Elizabeth Wynhausen: Brazen displays of the unAustralian way

December 31, 2005

IT is a truth universally acknowledged that the reticence once prized by Australians no longer gets you anywhere. In light of such a historic shift, this columnist proposes to honour those whose brazen behaviour has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams - let alone ours.

The “unAustralian of the year award” (and possibly of the decade) must go to former NSW premier Bob Carr. In August, seeming moments before the you-know-what hit the fan over the latest Sydney toll-road disaster, Carr quit as premier, saying he and his wife Helena liked the idea “that we could spend more of our time in a nice way”.

Just 10 weeks later, Macquarie Bank, which had been involved in big-dollar tollway deals with Carr’s former government, announced that Carr had been taken on as a consultant. Nice! Neither the bank nor its new consultant has denied he will get half-a-million a year, twice what he earned as premier. Carr keeps his $160,000 pension but has had to move out of a taxpayer-funded retirement office in the presciently named government office block, Governor Macquarie Tower.

Of course Carr is far from the first politician to accept a job involving the appearance of potential conflict of interest. Take the squad of former Howard government ministers - Peter Reith, Michael Wooldridge, John Fahey and Richard Alston - who soon after quitting parliament had accepted lucrative consultancies (or other well-paid work) with companies or organisations in fields which they had overseen as ministers. Some other Western countries require waiting times such as two years.

All this did not seem to worry Prime Minister John Howard, the unrivalled master of the official perquisite, who has found time, within his hectic taxpayer-funded travel schedules and his pilgrimages to Lord’s, to pass legislation to ensure that all perks can be stripped from the employment contracts just now foisted upon the mugs who voted for him. Emerging again and again in the polls as preferred prime minister, Howard undeniably gets away with it, as did former Fairfax chief executive Fred Hilmer, who left with a cool $4.5 million, as Fairfax was saving money by thinning the ranks of journalists - offering scores voluntary redundancies.

Hilmer no sooner left Fairfax than he walked through the revolving door of the vice-chancellor’s office at the University of NSW. It has to be said that as a former academic he surely knows more about universities than he knew about newspapers.

Though he didn’t get away with it, the “Brendan Nelson award for showing your face in the media once too often” goes to Giuseppe “Joe” Barbaro, whose baby daughter Montana was abducted in Melbourne last year. Thus alerted to his double or triple life, the Canberra woman who is the mother of two of Barbaro’s other children held up a wedding dress on television and said her engagement was off now she had learned he also had two children with Montana’s mother, Anita Ciancio.

Barbaro’s woes only got worse when NSW police who saw his face in the papers had him extradited to face drug charges. This year Barbaro was sentenced to six years in prison on those charges. He should have listened to advice and we know where he can get it.

The “Sol Trujillo award for unwanted advice from an expat pest” goes to Germaine Greer, who seldom stops haranging us. Greer recently responded to the troubles in Cronulla, 20,000km from her perch in Cambridgeshire, by anticipating “a bloody summer in Australia”.

In what is always a strong contest, other professional expats have been beaten out by award sponsor, Mr Trujillo, the boss of Telstra,

who had just landed on our shores to flog off what remained of our once unique (and uniquely annoying) Telco when he and his imported lieutenants sent the share prices south by suggesting that the value would suffer if the Government failed to restore elements of the Telstra monopoly.

But Trujillo will have to share the “over-reacher of the year” award with Gunns, the logging company with the Government of Tasmania onside and a former Tasmanian premier on its board. Gunns, the largest logger of Tasmania’s old-growth forests, is suing 20 environmental organisations and activists, including Greens leader Senator Bob Brown and a raggle-taggle group of students and others, for $6.9 million in damages, claiming that their campaign against old-growth logging has harmed its business. Gunns’ first two statements of claims have been struck out of court. Last August a Victorian Supreme Court judge described parts of the second statement of claims, a 360-page epic, as embarrassing and unintelligible.

Confronted with hundreds of pages of other legal documents, former NSW roads minister Carl Scully, now Police Minister, seems to have murmured “take me, I’m yours”, before signing off on the toll road agreement that gives one of the richest guys in Asia effective control over Sydney roads between William Street and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Scully, a vegan, gets the “Billy McMahon award for self-delusion” for claiming that he would bring “sparkle” to the position of NSW premier. This claim seemed a shade less far-fetched when the job went to Morris Iemma, a droopy-eyed man few had heard of before he became premier. Confronted with the Cronulla riot earlier this month, Iemma threw his hands in the air and told people not to go to the beaches.

If Mark Latham, whose diaries gave a new dimension to the expression Labor rat, can be considered the year’s political loser, the winner has to be Phillip Ruddock, the former federal minister for immigration, known for his zealousness in putting kiddies “of Middle Eastern appearance” behind barbed wire. Not only did he dodge the flack when it became clear that his former department had also deported an Australian citizen and put a permanent resident into immigration detention, but Ruddock had meanwhile been appointed Attorney-General.

Ruddock was far from being the only lucky lawyer but the luckiest of all has to be Eugene McGee, the South Australian barrister who escaped going to jail despite leaving the scene of a fatal accident. McGee was fined $3100 and given a 12-month driving-licence suspension after the judge accepted psychiatric evidence that he had avoided police for more than six hours after killing cyclist Ian Humphrey in 2003 because the accident had triggered partial amnesia related to a post-traumatic-stress disorder. The trauma had not stopped him telephoning his wife, his brother and a lawyer soon after the accident. Nor did his amazing escape from prison inhibit him from voicing concern that he wouldn’t be treated fairly at a subsequent royal commission. Now there’s boldness for you. But it’s not over yet. McGee and his brother Craig have since been charged with attempting to obstruct justice.