By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
CBD brought word this week of North Sydney MP Kylea Tink’s push to save her very special electorate from those ruthless, unsentimental bureaucrats at the Australian Electoral Commission.
We bring your attention today to another peak lower north shore dummy-spit that unites two very Sydney attitudes: NIMBYish resistance to new public development and a visceral hatred of cyclists.
This year, the NSW government is set to finally begin construction on a long-awaited bike ramp coming off the Harbour Bridge at Milsons Point.
It will go ahead despite years of complaints from a rather vocal group of residents with too much time on their hands who say the ramp will compromise the heritage of both the bridge and North Bradfield Park, which we today discovered is the name of those unsightly patches of grass next to Milsons Point station.
In the whingers’ defence, the proposed ramp is as hideous as you’d expect. But their counter-proposal, which they call the “community cycle ramp”, is basically another ramp except more squiggly, and hardly an aesthetic upgrade.
Anyway, with construction set to begin, the development’s opponents have found an ace up their sleeve, approaching former prime minister and committed lycra lover Tony Abbott to plead their case with the government. We hear Abbott has been making a few calls asking for more detail about the project.
Joan Street, a spokesperson of sorts for the campaign against the ramp, gave us a frantic “no comment” when asked by CBD about Abbott’s involvement. The former PM didn’t return our calls.
But we can’t imagine anyone better placed to sway a state Labor government than a conservative former prime minister.
SPUN OUT
Quo vadis, Isaac Levido? (OK, that’s Latin for “where are you going?“).
The former Port Macquarie boy turned political strategist has had some massive campaign wins under his belt, including Scott Morrison’s 2019 miracle in May, and that December, Boris Johnson’s “Get Brexit Done” general election. It was even reported that Conservative Party staffers were so in the strategist’s thrall that on the election night, they chanted “Oooh, Isaac Levidooo” to the tune of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army.
But that was before Johnson’s successor Rishi Sunak led the party through a disastrous campaign which ended in crushing defeat last week. Levido was on the books working for the party but his advice – such as don’t have an early election – wasn’t followed.
So what does Levido, once a protege of veteran Liberal Party election whisperer Sir Lynton Crosby at his CT Group, do next? Not return to Australia, it seems.
“I’ve been based in the UK for some time and will continue to be. I have a corporate business I’ll be returning to,” Levido, who has an OBE, told us.
In January, he founded Sancrox Political Advisory, which just happens to share a name with an industrial suburb of Port Macquarie.
BIRTHDAY BARTLETT
A shout-out to media lawyer Peter Llewellyn Bartlett, who is celebrating his 50th anniversary as a partner at legal firm MinterEllison – a milestone unlikely to be surpassed.
Bartlett grew up in Warburton in the Yarra Ranges, where his mother opened a shop after his timber-cutter father suffered a stroke. He didn’t even understand what a lawyer did, but his aunt told him it would be a worthy profession.
His life turned a corner at Flinders Golf Club when his dad and brother chanced to meet a partner at law firm Gillott Moir & Winneke who later offered him articles. He became a partner at that firm, now known as MinterEllison, in 1974.
Since then, he’s worked on some of the biggest legal cases in Australian history, including matters involving Kerry Packer, Abe Saffron, Mick Gatto, Tony Madafferi, Justice Lionel Murphy, Robert Trimbole, Christopher Dale Flannery, Dr Geoffrey Edelsten and Roger Rogerson. He also acted for the widow of Donald McKay in the special inquiry into his murder.
More recently, Bartlett played a leading role in the defamation trial of the century, when decorated soldier Ben Roberts-Smith sued this masthead in 2018 for reporting he had committed war crimes in Afghanistan.
Last year, when Federal Court judge Anthony Besanko delivered his verdict, a win for the papers on all counts, Bartlett, listening in while on holiday in Iceland, burst into uncontrollable tears.
“I have been very lucky to work with some of the best journalists that this country has produced and work on some of the biggest stories – stories that the public has a right to see,” he told CBD.
SHARPE SCHEDULE
The NSW government on Tuesday awarded long-overdue state heritage listing of the Gooriwal Cultural Landscape at La Perouse, a hugely significant area for the local First Nations community and a site of first contact between European colonisers and Indigenous Australians.
But what was meant to be a feelgood NAIDOC Week announcement by Heritage Minister Penny Sharpe fell flat when nobody from the local Indigenous community turned up.
Members of the La Perouse Land Council were meant to be at the announcement with Sharpe, but had to withdraw because of a last-minute scheduling mix-up, we’re told.
How awkward.
AND FINALLY
We note that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Tuesday announced Jillian Segal as Australia’s first antisemitism envoy. Given CBD brought you advance news of this appointment last week, we debated if we deserved a modest victory lap. But when our editors voiced concerns such a move would be insufferably smug, that clinched it.
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