The redheaded weirdo, his regal acquaintance, a couple of ex-PMs and the Bad Orange Man
What we’ve learned this week about how plutocrats exercise power
Want to keep a low profile after damaging media revelations? Consider fashioning a cunning disguise out of the finest Visy cardboard!
My superpower is that I am rich. So I am useful.
All these guys are like the mafia. Trump, Rupert, Rudy. You want to be a customer, not a competitor. And I am very aware of that.
I see him as an undervalued political stock. It is just that he is a laughingstock now. But when he is king, [they] won’t be laughing.
“Cardboard King” Anthony Pratt
A young entrepreneur spies Kerry Packer in the Qantas Chairman Lounge. He introduces himself, says he’s a big fan and explains he is about to meet someone to try to close a deal that could set him up for life. The entrepreneur says that if the Great Man publicly acknowledges him, he’s sure to be successful. So, pretty please with a cherry on top, could Kerry come over and say hello in a few minutes?
Packer graciously agrees and shortly afterwards warmly greets the entrepreneur after he has begun talking to another businessperson. The entrepreneur turns to Packer and says, “Fuck off, Kerry! Can’t you see I’m busy talking business with someone important?”
Apocryphal but much-retold Australian anecdote
The more narcissistic plutocrats revel in public and media attention, at least when everything is going well. But most prefer to wield influence behind closed doors, living by the maxim that “nobody should know what you look like; everybody should take your calls”. While I have interviewed plutocrats on occasion, I don’t pretend to have much understanding of how this tribe coterie operates.
Me, a week ago
When the student is ready, the teacher appears. As Confucius or possibly Winston Churchill once observed. Seemingly mere moments after I publicly confessed I had little idea how exactly billionaires advanced their class interests, Anthony Pratt inadvertently provided a LinkedIn MasterClass.
Let’s take the learning modules one at a time.
Where is Joe Aston when you need him?
Before going any further, I should acknowledge the sterling work of the much-derided “lamestream media”. As a sometime journo who’s never been reluctant to draw attention to the hubris of the legacy media, I’m surely entitled to point out that the Fourth Estate does us all a great service by keeping a sceptical eye on Australia’s – and the world’s – movers and shakers. (The aforementioned Joe Aston’s recent departure from the Australia Financial Review prompted something approximating a national outpouring of grief for precisely this reason.)
The near-total collapse of local newspapers means that the amount of fuckery dodgy councillors and property developers are getting up to has undoubtedly increased exponentially. There are some, but not many, resources devoted to covering state politics, so I’m hoping a little less fuckery is occurring at that level. Fortunately, those substantial legacy media organisations still extant, such as Nine, do still fund a bit of investigative journalism at the national and international level. That means journos who work for those organisations (Richard Baker, Nick McKenzie and Hannah Bowers, in this instance) can do important work.
Anyway, that’s enough of the backslapping. Let’s get down to what the little people have learnt about the (very) top end of town in recent days.
If you’ve got enough dosh to throw around, everybody is your (fairweather) friend
I assume King Charles and Donald Trump aren’t short of a quid. Tony Abbott has apparently long felt insufficiently renumerated for devoting his life to public service. Nonetheless, he lives in the same neighbourhood as my father and, well, it’s a pretty nice part of Sydney’s “leafy” North Shore (in a non-flashy way). And I gather that Keating, like his eternal frenemy Hawke, made an absolute motza after getting out of politics by assisting Australian businesses seeking to establish a toehold in the Chinese market.
Now – defamation lawyers please take note – I’m not accusing anyone of corruption here. But it’s been my experience in life - my ‘lived experience’, as the kids might put it - that people don’t hand you money without expecting something in return.
At the time of writing, neither King Charles nor that faithful champion of the British monarchy Tony Abbott have commented on the Pratt revelations. We’ll get to Trump momentarily. Paul Keating told the Nine newspapers, “I do not advise Mr Pratt on commercial matters in Australia or abroad [or]... on government matters in Australia that may be relevant to him or his company. My advice is limited to big picture issues of the international kind.”
Okey dokey then. In that case, here are a few questions the more courageous members of the Canberra press gallery may care to explore:
*Exactly what payments are businesses/entrepreneurs – both foreign and domestic – making to erstwhile or currently serving Australian politicians?
*Should Australian voters be made aware of these payments, ideally via a regularly updated online registry? If not, why not?
