disclose the patronage of Australia’s richest woman Gina Rinehart, whose planes have provided a sort of unofficial fleet to Hanson and her One Nation entourage.
So when we finally started to see the senator make some timely disclosures this month, we were intrigued to see two of them double as makeshift advertisements for the aircraft operated by Rinehart’s company S. Kidman. The disclosures were also flush with gratitude for the company’s chief executive and former Northern Territory chief minister Adam Giles.
“Thank you S. Kidman CEO Adam Giles. The Pilatus PC-12 is widely regarded as one of the safest and most reliable single-engine turboprop aircraft, featuring a safety record comparable to twin-engine jets,” Hanson wrote in her latest disclosure to the register last week.
“With over 7 million flight hours, it is heavily used in charter and medevac [sic] roles like the Flying Doctors.”
This disclosure, we should note, appears to have landed pretty quickly, just two days after Hanson caught the Rinehart express from Adelaide to Coober Pedy on March 17.
But the love for Giles and Rinehart’s assets didn’t end there. In a disclosure on March 17, Hanson disclosed an August flight from Archerfield to Toowoomba for News Corp’s Bush Summit, and a flight from Toowoomba to Canberra for parliament the following day, and a further three flights between December and March.
“Very thankful to S. Kidman CEO, Adam Giles who represents the legacy of Sir Sidney Kidman, born in Adelaide in 1857 and legendary figure in Australia’s cattle industry,” Hanson’s disclosure reads, before squeezing in some drivel that reads like campaign material.
“It’s also wonderful catching a flight that doesn’t try and welcome me to my own country each time it touches down.”
Catalano’s $29.9m penthouse back on the market
Not long after news broke this month that former Domain chief executive and Australian Community Media chairman Antony Catalano had been charged with assaulting a woman, his real estate agent quietly delisted the media operator’s six-bedroom Melbourne penthouse.
On Monday, the $29.95 million property, located in St Kilda’s Saint Moritz building, went back on the market.
The relisting emerges as only the latest in a string of developments following news of the charges.
Until this month, Catalano was the executive chairman of ACM, which he and Melbourne investor Alex Waislitz bought in 2019 for more than $125 million from Nine Entertainment, owner of this masthead. He also controls the real estate classifieds business View Media.
Days after Catalano was charged with assault, he stood down at ACM, and his Melbourne home was pulled from the market by his agents, who this masthead previously reported cited “sensitivities” over the alleged assault.
Police attended the luxury penthouse on March 12, with the entrepreneur returning there briefly after he was granted bail at a court hearing the following day.
This is not the first time the property has been on the market. Catalano previously listed it in April last year, with a reported price guide of $33 million to $36 million. But it was later taken off the market for family reasons, according to The Australian Financial Review.
The property then hit the market once more in February, with a slashed asking price of $29.95 million. The selling agent, John Bongiorno of Marshall White, declined to comment.
The media figure has since checked into a rehabilitation facility after being charged by Victoria Police with dragging a woman around an apartment by her hair and ankles and swinging a clothes iron at her head. A representative for Catalano didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
NSW Liberals brawling again
Like clockwork, the outcome of a recent NSW Liberal Party executive election has triggered a wave of bitter infighting.
On Friday, former state Liberal Party leader Peter Collins delivered the party’s moderate faction a minor victory after he beat the right faction’s Blake Keating 363 votes to 228 on first preferences to become the newly minted president of the NSW Liberals, roughly two years after the state executive was sacked.
Now, self-described conservatives in the state party are licking their wounds and wondering where it all went wrong, naturally turning against each other over shifts in voting blocs and bizarre skirmishes over how-to-vote cards so esoteric we won’t even bother getting into them.
But one point of tension to emerge in the wash-up has been the role of leading conservative powerbroker Dallas McInerney in Keating’s defeat.
McInerney swung a bloc of as many as 70 votes from Keating to Collins, according to sources close to the situation. The move was branded by some members as “retribution” for the ongoing right faction involvement of expelled Liberal Matt Camenzuli, known among other things for trying to sue former prime minister Scott Morrison over preselections.
On that side of the right factional split, the thinking goes that Keating would’ve had a better run at the presidency had he made good with McInerney to get his votes. On the other side, Keating’s camp reckons he was never in with a real shot at winning, and that McInerney’s bloc wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.
Either way, the bad blood runs deep. McInerney and Keating haven’t spoken in about a year, CBD hears, and we’d expect the ongoing factional sparring only deepens the split between the pair. Some things never change.
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John Buckley is a CBD columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.