Guards of dishonour march into court
Date February 9, 2013 Category Opinion 15 reading now
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Mike Carlton
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Eddie Obeid leaves ICAC. Photo: Edwina Pickles
What a spectacular parade of greed and deceit there has been at the Independent Commission Against Corruption these recent months.
In they went and out they came: a revolving door of touts, chancers and urgers, scum from the Sydney business world and the swill of the Labor Party.
Money was their holy grail, other people’s money and lots of it.
I had thought counsel assisting the inquiry, Geoffrey Watson, SC, was exaggerating, as barristers will, when he invoked the spectre of the infamous Rum Corps on the first day’s play last November. The evidence since suggests this was restrained understatement. We have seen NSW Inc laid bare, rotten to the core.
Counsel Assisting the Commission Geoffrey Watson. Photo: Edwina Pickles
No doubt the business figures involved think of themselves as canny investors, superior men of affairs far smarter than your average bear. Money was their holy grail, other people’s money and lots of it. They include John ”Foghorn” Kinghorn, best known for his exquisite timing in trousering a cool $670 million by selling off his RAMS home loan business shortly before it fell to pieces in 2007. Kinghorn is one of the so-called Magnificent Seven, each of whom stood to make about $60 million with the flick-of-a-wrist sale of coal company A to coal company B.
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Another is Richard Poole, amusingly described as an investment banker, and heard on a phone intercept saying ”we want money and we don’t give a f— how we get there”. For all his vaunted financial expertise, he had difficulty explaining the millions sloshing in and out of his wife’s bank account.
My personal favourite of this bunch is one John McGuigan who, after repeatedly denying to Watson that he was ”after the shortest route to the biggest pot of money”, was much discomfited to hear himself spouting that very phrase in yet another telephone tap. For all the swagger, some of them appear to be not all that bright.
Then there is Edward Moses Obeid himself, the capofamiglia at the dark centre of it all, with his smug, reptilian face and his brood of oily sons. Eddie is bright. You would have to be, to turn the $200,000 a year in pay and allowances for a member of the NSW upper house into a squillion-dollar octopus run by a bewildering network of trusts, as he would like us to believe. His defining moment came on Tuesday when he blew his cool and snapped at Watson that ”I have spent more money than you have made in your lifetime”. He seemed to be proud of this.
Hooray for the anonymous onlooker in the queuing throng who told him that ”It is not a guard of honour, I assure you”. As Kate McClymont reported, Obeid’s brief and my old ABC colleague Stuart Littlemore, QC, momentarily abandoned his Zen-like calm to shoot back: ”I will speak to the commissioner about you”. Grrrrr, Stuart, I bet that frightened him.
The fat lady sings on Monday when the former energy minister Ian ”Sir Lunchalot” Macdonald will be in the witness box to assist with inquiries. Too much to hope that he’ll roll over and reveal all, I suppose.
In high contrast to the odious crew above, a good man died this week. Roy Wotton, OAM, a retired Anglican priest, left this world at the age of 99, deservedly mourned by all who knew him. Roy had been an army chaplain in New Guinea in 1942, in the thick of the fighting as the Australians stopped the Japanese on the Kokoda Track. In a few bloody months, he buried more than 400 young Diggers, a horror that affected him profoundly and cemented the pacifist beliefs he would hold all his life.
Not that he was a shrinking violet. At one burial service, he spotted an armed Japanese soldier creeping through the jungle and brought him down with a rugby tackle; he had been a nippy rugby halfback at Fort Street Boys’ High. There was another celebrated occasion when no less than the American Caesar himself, Douglas MacArthur, asked him what the terrain was like at Kokoda. ”Put on some boots and find out for yourself,” Roy retorted.
Our paths crossed when I was on radio and he rang me a few years ago to get something done about a memorial for the great Australian battles at Buna and Gona. His humanity shone through. For 28 years he was the rector of St John’s at Gordon on the north shore, where he upset many of his Tory-blue congregation with his trenchant opposition to the Vietnam War. A high church Anglo-Catholic, in his later years he came to despise the piss-and-wind evangelicals who have seized control of the Sydney diocese.
Roy Wotton died suddenly last Sunday, just a few months short of his 100th birthday. They farewelled him at his beloved St John’s.
It’s that time of the year when the nutters of Europe are wont to flee the northern winter and blow in for a visit here.
First cab off the rank this month will be that loon, the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, who believes the science of climate change is a Marxist plot to gain control of the world. Monckton would like you to think he is a member of the British House of Lords, which he is not. This time around he is being carted about the place by none other than Pastor Danny Nalliah, of the Melbourne-based Catch the Fire Ministries. Danny, you might remember, claimed that Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires of 2009, in which 173 people died, were God’s punishment for the state’s legalisation of abortion. He has also suggested that the Queensland floods of 2011 were ”God trying to get our attention” after Kevin Rudd had delivered a speech critical of Israel. Enough said there.
The second nutter is a far-right Dutch MP, the peroxide-blond Geert Wilders, a bigot who rants against Islam and has compared the Koran to Mein Kampf. His sponsors are a secretive mob called the Q Society, whose deputy president, Debbie Robinson, warned the ABC’s Lateline program last year that Muslims here were demanding that Australians should ”not have Christmas trees, stop having pork, don’t drink alcohol”.
It’s part of life’s rich pageant. They should give us all a good laugh.
smhcarlton@gmail.com
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/guards-of-dishonour-march-into-court-20130208-2e3ac.html#ixzz2KN5CVQCT