*Exactly what do the world’s plutocrats get for their ‘consultancy fees’? Is it only ever the occasional big-picture rumination about the state of the nation and the world? When on the publicity trail for his Bob Hawke bio last year, Troy Bramston noted, in reference to the Silver Bodgie’s insatiable appetite for those sweet, sweet yuan:
A few colleagues have said he asked for too many favours… Kevin Rudd told me on the record, he felt uncomfortable with Hawke asking for assistance with his business deals in China, and (Peter) Beattie said the same. But a lot of what he did wasn’t bringing China to Australia, it was the other way, opening doors for Australian businesses. And it’s a different China today. He was meeting with Chinese leaders in the 1990s, when it wasn’t so narrow-minded and oppressive. But I do think he was a little naive about things.
*Do you have to be an ex-PM or a future monarch to get captains of industry to sling you consultancy fees? What if you’re a washed-up content creator who likes to hold forth about “big-picture issues” in a widely ignored weekly Substack newsletter? If you’re, say, a tenth as brutally witty and breathtakingly clever as Paul Keating, can you charge a tenth of his fee?
(Asking for a friend.)
*Domestic politics is more Veep than House of Cards
That’s Ben Shapiro’s observation, not mine. But I’ve always thought he was probably correct. Following the Pratt revelations, I’m even more convinced.
Especially if they have never met them, people often assume rich and powerful individuals are different to the rest of us. On one level, this is self-evidently true – to paraphrase Hemingway’s famous rejoinder to F. Scott Fitzgerald about the rich being different, they are most certainly different in that they have both the insulation and agency afforded by wealth.
Nonetheless, the Pratt revelations – just like Elon Musk’s leaked 2022 text messages – suggest modern-day aristocrats are just as insecure, manipulative, petty, prideful and self-deluding as the old-school kind. What struck me most powerfully about the Pratt revelations was how pathetically desperate the paper-based-products plutocrat was to sit with the cool kids in the school playground.
Pratt boasts about paying Rudy Giuliani a million bucks to attend one of his parties, but the hero of 9/11 doesn’t even bother turning up.
Pratt imagines the heir to the British throne will befriend a colonial cardboard-recycling titan for his winning personality and good looks but then consoles himself that just being “useful” to the Prince of Wales is more than sufficient.
Pratt sucks up to Trump, exalting and excoriating him while dining out on the president’s (alleged) indiscreet remarks. Characteristically, Trump doesn’t hesitate to immediately hurl Pratt under the bus, labelling him a “redheaded weirdo from Australia”. (One can only imagine the depths of depravity an Antipodean ginger could sink to.)
Not so long ago, Trump was given to describing Pratt as a “friend” and “one of the most successful men in the world – perhaps Australia’s most successful man”.
Are the powers-that-be even more worried about China than they are letting on?
For reasons I’ve gone into some detail about previously, I believe there is at least a 50-50 chance that China Anschlusses Taiwan in the next four years. After learning that Pratt – who, as has been established, keeps company with Australian PMs, US presidents and British monarchs – is given to casually observing, “I think China is going to take over Australia,” I’m upping those odds to 70-30.
Given the events of recent years, I can even detail how this is likely to play out. (I don’t claim any great insight or perspicacity here; much more intelligent people than I have been sketching out similar versions of the following scenario for some time.)
The next US federal election takes place in a little over a year. Let’s assume that whichever side loses will refuse to accept defeat. This came close to happening in 2016 and did happen in 2020, so I see no reason to be optimistic about 2024. Especially if it turns out to be a Biden-Trump rematch.
At this point, the US goes from merely being hyperpolarised to being ungovernable, or close to it. Xi, especially if the Chinese economy is still tanking, sees a rare opportunity to unify the virulently ethnonationalist Chinese behind him and secure his place in the history books as one of the Middle Kingdom’s most magnificent emperors. He probably doesn’t even need to do anything too risky or irrevocable; just whip up some confected outrage about the Taiwanese and/or Americans “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people” and put a partial or total blockade in place.
The best-case scenario is that Xi then offers the Balkanised and exhausted US a golden bridge that allows the war-weary American public to abandon Taiwan to its grim fate without losing too much face in the process. For example, Xi may benevolently decree that Taiwanese who don’t want to hang around to be ruled by the CCP are free to migrate, while simultaneously insisting that there really will be only ‘one China’ from now on.
Should something like this occur, allies of the US within China’s orbit – Australia, Japan, South Korea – will be left in a difficult position. At that point, things don’t look promising for any of them. But they look particularly bleak for a sparsely populated continent packed to the brim with natural resources that has just lost the protection of the great and powerful friend it’s demonstrated such slavish loyalty to over the last eight decades. I’m not arguing that China will invade Australia, but it’s possible to “take over” a country without dropping a single bomb on it.
And that’s the best-case scenario. If WWIII breaks out, everybody will lose massively regardless of whether it’s the US-led bloc or China-led bloc that ultimately ekes out something that can potentially be considered a ‘victory’.
Which is another topic that well-resourced legacy media organisations might care to explore more fully.