Overall, it looks like the meeting’s mission – to lower the tension at the club by sharing more of the findings by accountants Grant Thornton on the missing millions – was not accomplished.
With the board resisting the release in full of the accountants’ report – which they argue is “commercial in confidence” – the insurgency on Glenferrie Road is likely to rage on.
Former Australian prime ministers have been undergoing post-political rebrands just lately as globe-trotting fonts of international affairs wisdom.
Scott Morrison, now a fixture on the US neocon lecture circuit, is also a colleague of Donald Trump’s former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who just gave a rave review to the former PM’s upcoming Christian memoir.
Right-minded: The ex-PM is a man in demand in conservative circles.Credit: SMH
Before he was captain’s picked back into public service, Kevin Rudd ran the Asia Society in New York, while Julia Gillard chairs London-based charity Wellcome, among other roles.
But perhaps none are freelancing quite so hard as Tony Abbott.
Last week, the frequent-flying former PM was in Budapest hanging out with hard-line Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, and delivering a speech at that country’s local spin-off of the Conservative Political Action Conference.
As CBD reported last year, Abbott landed a part-time gig with the Orban-aligned Danube Institute, on top of his British trade advisor gig, and seat on the Fox board.
The industrious Abbott has also been unveiled as a “visiting senior fellow” at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a Canadian think-tank that skews right, although not quite to the extent of his Hungarian friends (the institute describes itself as non-partisan).
Tony Abbott speaking in Ukraine last year.
The organisation announced Abbott’s appointment with breathless zeal, pointing to a recent Wall Street Journal interview which described our man as “a fighter in the Cold War with China”, and noted that “Americans dispirited by the 2024 presidential campaign might find it bracing to listen to Tony Abbott”.
According to the institute’s hero-gram, Abbott has been “a fixture of strong, principled leadership throughout the Anglosphere”.
Abbott would no doubt be thrilled.
As lawyers for Bruce Lehrmann returned to the Federal Court on Wednesday for a costs hearing, news was already circulating that the former Liberal staffer is considering appealing last month’s judgment, which found, on the balance of probabilities, that he’d raped Brittany Higgins in Parliament House.
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According to News Corp, Lehrmann has approached Guy Reynolds, SC, who’s acted for Eddie Obeid, Peter Dutton and the like, and is seeking funding from donors in Australia and abroad. No word on who they could be, and we don’t imagine they’ll be rushing to make themselves known.
Still, we felt it time to check in on some of Lehrmann’s backers. Men’s rights activist Bettina Arndt has delayed her Presumption of Innocence Conference, where Lehrmann was slated to speak before pulling out ahead of last month’s judgment, from June to August, citing “hostile media attacks”.
“We will not allow activists to highjack [sic] the vital agenda to be discussed by the unique panel of experts appearing at our conference,” Arndt wrote on Substack, claiming that the decision to platform Lehrmann had elicited a “bizarre overreaction”. Who knows, perhaps in three months’ time, Bruce will be up to it again.
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This masthead carried a just lovely piece last month all about legendary Australian ad man Peter Clemenger preparing to sell of some of the art collection he and his late wife Joan Clemenger built up over their decades together.
The eyes of art pundits were caught by The Wren, a 1978 painting by Brett Whiteley which was expected to go for $2 million or even $3 million. But auctioneers Deutscher and Hackett brought the hammer down in their Melbourne sale rooms last week at $3.7 million, showing, once again, that collectors cannot get enough of Whiteley.
But the real surprise of the sale came from another vendor. A 1905 effort called Cruach en Mahr, Matin, Belle-Île-en-Mer by Aussie impressionist John Peter Russell – who was offered back in those days a few tips in the use of colour by Claude Monet himself – which was expected to fetch between $1.5 and $2.5 million, went for $3.9 million. What cost-of-living crisis?
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