By Stephen Brook and Kishor Napier-Raman
During the last term of parliament, the Greens made themselves the party of renters, and didn’t care whose noses they put out of joint. Here’s looking at you, prime minister.
But this is Australia, where landlords always win, and win they did in the May election. Max Chandler-Mather, the party’s landlord hater-in-chief lost his Brisbane seat of Griffith to Labor’s Renee Coffey, whose bestie Jessica Rudd is daughter of that electorate’s most famous MP, Mr Kevin 07 himself.
Sarah Witty, the member for Melbourne, delivers her maiden speech at Parliament House.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Notably, Coffey is a landlord, owning a Brisbane investment property with her husband, Jason McKenzie, on top of their residence (McKenzie has another investment property in Melbourne).
Meanwhile, Sarah Witty, the Labor MP who turfed out former Greens leader Adam Bandt in the inner-Melbourne seat of, er, Melbourne, is a bona fide property mogul, owning three Melbourne investment properties – in the suburbs of Richmond, Point Cook and East Brighton – as well as a home in Richmond.
That makes Witty one of federal parliament’s No.1 landlords, behind Labor colleague Andrew Charlton, who owns five homes in a circa $42 million property portfolio. They are the party of the working class, after all.
Crime-fighting mayor stands aside – after he is charged with criminal offences
Councillor Pradeep Tiwari, the crime-fighting mayor of Maribyrnong City Council, garnered quite the reputation for his stance on violence and antisocial behaviour in Footscray.
Maribyrnong Mayor Pradeep Tiwari.Credit: Facebook
So it might be a surprise to some readers to learn the mayor is standing down after he was charged with several criminal offences.
The mayor faces three magistrates’ court charges including dangerous driving – a jailable offence – as well as one count of using a portable device while driving and a count of failing to ensure a passenger was not in the same seat as the driver.
He is yet to enter a plea. The charges relate to an incident in Flemington in June 2024 before Tiwari’s election to the council.
“This is a personal matter for Cr Tiwari,” the council said in a statement. Well, yes, and “council respects the legal process now underway. We trust it will be resolved in a timely and appropriate manner.”
Here’s hoping.
The stood-down mayor – he has also stepped aside from his role on the council – hit the headlines after an arrest warrant was issued when he didn’t show up to a court hearing last week. The warrant was then scrapped hours later after the court received further information from Tiwari’s lawyers.
The matter returns to court in October, where hopefully the rather unusual charges will be further explained.
It was Tiwari’s decision to stand down, we were told. The man himself took to social media to air his views.
“I want to acknowledge the hundreds of messages, emails, and calls I have received from people offering their encouragement and support,” he said in a Facebook post. “I cannot express enough my sincere gratitude for every single one of you. At the same time, I must strongly condemn the racist comments that have been posted about my [Indian] heritage in response to this matter.
“I want to make it clear that I remain a councillor of the City of Maribyrnong. Once this legal matter and investigation are resolved, I fully intend to return to my role and continue representing our community.”
Which shows either innate self-belief or a touching optimism. Time will tell. Meanwhile, deputy mayor Bernadette Thomas has stepped up as acting mayor.
Heydon has his say
Former High Court judge Dyson Heydon has published a book on the law of contract.Credit: AAPIMAGE
Disgraced former High Court judge Dyson Heydon’s re-embrace by the higher echelons of the legal fraternity continued with an address at the Samuel Griffith Society’s annual conference in Perth at the weekend. Heydon, found by an independent High Court-commissioned investigation to have sexually-harassed six female associates, has been feted by top judges since the release of a self-published book on contract law earlier this year.
His controversial appearance at the Perth conference – hosted by a prominent conservative legal pressure group and among his first public forays since a dramatic fall from grace in 2020 – involved a speech titled A Homage to Justice [Ian] Callinan, one of many tributes to Heydon’s fellow John Howard-appointed High Court colleague delivered at the conference.
Heydon’s attendance was slammed in an op-ed in The West Australian by Women Lawyers Association of Western Australia president Catriona Macleod, who called the whole thing “laughably out of sync with the legal profession I know”.
Except the conference drew quite a well-connected crowd, including two sitting High Court judges – Simon Steward and James Edelman, former Commonwealth attorney-general Christian Porter, ex-Coalition frontbencher turned Queensland MP Amanda Stoker, and NSW Liberal leadership aspirant and arch-NIMBY Alister Henskens.
Australia’s richest barrister and ex-University of Melbourne chancellor Allan Myers, KC, who is the Society’s chair also spoke, as did former finance minister Nick Minchin, currently stuck with the unenviable task of figuring out what went wrong for the Liberals in their May election disaster.
This time, the Liberals can’t even blame the party’s flirtation with anti-trans keyboard warrior Katherine Deves, who ran unsuccessfully in Warringah in 2022, and whose nasty tweets helped drive moderate voters away from Scott Morrison’s government.
What is Deves up to now? Well, at the weekend, she too was among the speakers at the Samuel Griffith Society’s conference.
Income streams while inside
After being convicted of sex offences against two young men last month, former NSW MP Gareth Ward fought tooth and nail to stay on representing the voters of Kiama from inside his jail cell.
Ward eventually resigned hours before parliament was set to vote to expel him, after the NSW Court of Appeal rejected his attempt to stop the Legislative Assembly exercising that power.
But Ward, who is remanded in custody ahead of a sentencing hearing next month, still has other passive income streams. He owns two inner Sydney apartments, both of which remain listed on short-term rental platform Airbnb.
One of those is the Art Deco Potts Point apartment, bought in 2017 for just $640,000, which Ward locked himself out of last year prompting the then MP to show up at Parliament at 4am dressed in his underwear. The other property is a two-bedroom unit in neighbouring Woolloomooloo, brought for $790,000, also in 2017.
Convicted rapist Gareth Ward has resigned from NSW parliament, losing his taxpayer-funded salary and triggering a byelection in Kiama.Credit: Dylan Coker
Both properties, which are managed on the platform by a third-party provider that arranges bookings and cleaning, are reserved for much of September, and according to nightly prices, Ward can make up to $4000 a week while imprisoned.
The Potts Point apartment boasts a prime location, and a few accoutrements referencing the owner’s previous occupation, with red leather-bound copies of parliamentary Hansard adorning a bookshelf in the living room.
But guests haven’t always had the most pleasant experience. The unit has a 4.35 rating on Airbnb, which the platform notes puts it in the bottom 10 per cent of eligible listings.
“Unfortunately, the lack of cleanliness made the experience not good,” was the feedback left in a one-star review from 2022.
“There was an issue with damp, mould and also a pest issue which was mentioned and hopefully will be resolved before more guests,” another guest wrote.
A lack of cleanliness was a recurring theme across reviews for Ward’s properties. Make of that what you will.