Strength, Wealth And Politics
Sun Herald
Sunday August 31, 2003
SO THE story goes, a leading businessman was so frustrated with the rough treatment he was receiving from a major bank he went to Kerry Packer for advice.
The powerful head of the television, publishing and gaming empire listened to the man's pitiful story and said he would make a few calls.
Packer phoned a senior bank manager and soon had him quaking on the end of the line. A few hours later the businessman's bank problems evaporated and his company returned from the brink to prosperity.
This is a clear example of the exercise of raw power by someone who has it, knows how to use it and, with his impressive physical frame and wrestler's arms, almost embodies it.
But people with power don't fit a stereotype. Bob Carr, for example, once a hired hand on Packer's Bulletin magazine, is now ruling NSW for a third term and heading for a record-breaking 101/2 years in office.
With a sweeping majority in Parliament and a chronically weak Opposition, Carr could use his political power with brutality and cruelty in the manner of Neville Wran or the late Sir Robert Askin.
He doesn't because power sits uncomfortably with him, giving the appearance that he is almost daunted by it.
Not that anyone should test his resolve because Carr has an utterly loyal apparatus in the Premier's Department and the Cabinet Office (nicknamed ``The Stasi"), that can bring grief to the fortunes of those who cross him.
One of the political operatives in the discreet annexes of the Carr Administration is ALP general secretary Eric Roozendaal .
As bureaucratic head of the ruling party, Roozendaal is the conduit for all significant transactions between Sussex Street, headquarters of the ALP machine, and Governor Macquarie Tower, where the executive government has its command post.
Roozendaal has used his entrepreneurial skills to fill the party's coffers with millions of dollars in political donations and built a factional base that decides who will be your next MP and who won't.
While Roozendaal's remarkable power is derived from a 120-year-old political machine, Westfield co-founder Frank Lowy and Meriton owner Harry Triguboff are migrants who made their billions with their bare hands, energy and sleepless drive.
Westfield, with a worldwide combined market capitalisation of $22.8 billion, is so powerful that the Wran government passed legislation 20 years ago to give it Crown land for the Eastgardens centre.
Last year the Carr Government passed an act to place the company's massive Bondi Junction redevelopment under the single control of Labor-controlled Waverley Council and remove it from the boundaries of neighbouring Liberal-led Woollahra Council.
While Lowy has changed the way we shop, Triguboff has changed the way we live by making apartments an acceptable alternative to the once-fancied home on a quarter-acre block. In 40 years, Triguboff Inc has built 50,000 private dwellings and the Scots College old boy is now fixated on his crowning achievement, the $300 million, 80-storey World Tower which will dominate the city's skyline when it is finished next year.
Alongside the shopping and apartment tsars, Macquarie Bank supremo David Clarke has been engineering the way we get to work and home again.
He is the maestro of motorways with a significant shareholding in every major traffic mover in the Sydney area the M4, M2, M5, Eastern Distributor and Western Sydney Orbital.
When Sydney Airport was put up for sale by the Howard Government, Clarke and his two senior lieutenants, managing director Allan Moss and executive director Bill Moss (unrelated), outblitzed rival bidders to secure the business and then headhunted Max Moore-Wilton, head of the Prime Minister's Department, to run it.
The crash-tackle modus operandi of Lowy, Triguboff and Clarke is in sharp contrast to the discreet but steely charm of David Gonski, whose effortless diplomacy extends from the boardroom to the arts world.
This tax lawyer and merchant banker has won the hearts of the arts community because of his ability to soothe the cultural backwoodsmen of the Howard Government and the Treasury philistines in Carr's administration.
Gonski's method is softly-softly while broadcaster Alan Jones has acquired his all-pervasive influence by table-thumping, on-air editorialising, power speeches at breakfasts, lunches and dinners and a frantic pace of letter writing.
He hounds politicians and public figures until they submit to his microphonic interrogation and networks with powerbrokers in pursuit of agendas that can be political, sporting or charitable.
Someone who is never likely to be interviewed by Alan Jones is Gerry Gleeson, the ultimate eminence grise, who has served both Wran and Carr. Known as ``The Cardinal" because of his special relationship with the Catholic Church, Gleeson had a hand in selecting former police commissioner Peter Ryan, promoting senior public servants and grabbing vast tracts of public real estate as far as the Cooks River development for his Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority.
The eighth Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, has put the country's biggest and wealthiest archdiocese on notice since his liturgical reception at a full Mass at St Mary's Cathedral in May 2001.
A noted conservative, he has deplored homosexuality, refused communion to gay Catholics, ruled out the ordination of female priests and expressed opposition to a revision of the code of priestly celibacy.
He has introduced the stealthy apparatus of Opus Dei (Work of God), a fundamentalist organisation founded in 1928 which now has 80,000 members worldwide, including 2000 priests.
With his pronouncements and newspaper columns, Pell is able to shape cutting-edge social policy among the State's largest religious community and when Australian troops are sent overseas as part of an invasion force, he can lead the faithful in support or against.
To the uninitiated, MPs and ministers wield power because they are elected, sit in Parliament and appear to govern.
But the reality is that executive government has displaced Parliament a long time ago as the source of authentic decision-making. Parliament merely rubber-stamps them.
Even ministerial announcements on policy, new legislation, amended regulations and revenue raising are often determined by anonymous men of vested power, who are pulling the strings from behind the scenes.
And they are mostly men not women.
Outstanding women have risen to lofty positions in the corporate world Qantas chairwoman Margaret Jackson, St George chief executive Gail Kelly and Macquarie Bank's Helen Nugent, for example but none has reached the awesome status of bending governments, politicians, regulators and the tax office.
Power has been afflicted with a bad press ever since the fatuous English Tory historian Lord Acton famously declared in 1887: ``Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
It wasn't until 1982 that the brilliant London scribe, the late Kenneth Tynan, tried to halt the endless repetition of Acton's quotation by insisting: ``All power is delightful, and absolute power is absolutely delightful."
In a world where money, power and celebrity now march hand-in-hand, Tynan's verdict has passed from wit to wisdom.
TOP 10 MEN OF POWER
Bob Carr
NSW Premier
Elected in 1995 to rule Australia's wealthiest state, Carr's power derives from three consecutive election victories to become the current longest-serving leader in the Commonwealth. He has silenced his internal party critics, politically cleansed the state bureaucracy by appointing FOBs - Friends of Bob - and tirelessly worked to maintain his top-rating profile. Aged 55.
Alan Jones
Radio host
The undisputed king of breakfast broadcasting for the past decade, Jones is the rapid-fire voice that politicians, business leaders and sports administrators cannot ignore. His tentacles of influence reach into the Labor Party as well as the Liberals and Nationals, rugby league and rugby union, the bosses and the unions, the top end of town and struggle street. Aged 60.
Kerry Packer
Media tycoon
Australia's richest man, worth an estimated $5.5 billion, Packer is executive chairman of Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd, owner of the most influential television network, Channel Nine, the country's biggest magazine stable and the cash-minting tables of Melbourne's Crown Casino. He wields unrivalled power in business and sport. Aged 65.
George Pell
Catholic Archbishop of Sydney
Head of the largest religious faith in NSW - 29 per cent of the population are Catholics - Pell exerts influence on major social and political issues. He administers 427 parishes, employs 528 full-time priests and oversees 557 primary and secondary schools teaching a total of 228,392 pupils. When he speaks, he expects the flock to follow. Aged 62.
Harry Triguboff
Meriton Apartments chairman
Private owner of Australia's largest and most profitable apartment company, Triguboff has accumulated a personal wealth estimated at $1.6 billion. His success results from an irrepressible bulldozer approach to governments, councils, planners and subcontractors. When he calls, government ministers and local mayors pay attention. Aged 70.
David Clarke
Macquarie Bank executive chairman
Head of the investment bank known as the "millionaires factory", Clarke is an awesome power in the land of money raising, asset-buying, deal-making and promoting infrastructure development. A rugby tragic and wine buff, he started with a team of true-blue Liberals which is now furnished with Labor identities to maintain crucial ideological balance. Aged 61.
Frank Lowy
Westfield Holdings executive chairman
The king of shopping centres is Australia's second-richest man with a reported personal wealth of $3.5 billion. His company owns 115 retail palaces around the world, 17 in NSW. He contributes generously to both sides of politics and operates even-handedly with the heavyweights of Liberal and Labor politics. Now chairman of embattled Soccer Australia. Aged 72.
David Gonski
Merchant banker
A corporate wizard who doubles as the country's only genuine arts tsar, Gonski is chairman of Investec Bank and Coca-Cola Amatil and a director of ANZ Bank, Westfield Holdings and John Fairfax Holdings. In his arts hat, he is chairman of the Australia Council, the Art Gallery of NSW Trust, the National Institute of Dramatic Art and the Bundanoon Trust. Aged 49.
Gerry Gleeson
Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority chairman
A former head of the premier's department in the Wran era (1977-88), Gleeson was resurrected by Bob Carr and given formidable powers. With assets of $1.4 billion, his Sydney Harbour Authority controls Darling Harbour, The Rocks, Circular Quay, Luna Park and the best property portfolio in Australia. He sits on the remuneration tribunal. Aged 75.
Eric Roozendaal
NSW ALP general secretary
Since succeeding John Della Bosca in 1999, Roozendaal has corporatised the state ALP and turned it into a high-powered fund-raising machine. Regarded by Bob Carr as "shaping up as the greatest campaign director anyone has seen from either side of politics in NSW", Roozendaal has the ear of cabinet ministers on policy and big projects. Aged 41.
© 2003 Sun Herald